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"O'Connor, Flannery, author"
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Good things out of Nazareth : the uncollected letters of Flannery O'Connor and friends
\"A literary treasure of over 100 unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends which explores such themes as creativity, faith, suffering, and writing.\"--Publisher's description.
BOOK
After Chekhov A novel that captures his method and values
When the Revolution came, Maria Pavlovna trudged through one Moscow office after another, appealing to functionaries to have the villa declared a Soviet museum. Now, with German troops about to march into Yalta, she is busily removing the portraits of Lenin, Gorky and Tolstoy, replacing them with Gerhart Hauptmann and a photograph of Chekhov with a dachshund, putting into prominent view the German translations of Chekhov's work and his correspondence with German writers. W.D. Wetherell's \"Chekhov's Sister\" is something Chekhov never wrote, a novel-a Chekhovian novel made up of dialogue and stage directions and prose episodes that have the understatement and heightened realism of a Chekhov short story. Outside the villa a young man named Peter Sergeich Kunin stands watching for the appearance of the German troops. An aspiring writer, embarrassed by his clubfoot, Kunin emulates Chekhov. And \"since all the pilgrimages of youth are literal ones,\" he has become a medical student, grown a beard, affected a monocle and a double-breasted overcoat with the collar turned up, and journeyed to Yalta, where he has become a protege of Maria Pavlovna.
Newspaper Article
When order and craft meet gore and mayhem
Ordinarily the making up of imaginary realities is the province of science fiction writers, but British suspense writer Peter Dickinson has built each of his mysteries around some sort of invented setting. In \"King and Joker\" (1976) it was an alternate British royal family, sprung from King Victor I, the eldest son of Edward VII, who in Dickinson's revised genealogy doesn't succumb to influenza but survives to marry Mary of Teck, leaving the offspring of the real-world George V to become a subsidiary branch of the family tree known as \"the Yorks.\" In \"The Poison Oracle\" he created a mythical Arabian kingdom in which the only witness to a murder is a chimpanzee who has been learning to form sentences with plastic symbols. In \"Tefuga,\" probably Dickinson's best book, a British director is in Nigeria filming a television series based on his mother's diary, written while she was a young bride in a colonial Nigeria that the author has given his own system of language, customs and tribal enmities. \"Skeleton-in-Waiting\" brings into the present the story of King Victor II; his Spanish-born queen; Albert the Prince of Wales, a hairy leftie vegetarian in \"King and Joker\" but now maturing into his role; and Princess Louise, married to a professor of computer science and the mother of a new son.
Newspaper Article
The quiet power of Jane Smiley's novellas
In the \"The Age of Grief,\" the novella that gives its title to Jane Smiley's highly praised 1987 collection of stories, a man suspects his wife is having an affair with another man but is willing to go to almost any lengths to keep her from confessing it to him-thus hoping to prevent a rupture in their marriage. \"The Age of Grief\" is, like Henry James' \"The Turn of the Screw,\" an exercise in sustained uncertainty and a model of the novella form's classic virtues: compression and suggestiveness. Always an unwieldy form commercially-too thick for magazine publication, too thin for the bookbinders-novellas tend to come in pairs (J. D. Salinger's \"Franny and Zooey\") or serve as the locomotive for a book of short stories. In fact, \"Ordinary Love,\" the first of the two novellas that make up Jane Smiley's new collection, would have made a good companion piece for \"The Age of Grief.\" In \"Ordinary Love,\" then, Rachel, now 52 and long-divorced (\"I've been married once, almost married a second time. I have five children, four grandchildren. . .\"), is waiting the return of one of her twin sons from a two-year teaching stint in India. \"When Ellen was ten,\" she mentions early on, \"and the twins were five, and there were two in between, Pat, their father, and I parted, and he sold our house without telling me and took the children abroad.\"
Newspaper Article
Must a father be a giant to win his child's love?
