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Johnny Cash : the life and legacy of the Man in Black
\"An illustrated biography of Johnny Cash that tells his life story through never-before-seen personal photographs and memorabilia from the Cash family\"-- Provided by publisher.
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20,000 B.C. revisited Novelist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas portrays our prehistoric forebears
It might seem untimely-for her-that ethnologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has just brought out her second marvelous novel about prehistoric life in Siberia. (The first, called \"Reindeer Moon,\" was published a few years ago.) Untimely because the latest Jean Auel mastodon of a novel about primitive life, \"The Plains of Passage,\" is about to appear, and there is little doubt that Auel's book will receive more notice. How many novels about our ancestors from 20,000 B.C. can the public bear? Thomas' \"The Animal Wife\" dares to strip away any sentimental notions we might have about so-called \"primitive\" human beings and tries to show them as they may have been-quite close, in fact, to the spirit, temperament and intellect of the few surviving nations of bushmen and herdsmen whom Thomas had made a vocation of studying before she set out to write fiction. Father takes another wife from the group, the smart and beautiful Pinesinger, although he is unaware that Kori already has slept with her. As the cold season draws near, Kori discovers that he has made Pinesinger pregnant. But father, son, son's new stepmother and a few cousins and uncles and their wives and children must live the winter together in father's small isolated lodge, hunting for reindeer and fox, themselves stalked by a giant tiger whom they call, half-affectionately, the Lily, and watched by wolves and ravens.
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A Texas town where the Devil is the `only regular tourist
For so-called minority writers, the road to recognition in the general reading culture of the United States can be rather smooth-think of Amy Tan, author of \"The Joy Luck Club\"-or it can be quite rocky, as it has proved to be for Aristeo Brito. Author of the deeply resonant short novel \"The Devil in Texas,\" Brito first published the book in Spanish as \"El diablo en Texas\" with a small press in Tucson in 1976, but only now, in its snug-fitting translation by David William Foster, will it be widely available to a non-Spanish reading audience. (A small bilingual edition, using Foster's translation, came out several years ago.) Sixteen years is a long time to wait for a book that deserves-and demands-an audience of more than a few dozen experts on Hispanic-American literature. A darkly lyrical narrative, \"The Devil in Texas\" straddles the border between Texas and Mexico and bridges the near-past and turn-of-the-century history of the town of Presidio, Texas.
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Empire of the Andes Novelist Daniel Peters portrays the Incas' last days
`The Incas\" is the third novel in Daniel Peters' vast and impressive trilogy about the glories and sorrows of princes and warriors and courtiers and stone carvers and magicians and just about everyone else who must have walked the earth at that time and place in antique America south of the Rio Grande. With its publication, the North American public now has the opportunity to complete its education into the lives of the three great civilizations-Aztec, Maya and Inca-that the conquering Spaniards covered over with churches built of the bricks of pyramids and washed with blood and mixed with semen. Like its companion volumes, \"The Luck of Huemac,\" which focused on the Aztecs, and \"Tikal,\" Peters' interpretive historical fiction on the turning point in the demise of Mayan culture, \"The Incas\" assumes that the seemingly unknowable is never out of reach. Peters' subjects are the stuff of the ethnologist and the historian you might think, before having read his fiction. Here, one has to assume that Peters is inventing as much he is as employing his research, because the psychology of the Inca family seems as much a matter for the novelist's speculations as for the historical anthropologist's monograph. But in one of those many credible turns of psyche-and story-that the writer of fiction has to master in order to bring any narrative to life, Peters makes us believe in the growing sense of personal difference that sets Cusi apart from his brethren, his parents and the political and religious order to which he by birth must aspire.
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Dead reckoning A Native American envisions a victimized culture claiming its birthright
D.H. Lawrence once forthrightly declared that the novel was \"the one bright book of life.\" If he were alive to read Leslie Marmon Silko's monumental new novel, the first full-length narrative in over a decade from this gifted Native American fiction writer, Lawrence might want to change his phrase to \"the one bright book of death.\" \"Almanac of the Dead\" is one of the great American nay-saying creations, a novel that takes us on an odyssey through the lower depths of Southwest American and Mexican society in which scarcely an Anglo-American character (and in the Mexican sections, not a mestizo or mixed-blood character) is depicted with any socially redeeming qualities whatsoever. European-American society is portrayed in these pages as an endless skein of pornography, drug addiction, heinous racist criminality, bestial perversion, white-collar crime, Mafia assassinations and the fouling of the earth and air and water. Seese's quest for her missing child binds together a number of disparate scenes and locations and multitudes of characters, major and minor. Beaufrey has set things up so that Seese believes that David has engineered the kidnapping. She sees a Native American psychic on cable television and goes off to find her, hoping for a clue to the whereabouts of David and the baby. This leads her to the household of the psychic, Lecha, and her sister, Zeta, who are now nearing old age and whose ancient grandmother, old Yoeme, put in charge of an antique tribal scroll of prophecy, the \"almanac\" of the book's title.
