Meredith
Sue Willis's
Books
for Readers # 232
March 16, 2024
My favorite reads for 2023 at
Shepherd.com.
Check out Shepherd.com for lots of writers' (and others'!) favorite
reads: they have lots of interesting lists by genre
and other categories.
BOOK REVIEWS
This list is alphabetical by book
author (not reviewer).
They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted.
This issue has reviews by several friends of mine,
including one of an older book of my own by Hilton
Obenzinger. I don't usually run reviews of my own books,
but this review is fun to read, and it is about a book (Love Palace)
that didn't get a lot of notice when it first came out, so I
especially appreciate Hilton's review.
We are in a time when books need readers and reviewers
badly: there are wonderful books coming out from Knopf and
Random House and the other biggies, but a lot of great stuff
is overlooked by the conglomerates. Reach further when you
can--look at small presses like Dos Madres and University
Presses like Ohio University Press and WVU Press.
And once you've read something-- particularly something
from a smaller press that you like--make time to write a
review. If you have somewhere to place it, great, but also
(or only) post the review on Amazon. Whatever you think
about Amazon, its short reviews matter, and you can help
writers by them.
I continue to make some of my reading choices via the short
novel guide Great
Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly
by Kenneth
C. Davis.This issue I comment on Dept. of
Speculation by Jenny Offill, Natalia Ginzburg's The
Dry Heart, and The Hour of the Star by
Clarice Lispector. These short books have been especially
useful for me as a way to read something by writers I've
been hearing about for years and never quite getting to. I
went ahead and read another Ginzburg book, Family
Lexicon, and expect to read more Lispector soon.
I
also reread a couple of Michael Connelly's books instead
of watching Netflix or HBO. Connelly is a very dependable
writer with a clean style, serious and entertaining, and
when I'm too tired to challenge myself, I often turn to
Harry Bosch or the Lincoln Lawyer.
Again,
please share your reviews: I'm happy to have submissions
here, including ones you're publishing on Amazon).
The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim
Minick
Perhaps more than the spoons, I love the birds in this
book. They, along with a multitude of images brought to
mind by the uses of and phrases using spoons, light up
Minick’s collection of poems with what Doug Van Gundy calls
“a near-boundless affection for the overlooked and
quotidian.”
The poems are suffused with delight and love even as
they look grimly at the loss and future loss of lifestyles
and species. “Diminished,” for example (p.23), is about the
passing of ovenbirds.
This poem, like several others, is addressed to a specific
poet, in this case Robert Frost. Minick speaks directly to
climate change again in “When You Realize the Future” (p.
84).
But I kept anticipating the birds: the lost ones, but
also the living ones. They give the book its cohesion (along
with the spoons!), and sometimes, like “Spoon Bill,” you get
both. “Why Birds” (53), celebrates love of birds and love of
a woman. “Blink” (p. 79) is about a hands-on close encounter
with a stunned cardinal, but there are also jays and
sparrows and many others: the precise color of their
feathers, the vicissitudes of their precarious small,
striving lives, and Minick’s swell of gratitude to be in the
world with them.
Birds fly me away
from me, but also back– (53)
There are other animals too: in “Coyote Grace” (3)
where the coyote puppies have a yodeling school and get the
"nightly hairy news.” “Earth Diving” (66) is the fanciful
title for a dog’s funny hobby of rolling with “odoriferous
joy” in whatever is rotten. There are also several excellent
narrative poems, especially the stunning voice piece “Tim
Slack the Fix it Man” (57) with its calmly mentioned double
murder. This one is too compact, humorous, and shocking to
quote in part–just get a copy and read it!
And finally, there are the spoons. The book begins and
ends with spoon poems: the opening “To Spoon” (1) explores
the metaphors and the actual metal cutlery.
To spoon is not to fork--
that’s what we do to steaks
and roads and manure.
And the final poem, the “Intimacy of Spoons” (81) takes us
to a lovely ending, in bed with a lover--spouse--partner:
“knees cupped,/thighs touching."
Spooning.
Porch Poems
by
Cheryl
Denise, Susanna Connelly Holstein, Kirk Judd, and
Sherrell Runnion Wigal Reviewed by Edwina
Pendarvis
Porch
Poems,
a chapbook anthology of 24 poems by four authors, offers
new work in keeping with some of the most characteristic
themes of Appalachian poetry—connectedness to family and
community; connectedness to place and nature; and respect
for work and the everyday. Cheryl Denise, Susanna Connelly
Holstein, Kirk Judd, and Sherrell Runnion Wigal, all
well-known and highly respected in Appalachia and beyond,
formed a kind of writing collaborative that resulted in
the collection. The foreword to the chapbook notes that
the four friends began meeting in May, 2016, in Pocahontas
County, “one of the most beautiful and peaceful spots in
West Virginia.” That spring and at least one week-end a
year for the next few years, they stayed at an old house
built for a section foreman of the Greenbrier Railroad in
the early 1900s. During their stays at what they deemed
“Poet Camp,” they wrote, critiqued each other’s work, and
exchanged ideas. In keeping with the spirit of the book, I
refrain from identifying the author of any of quoted
passages below, as the collection refrains from doing so
until the end of the book. Readers familiar with the poets
might guess who wrote what.
“Audience
Blessing,”
the first poem in the collection, addresses an imagined
community of readers directly. It lists things the
narrator hopes those who read the book will take away from
it:
:
Blessings
to each of you.
May
you find something familiar
in
the words we share.
May
you find kindness.
May
you find solace.
May
you remember
one
moment you had forgotten.
May
you find a gentle way
to listen to the
morning
gossip
of crows.
Even
when
expressing awe at the mystery of nature the diction and
rhythms of these poems are natural-sounding. The tone is
conversational, as in “Almost Hidden,” in which the
narrator talks to someone dear, describing a trek the two
made together on a narrow trail along the Mississippi
River in winter. The poem ends with these lines, which
honor both the beloved and what the couple sought:
I
saw your eyes
and
knew why
we
had come
here
now
to
see the cranes
standing
thousands
still
and patient
breathing
quiet
almost
hidden
in
the morning snow
“DNA” uses a scientific
acronym as the title to a kind of tall tale about origins,
crediting family with passing traits to a descendant.
Written in the third-person, the poet opens with— “His
father was firewood./His mother an ax./ He knows how to
burn,” and goes on to claim, “His father was a moon./ His
mother a hawk./ He hunts at night.” Other family members
lend traits, too: “His grandfather was a trail./ His
grandmother a boot./ He travels light and fast./ His
uncle is a hemlock./ Another a spade./ He is green and
planted.” The
author uses exaggeration to make a serious point.
Several
poems
assume the serio-comic manner that runs through
Appalachian poetry and prose. “Rules for the Open Mic
Poetry Reading” offers friendly advice for the community
that populates open mic readings. The advice for the poet
includes the following: “Don’t explain the whole poem
before you begin./ Don’t stumble or slouch,/ or pick the
scab at your elbow.” Advice for the listener includes
“Gaze out the window of your mind/ and change what you see
according to what you hear./Allow yourself to be
surprised.”
Missing
home
and family is the theme of “Borders,” a poem that
surprised me because the place the narrator misses is far
away from Appalachia. The narrator, writing in the second
person, describes crossing the Canadian border into this
country and a new life then tells how it feels years
later:
But
even though you unfurled and became bold,
reading
poems on the radio,
still
some days, roaming these hills,
you
wish for a family crisis,
an
unexpected surgery,
anything
to pull you north for a month,
maybe
two,
pretending
you could stay.
