The latest addition to my website is Dawn Powell‘s A Time to Be Born. This is was Powell’s first commercially successful novel and it is easy to see why, as it is a wicked satire on New York society when war was raging in Europe but before the US had entered the war. There are … Read more
It was interesting to see in Today’s Observer, an article on William Melvin Kelley and, moreover, claiming his A Different Drummer is a lost literary masterpiece. The book has been on my site since the beginning and I read him many years ago. More interesting is his book Dunford’s Travels Everywheres (yes, it is everywheres … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Richard Powers‘ The Overstory. This is another first-class, long and complex novel from Powers. Its subject is trees, particularly the idea that trees are, to some degree, sentient, rational beings and the fact that trees are being chopped down in unprecedented numbers in the United States and elsewhere, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nicole Krauss‘ The History of Love. This is an excellent book about creativity and authorship, about the Holocaust and about who we are. Leo Gursky was in love with Alma back in Slonim (variously in Poland and Russia). Her father paid for her to go to the USA … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Stafford‘s The Mountain Lion, a semi-autobiographical novel with the two main characters, brother and sister Roger and Molly Fawcett, being based on Stafford and her brother Dick, who were very close, as are Ralph and Molly. The Fawcetts live in California. Mr. Fawcett is dead but his … Read more
Steven Moore is the author of two essential works on the history of the novel: The Novel: An Alternative History , the first one covering the beginnings to 1600 and the second one 1600 to 1800. Both will tell you far more than you ever knew about the history of the novel, not in an … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Stafford‘s Boston Adventure. Jean Stafford had a strong reputation when this book was released in 1944 but her reputation seems to have faded (this book is currently out of print, though easily obtainable). The book tells the story of Sonia Marburg, twelve years old when the book … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Robert Creeley‘s The Island. This is an autobiographical novel by Creeley – his first – about the breakdown of his marriage to Ann McKinnon (his first of three marriages). John, the Creeley character, and his wife, Joan, are living on an unnamed Spanish island (but clearly Majorca where … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wright Morris‘ Plains Song: For Female Voices. This is one of Morris’ last novels and tells the multi-generational story of the Atkins Family. Cora has married Emerson, after a very brief courtship, and then joined him and his brother, Orion, who are homesteading land out West. The families … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wright Morris‘ Ceremony in Lone Tree. This is a follow-up to his The Field of Vision, but, in my opinion, a much better book. It features much of he same cast but with a few extra, who will, in the second part of the book, attend the eponymous … Read more