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A cinematic comedy set amid the Mayan ruins of Yucatan
The author of \"True Grit,\" \"Norwood\" and \"The Dog of the South,\" Charles Portis has a devoted readership. It's a group relatively small in number by populist standards, though when \"True Grit\" hit the movie screens it became a ready phrase in contemporary American phraseology. I wish I could say \"Gringos\" was as moving as it was entertaining. Perhaps if Portis had turned the screw on his narrator, the expatriate American Jimmy Burns, one turn tighter, his story might have had more bite or, for that matter, more grit. As it is, Burns' story remains nearly poignant, but not quite. Burns is living down in the Yucatan, where Mayan ruins dot the jungle and Americans languish about the cafes and little hotels. He runs errands for gringo archeologists, but given his observations about the foibles and mores of his compatriots, he's as much an anthropologist as handyman and driver. His descriptions of his fellow Americans down among the ruins do have a nice comic edge, as in his take-out on a pair of American UFO aficionados, Louise and Rudy Kurle.
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GHOSTS OF MANILA' LETS NOVELIST SHINE
The wonderful thing about living a life with books is that there's always something new under the sun. In this case, it's the sun of the Philippines and its capital, Manila, the setting for a beautiful new novel by James Hamilton-Paterson. Hamilton-Paterson is a British expatriate living in the Philippines. For all most American readers know about him, though, he might as well be living on the moon. One of his novels, \"Gerontius,\" is a fascinating story based on the last days of the British composer Sir Edward Elgar-and that's the extent of his work that's been published here. This new novel will, I hope, bring him greater attention.
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A DENSE BUT LYRICAL TALE OF LOVE, LUST
The lyrical novel has had its following among 20th Century readers, certainly among the devoted fans of Virginia Woolf and lately in the blossoming readership of Cormac McCarthy, whose prose soars and startles and then swoops close to Earth before darting again toward the stars. Prose poems, the measured prose of poets, have their admirers as well, though it's probably a more select group of devotees. The two forms usually remain quite separate, but in the work of the late Texas writer William Goyen the two seemed to converge in prose tales with all of the resonance and implication of poetry, and prose poems with all of the evocativeness of short fiction. A small but appreciative crowd of readers greeted Goyen's first books, \"House of Breath\" (1950), a meditation on East Texas saints and sinners cast in the form of a novel, and \"Ghost and Flesh,\" his first book of stories that followed soon after.
Newspaper Article
GARCIA STRETCHES THRILLER BEAUTIFULLY UNTIL IT BREAKS
Hemingway told the story on himself that, while he was sitting on the patio of a lodge at Sun Valley, Marlene Dietrich swatted his newspaper aside and commanded him to look up at the mountain slope swarming with skiers. \"Daughter,\" old Hem said he told her, \"don't confuse motion with action,\" and went back to reading his paper.
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JIM HARRISON'S MISFITS A FATHERLESS WOMAN, AN UPPER PENINSULA ROGUE AND A VICTIMIZED ACADEMIC
Looking back at Harrison's fiction, one sees some books still burning brightly while others have sputtered out. Along with the novels \"Sundog\" and \"Dalva,\" the novellas in \"Legends of the Fall,\" particularly the title work, show off a writer at the height of his powers. \"Legends of the Fall\" is at once an epical gesture toward our great romance with the West and an acutely modern critique of those same myths-again, Harrison wants it both ways. This intense and engaging story breaks a lot of the rules of narrative (so much exposition, so little time) even as it makes new space in the imagination for the realms of manhood and sorrow. It's a tribute to Harrison's subtle narrative skills that as we follow Julip across Florida while she proceeds with her plan to get Bobby out of jail, we also move back and forth in time-discovering, in a third as many pages as it takes to build the usual novel, her dangerous past and how it comes to impinge on her present. Above all else the novella is a tribute to a young woman wise and talented beyond her years. Her father's dead-long ago run over while lying drunk in a sleeping bag in the middle of a campground parking lot-and her mother has floated away into some high society stratosphere. More than anything else from her childhood, Julip misses a bear that had been a bad if intriguing neighbor at the family's forest retreat in Wisconsin. To keep up her spirits, Julip reads Emily Dickinson and goes on the road on her brother's behalf.
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