References
to labor appear often in the collection. “Reprieve”
follows a woman living in the country as she goes out to
gather eggs. Ready to kill one of her hens for what I
imagine to be Sunday dinner, she notices the hen is on the
nest: “So you’re laying again, old girl.”/ ‘The clouds
move on./ This will be a good day,’ she says.” The poet takes away the sense
of complacency, however,
with the next lines of this last stanza of the poem:
“Sunlight gleams/ on the sharp edge of the blade/ hanging
just inside the henhouse door.”
“Blue
Watering Can” connects work and life with the presence of
death, too, in the things the narrator holds up for us to
see—a peach tree heavy with fruit, tomatoes growing, a
blue watering can:
When
the watering is done she sits
in
a wooden rocker on the porch
built
on to the trailer,
finishes
her smoke with long, slow drags,
making
it last,
making
it last.
.
. . .
Over
the hill
coonhounds
shift sadly on long chains.
One
jumps to the roof of his doghouse,
as
if to better see the road, the trailer,
the
man inside who wheezes
with
the steady beat of the oxygen tank,
watches
hunting shows on TV,
as
if maybe one night he will unchain the dogs,
grab
his gun, walk the midnight hills again.
The
porch,
in “Blue Watering Can: serves, among other things, as a
metaphor for a borderland between life and death. In
“Fermata” (a music symbol that looks like an eyebrow over
an eye and signifies lengthening of a note), it signifies
the time between day and night:
Night
approaches.
Hermit
Thrush rushes into song.
Doe
and fawn rise in meadows.
Snakes
slide home.
Dusk
pulls near.
Patient
on the porch
I wait alone
for that succinct moment
My
body relaxes,
skin marries
the air.
Here
the porch acknowledges the border, but—in this last poem
of the collection—emphasizes the sense of connection that
runs through the book.
The
motif
of a borderland, both connecting and separating, is an
especially poignant
motif for the people of the Appalachian Mountains, as.
Appalachia itself has long been regarded as a
borderland—between east and west in the settling of this
nation during the 18th and early 19th
centuries; between the north and south in the Civil War
years; and between poverty and wealth in the mid-to late
20th century. This collection, published in
2023 by Sheila-Na-Gig, bodes well for the region’s place
as a borderland between past and future, connecting the
past, “what brung us,” with a sense of the importance of a
communal future with the natural world.
The Hour of the Star by
Clarice Lispector
This was my first work by
Lispector, of whom I've been hearing for a long time in places
like (I think) The New York Review of Books and The
New York Times. There was always a sense that she was
highly experimental, maybe something of a literary show-off,
but if this small novel is a good example, she is on the
contrary extremely easy to read and pretty powerful.
Brazilian, although born a Ukrainan Jew, Lispector published
this book
in 1977, not long before her death.She fascinated the
Brazilian public, and her books sold well. The Hour or
the Star has a complex story within a story and is
told by a male writer character who spends a lot of time
sharing his travails with writing before getting to his story,
which is a simple life and death of a very poor young woman.
It has some of the tone of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart,
but with more devastating poverty and no parrot.
The striking thing to me is that the remarkable, small novel
does not feel like an experiment, but how she had to write it.
Educated: a Memoir by Tara
Westover Reviewed by Christine Willis
Tara Westover, Dr. Westover, entered my life via her memoir
Educated, too late. Had I read her
resistant-to-being-put-down book before I retired from high
school teaching, I would have made the book required reading
for my students in an Expository Reading and
Writing course.
Not a few of my many students disdained education and would
have opted out had the option been open to them. Dr.
Westover, however, was denied an education by her
fundamentalist (my description) Mormon parents. Her father,
driven to a degree by the Ruby Ridge events, took the extreme
route of keeping some of his children from attending any
school but home school. (The education she received at home
had extremely little to do with academics; learning how to
work with “scrap” was her alternate learning environment
filled with sexism, violence, and hard labor.) She reveals how
she agonizingly gained an education (initially by hiding who
she was and where she had come from), and how she was able to
finally fashion a family.
Family relationships are described in painful detail, and
Westover admits to memory differences among people involved in
important family events. It would have been frightening to
have lived the life she lived as a child of her parents. The
world view she was given was unique to her family, and it
appears to have influenced her choices and actions well into
her adulthood.
Trilby by George du Maurier
This 1894 novel by George du Maurier, the Franco-American
caricaturist and writer (and grandfather of Daphne du
Maurier), came to me first as a Classics Illustrated comic
when I was about seven. At the time, I was was thrilled by the
melodrama, the mystery of hypnotism, the hints of sexuality,
and the the evil of Svengali, the impresario who trains Trilby
to become a great singer.
What I didn’t remember (and probably wasn’t in the comic book
version) was the gross anti-Semitism toward the clownish but
villainous Svengali, who is hook-nosed, averse to bathing but
brilliantly musical. Those passages are offensive reading now.
Even so, the novel is entertaining. It spends most of its time
on the story of three young British artists living and
painting and carousing in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
Apparently the details of that life and the great friendship
of the artists and their working class friend Trilby are based
on Du Maurier’s own life and observations.
This part is lots of fun, with drinking parties, Svengali on
the scene--the anti-Semitism off-handed and cultural at this
point. Then things get serious when Little Billee’s mother
and sister show up to take him back to England and stop his
marriage to Trilby. There’s lots of nervous prostration, and
Trilby runs away so she won’t ruin Billee’s life, and he
almost dies, and loses his ability to love even his great
friends Taffy and the Laird.
You can deprecate the story for coincidences and
melodrama and sections that go off on the wonders of the Latin
Quarter, but the story moves forward. Little Billee is
presented as a real artist, unlike his friends who like the
life style more than the art. He has an interesting crisis in
which he pretends to be affectionate with friends and family,
but his heart is closed. His frozen emotions aren’t released
until he hears the famous mysterious La Svengali, a singer who
comes from apparently nowhere but has a voice that breaks and
heals hearts and has never been heard before or since. Can
she be the young men’s Trilby who had a magnificent speaking
voice, but couldn’t carry a tune? In the final section, the
mystery is solved, Svengali’s hold over his ward is broken,
there is much satisfactory sorrow with plenty of time for
memories and long farewells.
Whether you would want to read this would depend, I think, on
your tolerance for some over-long passages of nineteenth
century tangents and melodrama--and anti-Semitism that turns a
figure of unpleasant fun into a devilish villain.
Love Palace by Meredith
Sue Willis reviewed by
Hilton Obenzinger
In Martha, Meredith Sue Willis
has created a great hard-boiled narrator. She’s been hurt and
pissed off, mainly by her two “rotters,” her father and her
ex-husband, and the world that’s dealt her a tough hand, and
she finds relief through sex and constant instability,
confiding in her therapist, when she can afford her. She’s
ready for change, and stumbles into the Love Palace, a church,
a social center, and an organizing HQ for
its elusive charismatic spiritual leader, and by happenstance
she becomes its administrator. The Love Palace is among the
last low-income housing buildings in the riverside New Jersey
neighborhood being overrun by gentrification, and it becomes
the focal point for a fight to save what’s left. The Love
Palace is a catalyst, pulling together multiple lives and
stories into a pulsating community. Martha ends up cajoled to
marry a much younger man, scion of the rich couple who owns
the Love Palace as a project of their church – or at least we
think they own it. The Love Palace community fights eviction
and demolition, and knowing who owns the building is crucial –
and knowing the truth about the spiritual leader as well. The
novel is filled with surprises and revelations as the
mysteries peel away, and Martha grows increasingly capable of
handling the madness of seduction, deceit, and betrayal. Love
Palace, the novel, is a delight to read, and Martha is a tough
character worth meeting again and again."
Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Offill’s second novel (and she does not produce many) of 2014
was highly praised. Many people seem to like its brief
sections in block format, not paragraphs, with some space
between them. It’s the story of a writer who has, she thinks,
a wonderful marriage, focuses on her work and her neuroses in
a very New York City milieu. Then she has a baby, falls in
love with it, suffers for it, fears all the possible evils
that might befall the child. She seems to think her child and
her experience of motherhood are unique-- and trouble ensues
in the marriage. The writing is witty and beautifully
accomplished, although I could use just a little more
self-awareness of how the narrator’s life is at once ordinary
and at the same time, not the kind of life most people are
privileged to lead.
I recommend balancing this rather tepid praise with Roxane
Gay’s review of it in the The New York Times at https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/books/review/jenny-offills-dept-of-speculation.html
The
Kelsey Outrage by Alison Louise Hubbard
Alison Hubbard's novel The Kelsey Outrage takes
place shortly after the Civil War in a fishing and farming
village on Long Island where a disappearance turns into a
murder, and Cathleen Kelsey turns herself into a successful
sleuth as she tries to find out what happened to her brother.
She knows he has been
tarred and feathered after an accusation of rape, but Cathleen
is sure he’s innocent, and that the alleged victim’s wealthy
fiancé and his powerful local friends are responsible.
One of the things being explored here is the conflict
between the affluent original inhabitants of the town and the
immigrant Irish, as well as the age-old propensity of the
wealthy to get away with murder. What powers the novel is
Hubbard’s excellent. layered storytelling. It’s a crime novel,
but also the portrait of Cathleen as she faces off against far
more powerful people who see themselves as the masters of
their little universe.
Housekeeping by
Marilynne Robinson reviewed by Diane Simmons
Somewhere in the Far West, the town of Fingerbone perches on
the bank of a lake that is cold and deep, and haunted by those
who have died in its waters. The deaths are legendary—the
town’s own version of the Titanic—as one night, passengers
enjoying a train journey in warm, bright coaches, plunge off a
trestle bridge, the lights and the lives, instantly
extinguished in the black depths.
Afterward, the lake is still here, as is the little mountain
town. But Fingerbone is built upon land reclaimed from the
lake, and the smell of the water that comes through the tap is
that of dank, freezing death, the ferocity of the wilderness
invading through the house.
One family raised in the odd, little town struggles to locate
“normal” life. One of the sisters, Helen, who went off for a
time to Seattle, brings her two daughters — Ruthie and
Lucille— home to Fingerbone to stay with their grandmother.
Then Helen gives her handbag to a boy and drives her car into
the lake. Helen’s death prompts another of the sisters,
Sylvie, to leave off her life as a hobo and come home. The
grandmother has died, and someone must keep house for the two
pre-teen girls.
For Sylvie, though, the idea of living a settled life has
become alien, and she continues some of her drifter habits.
But for the sake of the girls, she tries to do the things that
proper housekeeping seems to require. Houses need to be
furnished, for example, so Sylvie dutifully goes about
collecting furnishings. She does not, however, acquire the
things usual to houses, but rather the materials she knows
from her life on the road, especially newspapers and tin cans.
She piles and bundles the paper neatly, washes and stacks the
cans.
Sylvie is cheerful and kind, and the girls, Lucille and
Ruthie, are all right. They go to school most of the time.
Sometimes, though, they take off to ramble through the forests
and along the lake. On one such adventure, they become
disoriented and don’t make it home until the next day; a
crumbling old cabin suggests the fate of lost children.
After this adventure, Lucille— recognizing both the charm and
the gentle insanity of the wandering life—makes a sudden,
irrevocable decision to go straight. She learns to sew herself
proper clothes, and studies fashionable hair styles in
magazines. She gets herself adopted by a teacher and is
eventually accepted by normal girls.
But Ruthie remains with Sylvie, and—as if they were only
trying for Lucille’s sake—they now wordlessly agree to drop
their efforts to observe expected conventions. Ruthie gives
up school and Sylvie stops trying to puzzle out what a proper
home might be. Now they are free, too free for Fingerbone.
Later, as the lake is searched in vain for their bodies—Can
they really have crossed the mile-long railroad trestle in the
dark? Can they live forever as drifters? —we see that the
story isn’t about houses at all, but the beauty, immensity,
and sometimes fatal allure of the still untamed West.
The Dry Heart by Natalia
Ginzburg
I read The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg in more
or less in one sitting. It’s a gripping little book that spins
out from a crime and turns out to be about a bad marriage,
entered into for bad reasons that don’t stop any of the
parties from obsessing and suffering. There is also a sad
portrait of mothering. Just about all of it is sad and grim
and gray–and I couldn’t put it down.
Family Lexicon by
Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg deserves her fame, but I don’t find this
particular work as sympathetic (to me) as I'd hoped. It is
about a large, eccentric family in Italy in the first half of
the twentieth century. They have a vast acquaintance of
equally eccentric and brilliant friends–many of them important
in the arts and politics, especially in the anti-Mussolini
world. Mixed with discussions are actual partisan
activities. Many of the people in this book, in fact, end up
jailed or killed under Mussolini or later under the Nazis, but
the book--called a novel but using real events and real people
and striving for a true account. It is told from the
matter-of-face perspective of the youngest child in the
family, first as a child and then as a young woman.
I loved a lot of the individual people. They change
realistically over time without a lot of back story on how and
why. It has a brilliant, moving ending in the form of
several pages of faintly nostalgic dialogue between the
parents of the family.
I also value its firm focus on what the Second World War and
Mussolini’s fascism meant on the ground in Italy to a family
of the professorial class with a bombastic Jewish father and a
cheerful self-described lazy Catholic mother. As a group, the
people are realistic about the horrors being experienced and
their own losses (Ginzburg’s young husband is one). The
translation is smooth and easy, but the conceit of the work is
the Levi family’s idiosyncratic slang-words, and they are
translated into English equivalents that don’t have the
resonance I expect they do in Italian. It took me a while to
get into this world, it’s an important world, well worth the
visit.
Rearranged by
Kathleen Watt Reviewed by Suzanne McConnell
Kathleen Watt’s memoir Rearranged is riveting.
With the marvelous ear of the opera singer she once was turned
now into nearly pitch-perfect prose, she recounts her
harrowing ten-year odyssey of dealing with facial cancer and
innumerable reconstructive surgeries. On the way, she informs
the reader of the intricate architecture of the face and the
equally delicate medical procedures required to restore that
architecture. Sustaining infections, dislodged protheses,
medical psychosis, and the emotional roller coaster of
triumphs beset with setback after setback, she records the
journey she and her partner traverse with authenticity, wit,
and sobering bravery. The reader is left with awe over the
heroism required to sustain optimism. When hers finally
fails, she refuses to gloss over despair. When restored, it
feels earned by the sheer grit of enduring that darkness.
This is an inspiring, wise, astonishing book.
I attended the launch reading of Rearranged.
Kathleen Watt looks terrific. She read with humor and drama,
even singing. Like the performer she once was and still is.
Harriet the Spy by Louise
Fitzhugh
Here's another book I've been hearing of for fifty years, but
never read. It was recommended to me by a children's writer
(I’m working on a novel with a child narrator).