In \"Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad,\" an extraordinarily vital and humane remembrance of her father, Bebe Moore Campbell recounts the deep physical and emotional split between male and female realms within her childhood. Because she spent three seasons of the year with her divorced mother, grandmother and aunt, going with her father to rural North Carolina during the summer months, Bebe's memoir is as much about the god she made of her father during his absence as it is about his ritualized appearances in her life. Parapalegic as the result of a car accident, George Moore remains an exuberantly determined, kingly figure whose devotion to his daughter is matched only by her own love of him. He is her dream-daddy come driving up in one of his dazzling speeding cars, carrying her as far as possible from the structured, overly-feminine domain of her mother, where it is expected she will accomplish something, be somebody, gain a place of distinction and overcome the prejudice of the white world (Moore is black) with hard-won gifts of intelligence, discipline and courage. Her mother's standards are strictly imposed upon Bebe; with her father, she feels loved simply for herself, her smallest whim cherished, her child's easy wishes granted.
Newspaper Article
The implausible journey On the road to California with two charmingly eccentric, widowed sisters
With adroit skill, quiet, compressed hilarity and compassionate philosophy, Charles Dickinson, author of \"Crows\" and \"Waltz in Marathon,\" has us, in his new novel, accompany two elderly, widowed sisters on a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. They travel only from midnight to 4 a. m., on secondary roads and at speeds ranging from 12 to 22 miles per hour. The elected driver, Helene, is blind. As elderly widows, Ina and Helene have more of the mixed blessings of habit and home than most. Not only does Ina still occupy their parents' house, with Helene only blocks away, but their husbands also were friends who vied over the two sisters during courtship-the four of them forming a friendly quartet before and after marriage. With their husbands both dead and their children grown and distant (emotionally, in Helene's case, physically, in Ina's), they have one another, a good many shared memories and the comfort of their homes. Marvelous characters-Ina still a sensual woman who possesses, at 70, a streak of daring most people relinquish by 30; Helene, fastidious, prescient, her humor biting and dry as gin. They goad, irritate and cheer each other. The two dead husbands, Rudy and Vincent, remain potently present in the women's lives. There are secrets Helene never discloses to Ina about her husband, secrets sadly inherited by Helene's only daughter. Perhaps sensing a lack of such union in her sister's marriage, Ina never confesses to Helene the precious intensity of her sexual life with her husband.
Newspaper Article
The perils of literature Nicholas Delbanco's writers are severely tested by life and art
Each of us erects our hidden altars, secretly hoping for salvation from mortality. Art exists as a particularly potent religion, the artist exalted as free agent, as re-creator of the universe. In Nicholas Delbanco's 13th book and second collection of short stories, \"The Writers' Trade,\" the craft and peril of being a writer is scrupulously examined. In the title story, a young man, Mark Fusco, achieves extraordinary success with the publication of his first novel. Intoxicated by language and literature, discovering joy in his solitary craft, he attends the sweet triumph of a publication party, receiving adulation as bounty and gift. Afterward, feeling \"there was nothing he could not attain, no prospect unattainable,\" he is deep in his giddy dream of success when the train he is on hits and kills a young woman. Abruptly he is diminished by the understanding that life goes on, that \"what was out there, on the track, found him irrelevant.\" His reaction, instinctively, is to take and absorb this stuff of life, write it down, elevate life into art. In \"And With Advantages,\" Ben, another young, naively ambitious writer, courts elderly, eminent men of letters, hoping at once to supplant them and to earn their imprimatur. Instead he witnesses old men foolishly lapsing into adolescent humor, exchanging souvenir erotic photographs and memories. As in the title story, this young writer, led by his colossal yet innocent vanity to attempt the transformation of life into art, instead finds life implacable and largely indifferent to his powers. Like Mark Fusco, Ben learns only that he understands nothing; he is painfully humbled, his vanity and ego assaulted.
Newspaper Article
Nobody's home : speech, self, and place in American fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo
This book has been taking shape for some ten years now, and I can accurately pinpoint its origin: my stint as Fulbright professor of American literature at Stockholm University in 1982-83. At that point I had the challenging experience of teaching American fiction to Swedish university students, and although my notions of what is “American” had been percolating ever since my student days in Paris, I found that this particular venture, namely, looking at American texts “from outside in,” triggered a process of reflection and self-definition that was to have real consequences.
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