This starts fairly slowly with a clever eleven year
old heroine who writes in a notebook about everyone and all
her perceptions, and makes a frequent circuit of interesting
East Side New York neighbors whose activities she follows.
The beginning didn’t seem especially special to me, but one
needs to keep in mind that Harriet (published in 1964) was a
game changer in how the characters, including Harriet herself
and her friends, are not just cutely mischievous but
occasionally nearly vicious. It's an affluent world of
nannies and cooks and enormous freedom for a kid like Harriet
who runs pretty free after days at her loosey-goosey-artsy
private school. For example, Harriet has to choreograph a
dance for herself as an onion.
The books gets better and better as it goes along, and a
little over halfway in, there is a crisis when the wrong
people find and read Harriet’s notebook and she gets involved
in a pretty terrible battle with the other students that
includes pouring ink over people and tripping them and
isolating them and a lot of things terrible to children.
The getting better as it goes is always one of my major
criterion for success.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
My favorite part of the novel are the scenes centering on a
deaf boy who gets sent to the asylum. I'm a sucker for
people-in-institutions-stories, and McBride does it really,
really well. This part of the novel deserves all the accolades
the book has been getting, in my opinion.
For me, though, the legendary story-telling quality of much
of the rest is not as much
to my taste. I confess, then, that both what I love and what
I don't love so much is about taste. I have a lot of respect
for McBride and what he’s trying to do, but my whole life has
been about trying to figure out what’s really real, and while
I certainly enjoy tales and fantasy, I tend to like best even
in those genres the characters more than the pyrotechnics.
And I do like the characters here, but the half-humorous tall
tale quality always sounds better to me told in person than on
the page. Legends and myths make me wary.
There are some chapters and scenes in The Heaven and
Earth Grocery Store that are as good as anything
contemporary I’ve ever read: the deaf boy Dodo communicating
with his friend who has cerebral palsy, for example, and some
terrific dialogues with precise dialect on all kinds of
topics. On the other hand, I don't like the POV section of
the evil racist doctor who is, compared to all the other
characters, quite clichéd.
For a solid recommendation of the book, read what Maureen Corrigan has to say on NPR.
SHORT
TAKES
Safe
by Imogen Keeper
I just finished Safe,
the fourth of five Imogen Keeper novels in the After the
Plague series. She does the details of post apocalyptic
life well, keeping it all pretty quotidian. In her world,
it was a pandemic that killed half the population, and every
survivor has lost a couple of loved ones. There's lots of
predatory violence and some dictatorships and armies forming
up, but the novel is, in fact, a romance (so is
post-apocalyptic romance a thing?)
Keeper makes her love story a
teaser, Frankie and Yorke are four (very short) books in,
and have done just about everything sexual except
intercourse. And doing just-about-everything-sexual very
vividly, too. But Yorke, a big powerful warrior-type, is
saving the final intimacy for when Frankie is finally
ready--namely ready to let go of her dead husband. It's
really pretty funny, how close they come and then, Oh wait,
let's not. I assume Keeper knows it's funny. And
old-fashioned, to have that particular sex act given such
importance.
On the other hand, I'm quite
engaged in their story, especially how she creates group
dynamics. It's not a loner story. It's about their group,
that has taken over a big resort based on the Greenbrier
Hotel in West Virginia. They garden, they search out gas
for their vehicles, and they have a difficult relationship
with a big group in the nearest town who are not exactly
evil but rather bullies. They force our survivors to give
them half their seedlings and share one guy who's an
engineer.
Keeper also quietly has all the
groups, including the big bad ones in D.C. let by women. I
wonder if Keeper would have preferred to write more
post-apocalypse and less romance, or if this Big Tease plot
line is what she really likes.Easy to keep reading. Good on
dogs, children, friendship.
Fever Season by
Barbara Hambly
Another Benjamin January
historical mystery set in 1830's New Orleans with terrific
background of class and race distinctions and the
devastation of Yellow Fever and cholera. January is working
in a hospital where most medicine is by today’s standards
malpractice. He also teaches piano to the daughters of a
high class creole lady of interesting contradictions.
The characters alone would carry
the story: there’s January’s extremely cool (in several
senses) mother and his sisters, as well as his opium
addicted white violinist friend. I particularly enjoyed a
“Kaintuck” policeman with a penchant for missing the
spittoon with his tobacco spit.
Murder, torture, surprises, and
the constant danger of bad actors kidnaping free blacks and
selling them into (or in some cases back into) slavery. I
like almost everything about this novel, except that it
probably needed one final run-through of tightening. As Ben
Jonson said of Shakespeare when told that the Bard always
wrote straight ahead without blotting (i.e. correcting) a
line,"Would he had blotted a thousand."
More Connelly
I’m reading Connelly again. I started reading his books
seven years ago when we were simultaneously selling and
buying a house. It was hot and we didn't have a.c., and I
always seemed to be stuck in one of the houses waiting
anxiously for a call about money or repairs. I couldn't
concentrate on anything intellectually challenging. I fell
hard for Michael Connelly's Bosch, that perfectly serious
and sincere urban cowboy loner with big gaps in his
psychological make-up, whose true and only love is tracking
murderers. He has a daughter eventually, but she mostly just
distracts him from his calling.He's a native of Los Angeles,
the child of a murdered prostitute, survivor of various
institutions, and a veteran of the Vietnam War. His
personality and Connelly's scrupulously believable police
procedures (his plots are somewhat less believable, but I
don't care so much about plot) work together extremely
well. It's fast moving stories set on a bedrock of the
inner suffering and narrow vision of a warrior. There are
also a lot of fun minor characters and great L.A. scenery.
None of Connelly's other protagonists come close. Mickey
Haller the Lincoln Lawyer (and Bosch's half brother) is fun,
but he's a first person narrator, a trickster, whose brash,
optimistic voice carries the entertainment fact.
Harry's the man, though. I reread these instead of watching
t.v.
The Late Show by Michael Connelly
Nice to be back in his meticulous police procedures, but
Renée Ballard isn’t Harry Bosch. I think the problem is
that MC just doesn’t feel her the way he feels Bosch. He
tries hard, and he’s so good at what he does that I was
totally into it, but she’s a skeleton crew going through the
story–a damaged person, but without the
historical/generational reverberations of Bosch. In her
case, her dad died more or less in front of her in a surfing
accident. She is semi-homeless, has a nice grandmother, a
dog, a surf board. Basically lives out of a van.
The detection was fun: at least three cases underway, lots
of personal betrayal in Ballard’s life, so she has ended up
on the “Late Show,” the overnight shift. There's a nasty
evil murderer; a semi-sympathetic portrayal of an ex porn
star who now directs porn; bondage; life-threatening danger
at 60% of the way through–typical of Connelly–with most of
the violence and ugliness off-stage or in a crime scene till
then. There's a daring escape, some sleazy cops and
dedicated cops. Satisfying fast read.
Desert Star (2022) by Michael
Connelly
This one is Bosch and Ballard together, and Bosch is sick
at the end. He gets called “old man” a few too many times.
I read this one in a used hard copy instead of as an e-book,
and I kept feeling how many pages were left between my
fingers, hoping it would last a long time. It didn’t, even
though it was between 350 and 400 pages long. Two serial
killers, a reset of the Cold Cases group, Renee running it
now, Bosch back as a volunteer. Lots of taking the 101 to
405 then the 10 to Santa Monica. I go to L.A. a couple of
times a year now, so I love that. Ballard is still just
okay–she just doesn’t have the depth that Connelly feels for
Bosch. Daughter Madison is in and out of this one toward the
end–written after the t.v. series got going.
Two Kinds Of Truth (2017)
This is the one with the stone cold Russian killers and the
plane rides over the Salton Sea. It is also the one with a
sneering serial killer Bosch put behind bars who is suddenly
about to be freed by new evidence that Bosch is sure has
somehow been planted. The two plots, the dead
pharmacists/drug plot and the serial killer seem like
totally separate stories, but Connelly seems to do that a
lot, at least in his later books, and my rereads blend it
all into one long epic. Not complaining.
For a fuller review, check out Kirkus.
The Fifth Witness
by Michael Connelly
The big question here is whether the person Mickey Haller
is defending is the real perp or not, and of course Haller
is determined NOT to answer the question, only to defend the
person.I enjoy his energetic generally optimistic voice–
Connelly’s male characters have a nice tendency toward
faithfulness, wanting to get back to the One They Love even
after divorce etc. In Mickey Haller’s case, that’s part of
his charming optimism. There’s also a good informal series
of exchanges on guilt and innocence and how a Defense lawyer
is better off not knowing about the client’s status. And
all the turns of the case and the courtroom antics are a lot
of fun.
LISTS
Phyllis Moore recommends Wiley Cash’s best books of 2023:
Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch
Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash
Yellow Face by R.F, Kuang
I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye
Watkins
To Anyone Who Ever Asks:The Life Times and Music of Connie
Converse by Howard Fishman
After the Lights Go Out by John Vercher
American Caliph by Shahan Mufti
ESPECIALLY
FOR WRITERS: Links and More
Peggy Backman writes: "Years ago I wrote
a column for a small town newspaper on classic cars. I had
heard that the newspaper was really bad in terms of delaying
payment, so I refused to write anything until I was paid As
it turned out, at some point they changed editors. I had
written three articles (that I had been paid for upfront),
but the new editor decided to discontinue the column—and I
even had a little following! So at least I had my money,
but I felt so bad for the people I had interviewed for the
articles, as they were looking forward to reading about
themselves and their cars. Congrats to those who got this
new law passed."
https://authorsguild.org/news/agcelebrates-passage-of-new-york-state-freelance-isnt-free-act/
Jane
Friedman's "Hot Sheet" of new agents &
presses from 2023 Free
lectures from Authors Publish
Check out WriterBeware.com,
which keeps us up-to-date on scams and bad publishing
options: it comes from a genre organization, Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, but has
information that is useful for all writers.
GOOD READING &
LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF
Two pieces from Scott Oglesby's memoir online
at Red Dirt Press.
Red Dirt Press is a publication focused on "New South"
writers, and the two pieces from Telling Dixie Good-bye
are "Waiting For Mama" and "Rednecks and Sofabeds."
Check out Shepherd.com
for a new way to browse books--author and other
recommendations for what to read!
An interesting New Yorker story by Sheila Heti
that she wrote by interrogating and manipulating a chatbot
and then cutting out her own lines. "According to Alice"
starts out charming, then gets pretty weird and a little
tedious. Definitely the best thing I've read with Chatbot
collaboration, though: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/according-to-alice-fiction-sheila-heti
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Just published--New Poetry by Jane Hicks!
The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality
from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination
rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked
towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even
beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures
contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the
world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and
the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The
poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and
revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how
family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how
they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative
yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity,
redemption, and celebration.
Marc Kaminsky's latest
translations from the Yiddish of the poems of Jacob
Glatshteyn are in the current issue of The Manhattan
Review (vol.21. No. 1). The issue is available as
hard copy or digitally, and can be ordered at Manhattan
Review .
The new translations include: "My Wandering Brother,"
"Sabbath," "The Joy of the Yiddish Word," "Variations on a
Theme," "Millions of Dead," "Prayer," and "Yiddishkeit."
Leslie
Simon says, “Ernie Brill’s rich, memorable poems reflect
his encyclopedic and kaleidoscopic mind. From Brooklyn
street life to war in Southeast Asia and occupation in
the Middle East, his words do not rest. Yes, they become
those journeys to another way of seeing every place and
time he brings us to, envisioning a way out of here when
the going gets kind of rough. Unapologetic
work poems, tender love poems, even some carefully
crafted sonnets, and a trove of Black Lives
Matter hybrid haikus where he will not let us forget
those names, those lives, those murders. Requiem
and revolution. He’ll convince you of the sacred art of
skateboarding. I’d hop on his traveling machine
any time. Don’t miss this ride.”
James Crews says of Barbara Crooker's new collection Slow
Wreckage, “Opening a book of poetry by Barbara
Crooker, you instantly know you’re in the hands of a
contemporary master. She ushers us seamlessly into each
moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago.
Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about
aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to
the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries
and intense pain, in spite of those “delicious burdens” we
must carry each day. Even in the midst of grieving her late
husband, she confesses: “But right now, I have what I need:
the sun coming up/tomorrow morning, the clouds, pink
frosting, spreading all the way to the horizon.” Her
expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the
medicine we need to “love in these dangerous times.”
Coming April 16, 2024 Deborah Clearman's The Angels
of Sinkhole County
Review Tales
Founded in 2016, Review Tales informs, inspires,
and provides knowledge of the craft of writing and supports
indie authors by providing a platform to demonstrate their
well-deserved work. The quarterly magazine is dedicated to
readers, writers, self-publishers and includes literature
discussions. It is an essential collection of author
confessions, exclusive interviews, words of wisdom, book
reviews, and literary works. Founder & Editor in Chief:
S. Jeyran Main.
Look for Laura Tillman's new nonfiction
book, The Migrant Chef: the Life and Times of
Lala Garcia.
Rachel Kin's Bratwurst Haven won a 2023 Colorado
Book Award.
Published in Persian!
My novel for children
Billie of Fish House Lane. See
announcement here. The Iran Book News Agency (IBNA)
has just announced that "Juvenile fiction book Billie
of Fish House Lane by American author Meredith Sue
Willis has been published in Persian and is available to
Iranian Children."
BUYING
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER
A not-for-profit alternative to
Amazon.com is Bookshop.org
which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool of
brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the
donation to a bookstore of your choice. Lots of
individuals have storefronts there, too including
me.
If a book discussed in this newsletter
has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be
able to borrow it from your public library as either a
hard copy or as an e-book.
You may also buy
or order from your local independent bookstore. To
find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie"
logo left. Kobobooks.com
sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar
bookstores.
The largest unionized bookstore in America
has a web store at Powells
Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to
shopping at Amazon.com.
An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support
the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com.
Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to
support the union benefit fund.
I have a lot of friends and colleagues who
despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the
issues back in Issue
# 184, as well as even older comments from Jonathan
Greene and others here.
Another way to buy books online,
especially used books, is to use Bookfinder
or Alibris.
Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling,
so you can see what you really have to pay. Another
source for used and out-of-print books is All
Book Stores.
Paperback
Book Swap is a postage-only way to trade physical
books with other readers.
Ingrid Hughes suggests another "great
place for used books which sometimes turn out to be
never-opened hard cover books is Biblio.
She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for
$4 including shipping."
If you use an electronic reader (all
kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg
Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927).
Also free from the wonderful folks at Standard E-books are redesigned
books from the Gutenberg Project and elsewhere--easier
to read and more attractive.
RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER
Please send responses to this newsletter
directly to Meredith
Sue Willis . Unless you say otherwise, your letter
may be edited for length and published in this
newsletter.
LICENSE
BACK ISSUES:
#232 Jim Minick, Clarice Lispector, The Porch Poems, George du Maurier, Louise Fitzhugh, Natalia Ginzburg, Marilynne Robinson; Kathleen Watt; Hambly, Connelly, Alison Hubbard, Imogen Keeper, James McBride, Jenny Offill. Reviews by Hilton Obenzinger, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, Suzanne McConnell, and Christine Willis. #231
Triangle shirtwaist fire, Anthony Burgess, S.A. Cosby, Eva Dolan, Janet
Campbell Hale, Barbara Hambly, Marc Harshman, P.D. James, Michael
Lewis, Mrs. Oliphant, Paul Rabinowitz, Nora Roberts, Strout, Tokarczuk.
Review by Dreama Frisk. #230
Henry Adams, Tsitsi
Dangarembga, Jonathan Lethem, Magda Teter, Mary Jennings
Hegar, Chandra Prasad, Timothy Russell, Carter Taylor Seaton, Edna
O'Brien, Martha Wells, Thomas Mann, Arnold Bennett, and more. Reviews by
Mary Lucille DeBerry, Joe Chuman, John Loonam, Suzanne McConnell, and Edwina Pendarvis.
#229
John Sandford, Dr. J. Nozipo Maraire, Rex Stout; Larry Schardt; Martha
Wells; Henry Makepeace Thackery; about Edvard Munch;Erik
Larson. Reviews and interviews by John Loonam and Diane Simmons.
#228
Edward P. Jones, Denton Loving, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Lee Martin,
Jesmyn Ward, Michelle Zauner, Valérie Perrin, Philip K. Dick, Burt
Kimmelman. Reviewes by Ernie Brill, Joe Chuman, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, & Danny Williams.
#227
Cheryl Denise, Larissa Shmailo, Eddy Pendarvis, Alice McDermott, Kelly
Watt, Elmore Leonard, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Suzy McKee Charnas, and
more. #226
Jim Minick, Gore Vidal, Valeria Luiselli, Richard Wright, Kage Baker,
Suzy McKee Charnas, Victor Depta, Walter Mosley. David Hollinger
reviewed by Joe Chuman, and more.
#225 Demon Copperhead,
Thomas Hardy, Miriam Toews, Kate Chopin, Alberto Moravia, Elizabeth
Strout, McCullers, Garry Wills, Valerie Nieman, Cora Harrison. Troy Hill on Isaac Babel; Belinda Anderson on books for children; Joe Chuman on Eric Alterman; Molly Gilman on Kage Baker; and lots more.
#224 The 1619 Project, E.M. Forster. Elmore Leonard, Pledging Season
by Erika Erickson Malinoski. Emily St. John Mandel, Val Nieman, John
O'Hara, Tom Perrotta, Walter Tevis, Sarah Waters, and more.
#223
Amor Towles, Emily St. John Mandel, Raymond Chandler, N.K. Jemisin,
Andrew Holleran, Anita Diamant, Rainer Maria Rilke, and more, plus notes
and reviews by Joe Chuman, George Lies, Donna Meredith, and Rhonda Browning White.
#222 Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Gaskell, N.K. Jemisin, Joseph Lash, Alice Munro, Barbara Pym, Sally Rooney, and more.
#221
Victor Serge, Greg Sanders, Maggie O'Farrell, Ken Champion, Barbara
Hambly, Walter Mosely, Anne Roiphe, Anna Reid, Randall Balmer, Louis
Auchincloss. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Chris Connelly
#220 Margaret Atwood, Sister Souljah, Attica Locke, Jill Lepore, Belinda Anderson, Claire Oshetsky, Barbara Pym, and Reviews by Joe Chuman, Ed Davis, and Eli Asbury
#219 Carolina De Robertis, Charles Dickens, Thomas Fleming, Kendra James, Ashley Hope Perez, Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Danny Williams.
#218 Ed Myers, Eyal Press, Barbara Kingsolver, Edwidge Danticat, William Trevor, Tim O'Brien. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman.
#217 Jill Lepore; Kathleen Rooney; Stendhal; Rajia Hassib again; Madeline Miller; Jean Rhys; and more. Reviews and recommendations by Joe Chuman, Ingrid Hughes, Peggy Backman, Phyllis Moore, and Dan Gover.
#216 Rajia Hassib; Joel Pechkam; Robin Hobb; Anne Hutchinson; James Shapiro; reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman; Fellowship of the Rings#215
Julia Alvarez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Anne Brontë, James Welch,
Veronica Roth, Madeline Martin, Barack Obama, Jason Trask, Katherine
Anne Porter & more
#214
Brit Bennet, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Robin Hobb, Willliam Kennedy, John Le
Carré, John Loonam on Elana Ferrante, Carole Rosenthal on Philip Roth,
Peggy Backman on Russell Shorto, Helen Weinzweig, Marguerite Yourcenar,
and more.
#213
Pauletta Hansen reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot; A conversation about
cultural appropriation in fiction; T.C. Boyle; Eric Foner; Attica Locke;
Lillian Roth; The Snake Pit; Alice Walker; Lynda Schor; James Baldwin; True Grit--and more.
#212 Reviews of books by Madison Smartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Mary Arnold Ward,Timothey Huguenin, Octavia Butler, Cobb & Seaton, Schama
#211
Reviews of books by Lillian Smith, Henry James, Deborah Clearman, J.K.
Jemisin, Donna Meredith, Octavia Butler, Penelope Lively, Walter Mosley.
Poems by Hilton Obenzinger.
#210 Lavie Tidhar, Amy Tan, Walter Mosley, Gore Vidal, Julie Otsuka, Rachel Ingalls, Rex Stout, John Updike, and more.
#209 Cassandra Clare, Lissa Evans, Suzan Colón, Damian Dressick, Madeline Ffitch, Dennis Lehane, William Maxwell, and more.
#208 Alexander Chee; Donna Meredith; Rita Quillen; Mrs. Humphy Ward; Roger Zelazny; Dennis LeHane; Eliot Parker; and more.
#207
Caroline Sutton, Colson Whitehead, Elaine Durbach, Marc Kaminsky,
Attica Locke, William Makepeace Thackery, Charles Willeford & more.
#206 Timothy Snyder, Bonnie Proudfoot, David Weinberger, Pat Barker, Michelle Obama, Richard Powers, Anthony Powell, and more.
#205 George Eliot, Ernest Gaines, Kathy Manley, Rhonda White; reviews by Jane Kimmelman, Victoria Endres, Deborah Clearman.
#204
Larissa Shmailo, Joan Didion, Judith Moffett, Heidi Julavits, Susan
Carol Scott, Trollope, Walter Mosley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and more.
#203 Tana French, Burt Kimmelman, Ann Petry, Mario Puzo, Anna Egan Smucker, Virginia Woolf, Val Nieman, Idra Novey, Roger Wall.
#202 J .G. Ballard, Peter Carey, Arthur Dobrin, Lisa Haliday, Birgit Mazarath, Roger Mitchell, Natalie Sypolt, and others.
#201 Marc Kaminsky, Jessica Wilkerson, Jaqueline Woodson, Eliot Parker, Barbara Kingsolver. Philip Roth, George Eliot and more.
#200
Books by Zola, Andrea Fekete, Thomas McGonigle, Maggie Anderson, Sarah
Dunant, J.G. Ballard, Sarah Blizzard Robinson, and more.
#199 Reviews by Ed Davis and Phyllis Moore. Books by Elizabeth Strout, Thomas Mann, Rachel Kushner, Craig Johnson, Richard Powers.
#198
Reviews by Belinda Anderson, Phyllis Moore, Donna Meredith, Eddy
Pendarvis, and Dolly Withrow. Eliot, Lisa Ko, John Ehle, Hamid, etc.
#197 Joan Silber, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander Hamilton, Eudora Welty, Middlemarch yet again, Greta Ehrlich, Edwina Pendarvis.
#196 Last Exit to Brooklyn; Joan Didion; George Brosi's reviews; Alberto Moravia; Muriel Rukeyser; Matthew de la Peña; Joyce Carol Oates
#195 Voices for Unity; Ramp Hollow, A Time to Stir, Patti Smith, Nancy Abrams, Conrad, N.K. Jemisin, Walter Mosely & more.
#194 Allan Appel, Jane Lazarre, Caroline Sutton, Belinda Anderson on children's picture books.
#193 Larry Brown, Phillip Roth, Ken Champion, Larissa Shmailo, Gillian Flynn, Jack Wheatcroft, Hilton Obenziner and more.
#192 Young Adult books from Appalachia; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Michael Connelly; Middlemarch; historical murders in Appalachia.
#191 Oliver Sacks, N.K. Jemisin, Isabella and Ferdinand and their descendents, Depta, Highsmith, and more.
#190 Clearman, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, Doerr, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Miss Fourth of July, Goodbye and more.
#189 J.D. Vance; Mitch Levenberg; Phillip Lopate; Barchester Towers; Judith Hoover; ; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; short science fiction reviews.
#188 Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban; The Hemingses of Monticello; Marc Harshman; Jews in the Civil War; Ken Champion; Rebecca West; Colum McCann
#187
Randi Ward, Burt Kimmelman, Llewellyn McKernan, Sir Walter Scott,
Jonathan Lethem, Bill Luvaas, Phyllis Moore, Sarah Cordingley & more
#186 Diane Simmons, Walter Dean Myers, Johnny Sundstrom, Octavia Butler & more
#185 Monique Raphel High; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Phil Klay; Crystal Wilkinson
#184 More on Amazon; Laura Tillman; Anthony Trollope; Marily Yalom and the women of the French Revolution; Ernest Becker
#183 Hilton Obenzinger, Donna Meredith, Howard Sturgis, Tom Rob Smith, Daniel José Older, Elizabethe Vigée-Lebrun, Veronica Sicoe
#182 Troy E. Hill, Mitchell Jackson, Rita Sims Quillen, Marie Houzelle, Frederick Busch, more Dickens
#181 Valerie Nieman, Yorker Keith, Eliot Parker, Ken Champion, F.R. Leavis, Charles Dickens
#180 Saul Bellow, Edwina Pendarvis, Matthew Neill Null, Judith Moffett, Theodore Dreiser, & more
#179 Larissa Shmailo, Eric Frizius, Jane Austen, Go Set a Watchman and more
#178 Ken Champion, Cat Pleska, William Demby's Beetlecreek, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gaskell, and more.
#177 Jane Hicks, Daniel Levine, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ken Chamption, Patricia Harman
#176 Robert
Gipe, Justin Torres, Marilynne Robinson, Velma Wallis, Larry McMurty,
Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Fumiko Enchi, Shelley Ettinger
#175 Lists of what to read for the new year; MOUNTAIN MOTHER GOOSE: CHILD LORE OF WEST VIRGINIA; Peggy Backman
#174 Christian Sahner, John Michael Cummings, Denton Loving, Madame Bovary
#173 Stephanie Wellen Levine, S.C. Gwynne, Ed Davis's Psalms of Israel Jones, Quanah Parker, J.G. Farrell, Lubavitcher girls
#172 Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Alice Boatwright, Fumiko Enchi, Robin Hobb, Rex Stout
#171 Robert Graves, Marie Manilla, Johnny Sundstrom, Kirk Judd
#170 John Van Kirk, Carter Seaton,Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, The Murder of Helen Jewett, Thaddeus Rutkowski
#169 Pearl Buck's The Exile and Fighting Angel; Larissa Shmailo; Liz Lewinson; Twelve Years a Slave, and more
#168 Catherine the Great, Alice Munro, Edith Poor, Mitch Levenberg, Vonnegut, Mellville, and more!
#167 Belinda Anderson; Anne Shelby; Sean O'Leary, Dragon tetralogy; Don Delillo's Underworld
#166 Eddy Pendarvis on Pearl S. Buck; Theresa Basile; Miguel A. Ortiz; Lynda Schor; poems by Janet Lewis; Sarah Fielding
#165 Janet Lewis, Melville, Tosltoy, Irwin Shaw!
#164 Ed Davis on Julie Moore's poems; Edith Wharton; Elaine Drennon Little's A Southern Place; Elmore Leonard
#163 Pamela Erens, Michael Harris, Marlen Bodden, Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Lisa J. Parker, and more
#162 Lincoln, Joseph Kennedy, Etel Adnan, Laura Treacy Bentley, Ron Rash, Sophie's Choice, and more
#161 More Wilkie Collins; Duff Brenna's Murdering the Mom; Nora Olsen's Swans & Klons; Lady Audley's Secret
#160 Carolina De Robertis, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris
#159 Tom Jones. William Luvaas, Marc Harshman, The Good Earth, Lara Santoro, American Psycho
#158 Chinua Achebe's Man of the People; The Red and the Black; McCarthy's C.; Farm City; Victor Depta;Myra Shapiro
#157 Alice Boatwright, Reamy Jansen, Herta Muller, Knut Hamsun, What Maisie Knew; Wanchee Wang, Dolly Withrow.
#156 The Glass Madonna; A Revelation
#155 Buzz Bissinger; reader suggestions; Satchmo at the Waldorf
#154 Hannah Brown, Brad Abruzzi, Thomas Merton
#153 J.Anthony Lukas, Talmage Stanley's The Poco Fields, Devil Anse
#152 Marc Harshman guest editor; John Burroughs; Carol Hoenig
#151 Deborah Clearman, Steve Schrader, Paul Harding, Ken Follet, Saramago-- and more!
#150 Mitch Levenberg, Johnny Sundstrom, and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns.
#149 David Weinberger's Too Big to Know; The Shining; The Tiger's Wife.
#148 The Moonstone, Djibouti, Mark Perry on the Grimké family
#147 Jane Lazarre's new novel; Johnny Sundstrom; Emotional Medicine Rx; Walter Dean Myers, etc.
#146 Henry Adams AGAIN! Also,Fun Home: a Tragicomic
#145 Henry Adams, Darnell Arnoult, Jaimy Gordon, Charlotte Brontë
#144 Carter Seaton, NancyKay Shapiro, Lady Murasaki Shikibu
#143 Little America; Guns,Germs, and Steel; The Trial
#142 Blog Fiction, Leah by Seymour Epstein, Wolf Hall, etc.
#141 Dreama Frisk on Hilary Spurling's Pearl Buck in China; Anita Desai; Cormac McCarthy
#140 Valerie Nieman's Blood Clay, Dolly Withrow
#139 My Kindle, The Prime Minister, Blood Meridian
#138 Special on Publicity by Carter Seaton
#137 Michael Harris's The Chieu Hoi Saloon; Game of Thrones; James Alexander Thom's Follow the River
#136 James Boyle's The Creative Commons; Paola Corso, Joanne Greenberg, Monique Raphel High, Amos Oz
#135 Reviews by Carole Rosenthal, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Wanchee Wang.
#134 Daniel Deronda, books with material on black and white relations in West Virginia
#133 Susan Carpenter, Irene Nemirovsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kanafani, Joe Sacco
#132 Karen Armstrong's A History of God; JCO's The Falls; The Eustace Diamonds again.
#131 The Help; J. McHenry Jones, Reamy Jansen, Jamie O'Neill, Michael Chabon.
#130 Lynda Schor, Ed Myers, Charles Bukowski, Terry Bisson, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism
#129 Baltasar and Blimunda; Underground Railroad; Navasky's Naming Names, small press and indie books.
#128 Jeffrey Sokolow on Histories and memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement
#127 Olive Kitteridge; Urban fiction; Shelley Ettinger on Joyce Carol Oates
#126 Jack Hussey's Ghosts of Walden, The Leopard , Roger's Version, The Reluctanct Fundamentalist
#125 Lee Maynard's The Pale Light of Sunset; Books on John Brown suggested by Jeffrey Sokolow
#124 Cloudsplitter, Founding Brothers, Obenzinger on Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University
#123 MSW's summer reading round-up; Olive Schreiner; more The Book Thief; more on the state of editing
#122 Left-wing cowboy poetry; Jewish partisans during WW2; responses to "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#121 Jane Lazarre's latest; Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky; Gringolandia; "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#120 Dreama Frisk on The Book Thief; Mark Rudd; Thulani Davis's summer reading list
#119 Two Histories of the Jews; small press books for Summer
#118 Kasuo Ichiguro, Jeanette Winterson, The Carter Family!
#117 Cat Pleska on Ann Pancake; Phyllis Moore on Jayne Anne Phillips; and Dolly Withrow on publicity
#116 Ann Pancake, American Psycho, Marc Harshman on George Mackay Brown
#115 Adam Bede, Nietzsche, Johnny Sundstrom
#114 Judith Moffett, high fantasy, Jared Diamond, Lily Tuck
#113 Espionage--nonfiction and fiction: Orson Scott Card and homophobia
#112 Marc Kaminsky, Nel Noddings, Orson Scott Card, Ed Myers
#111 James Michener, Mary Lee Settle, Ardian Gill, BIll Higginson, Jeremy Osner, Carol Brodtick
#110 Nahid Rachlin, Marion Cuba on self-publishing; Thulani Davis, The Road, memoirs
#109 Books about the late nineteen-sixties: Busy Dying; Flying Close to the Sun; Looking Good; Trespassers
#108 The Animal Within; The Ground Under My Feet; King of Swords
#107 The Absentee; Gorky Park; Little Scarlet; Howl; Health Proxy
#106 Castle Rackrent; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; More on Drown; Blindness & more
#105 Everything is Miscellaneous, The Untouchable, Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher
#104 Responses to Shelley on Junot Diaz and more; More best books of 2007
#103 Guest Editor: Shelley Ettinger and her best books of 2007
#102 Saramago's BLINDNESS; more on NEVER LET ME GO; George Lies on Joe Gatski
#101 My Brilliant Career, The Scarlet Letter, John Banville, Never Let Me Go
#100 The Poisonwood Bible, Pamela Erens, More Harry P.
#99 Jonathan Greene on Amazon.com; Molly Gilman on Dogs of Babel
#98 Guest editor Pat Arnow; more on the Amazon.com debate
#97 Using Thomas Hardy; Why I Write; more
#96 Lucy Calkins, issue fiction for young adults
#95 Collapse, Harry Potter, Steve Geng
#94 Alice Robinson-Gilman, Maynard on Momaday
#93 Kristin Lavransdatter, House Made of Dawn, Leaving Atlanta
#92 Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs
#91 Richard Powers discussion
#90 William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare
#89 William Styron, Ellen Willis, Dune, Germinal, and much more
#88 Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo
#87 Wings of the Dove, Forever After (9/11 Teachers)
#86 Leora Skolkin-Smith, American Pastoral, and more
#85 Wobblies, Winterson, West Virginia Encyclopedia
#84 Karen Armstrong, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Taylor
#83 3-Cornered World, Da Vinci Code
#82 The Eustace Diamonds, Strapless, Empire Falls
#81 Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , Paola Corso
#80 Joanne Greenberg, Ed Davis, more Murdoch; Special Discussion on Memoir--Frey and J.T. Leroy
#79 Adam Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Hemingway
#78 The Hills at Home; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jean Stafford
#77 On children's books--guest editor Carol Brodtrick
#76 Mary Lee Settle, Mary McCarthy
#75 The Makioka Sisters
#74 In Our Hearts We Were Giants
#73 Joyce Dyer
#72 Bill Robinson WWII
story
#71 Eva Kollisch on G.W. Sebald
#70 On Reading
#69 Nella Larsen, Romola
#68 P.D. James
#67 The Medici
#66 Curious
Incident,Temple Grandin
#65 Ingrid Hughes on Memoir
#64 Boyle, Worlds of Fiction
#63 The Namesame
#62 Honorary Consul; The Idiot
#61 Lauren's
Line
#60 Prince of Providence
#59 The Mutual Friend, Red
Water
#58 AkÉ, Season
of Delight
#57 Screaming with
Cannibals
#56 Benita Eisler's Byron
#55 Addie,
Hottentot Venus, Ake
#54 Scott Oglesby, Jane Rule
#53 Nafisi,Chesnutt, LeGuin
#52 Keith Maillard, Lee Maynard
#51 Gregory Michie, Carter Seaton
#50 Atonement, Victoria Woodhull biography
#49 Caucasia
#48 Richard Price, Phillip
Pullman
#47 Mid-
East Islamic World Reader
#46 Invitation to
a Beheading
#45 The Princess of Cleves
#44 Shelley Ettinger: A Few Not-so-Great Books
#43 Woolf, The Terrorist Next Door
#42 John Sanford
#41 Isabelle
Allende
#40 Ed Myers on John Williams
#39 Faulkner
#38 Steven Bloom No
New Jokes
#37 James Webb's Fields
of Fire
#36 Middlemarch
#35 Conrad, Furbee,
Silas House
#34 Emshwiller
#33 Pullman, Daughter
of the Elm
#32 More Lesbian lit; Nostromo
#31 Lesbian
fiction
#30 Carol Shields, Colson Whitehead
#29 More William Styron
#28 William Styron
#27 Daniel Gioseffi
#26 Phyllis Moore
#25 On Libraries....
#24 Tales of the
City
#23 Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction
#22 More on Why This
Newsletter
#21 Salinger, Sarah
Waters, Next of Kin
#20 Jane Lazarre
#19 Artemisia Gentileschi
#18 Ozick, Coetzee,
Joanna Torrey
#17 Arthur Kinoy
#16 Mrs. Gaskell and lots of other suggestions
#15 George
Dennison, Pat Barker, George Eliot
#14 Small
Presses
#13 Gap
Creek, Crum
#12 Reading after 9-11
#11 Political Novels
#10 Summer Reading ideas
#9 Shelley
Ettinger picks
#8 Harriette
Arnow's Hunter's Horn
#7 About this newsletter
#6 Maria Edgeworth
#5 Tales of Good
and Evil; Moon Tiger
#4 Homer Hickam
and The Chosen
#3 J.T.
LeRoy and Tale of Genji
#2 Chick Lit
#1 About
this newsletter
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