Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 225

January 31, 2023

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Comments from Readers

Recommendations from Readers

The 1619 Project for Children

More for Kids

Kage Baker Discussed by Molly Gilman

Troy Hill on Isaac Babel

Shelley Ettinger's Best Reads 2022

More Hints from a Professional Editor by Danny Williams

Links to articles on AI and Cultural Appropriation

Three More by Michael Connelly

Announcements

Lists

Reviews in this Issue

Read/Watch/Listen Online

Just for Writers

How to Help Authors

REVIEWS

This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer)

 

We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel
by Eric Alterman  Reviewed by Joe Chuman

The Works of Kage Baker discussed by Molly Gilman

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly

The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly

Trunk Music by Michael Connelly

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy

Chain of Evidence By Cora Harrison

A Shocking Assassination by Cora Harrison

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy

A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

Agostino by Alberto Moravia

In the Lonely Backwater by Valerie Nieman

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

I Am Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

Lincoln at Gettysburg: the Words That Remade America by Garry Wills

 

A couple of years ago I had a solid year-long project of reading books discussed in Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other) edited by Mark C. Carnes. It was an interesting guide to American novels chosen and discussed by historians (Gore Vidal's Burr, for example, was one of them). It led me to some books and writers I'd always wanted to sample and some I'd never have come to on my own. I've been looking for a while for something comparable, and I just came across a new book, Kenneth C. Davis's Great Short Books: A Year of Reading―Briefly. It describes systematically with samples 58 short books, mostly fiction, arranged alphabetically. It doesn't have as much scholarly interest as the Carnes book--Davis insists he is just another Common Reader, and he seems determined to convince us all that reading is easy. His list is interesting, though, and by the time I'd finished three chapters, I'd stopped and read Alberto Moravia's Agostino, Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café, and Kate Chopin's Awakening.

 

As always, I welcome your suggestions, responses and enthusiasms.

 

 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS WINTER 2023

 

 

Now available from the Jesse Stuart Foundation: Edwina Pendarvis's book about ballet in Appalachia, Another World: Ballet Lessons from Appalachia.

Find information here.

 

 

"Stepping Through History: Pittsburghers Reflect on City's Steps" is available on Paola Corso's blog. For more and her work see Paola Corso.com.

 

 

Valerie Nieman's novel In the Lonely Backwarter (see our take below) has won the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award. The SWR award honors the best book of fiction by a North Carolina writer. Previous winneers include Reynolds Price, Jason Mott, Lee Smith. P, Charles Frazier, John Ehle, Fred Chappell, and Allen Gurganus.

 

Shelley Ettinger's story collection John & Yoko & Rowena & Me made the shortlist for the Dzanc Books prize.

 

Spuyten Duyvil has new books!   Weird Girls by Caroline Hagood; Cirrus Stratus by Shome Dasgupta; It's No Puzzle by Cris Mazza, and much much more!

 

Excellent story by John Loonam now available on the Summerset Review

 

Lewis Brett Smiler's story "Down the Stairs" is on Creepy Podcast . The podcast is an hour, but his story only takes about 34 minutes.

 

MSW reviews "Foote" A Mystery Novel," by Tom Bredehoft at Southern Literary Review, November 2, 2022.

 

Norman Danzig's story "The Angel of Death" has just been published at Blue Lake Review.

 

Kelly Watt's short piece "Next Exit" is up for an honor!

 

Troy Hill has new stories online: The Write Launch published his long short story "Aquarium Life" and The Bangalore Review published his story "Ford Man.

 

 

 

 

REVIEWS

 

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

This is a really good book, and I recommend it with all my cylinders engaged. Probably her best work since The Poisonwood Bible, and maybe better.

I want to start, however, with a few caveats about things that some people may find problematic about Kingsolver's novels. First, most of her books, are weaker in the second half than in the first half. This is hardly uncommon: the longer the novel, the harder it seems to be to sustain momentum, and the easier to get lost in the trees. In Demon Copperhead, however, Kingsolver mostly stays strong. She is following a powerful structure (Dickens' novel David Copperfield) that carries this novel through the doldrums.

The second thing about Kingsolver is that while she is one of our best living novelists, she isn't subtle. Some admirers of literature may find this a problem, but Kingsolver has things to say, and she says them in your face. This can tend toward didacticism, and there is a little of that in certain speeches here, particularly things reported by Demon that his favorite teachers said--particularly about how Appalachia is treated in American discourse. Generally, though, Kingsolver's directness works well in this novel because of the splendid first person narrative voice. Young Demon Copperhead looks us in the eye and tells us his story. He's a kid, ages ten to early twenties in the book, and even when he gets things wrong, he is unreliable mostly in being too hard on himself.

Kingsolver also gets away with some of her messages because Demon is telling us what he's learning. Sometimes he is reporting a little lackadaisically what other say, and sometimes enthusiastically. It's always a challenge to get opinions and facts into fiction smoothly. I use"challenge" here seriously, not as a euphemism for "problem." In this novel, Kingsolver does it as well as anyone can, with Demon's voice presiding.

The message laid out here is about the opioid crisis in Appalachia, and more broadly in all the poor regions of the United States, and also about the insufferable sneering of the Media and many individual Americans at Appalachian Americans. Demon is aware of the disdain the larger culture often holds for everything Appalachian from accents to life style (including historical Appalachian preference for subsistence living over the pursuit of wealth). Kingsolver makes it clear that the devastation is from the outside: timber companies and coal barons who stripped the region of its resources-- and now Big Pharma.

This latter, the devastation of profitable addictive drugs, is something that anyone with a connection to the mountains is familiar with. I had a young cousin die last year of an overdose of Fentanyl. Many of us, middle class being no barrier, have these direct connections. Kingsolver's people, her imaginative community, are like relatives or neighbors. By nature and by ideology, she does not condescend to people, and that includes junkies.

Let me end with the Dickens connection. Kingsolver writes big, and, as I suggested above, sometimes her stories get a little saggy in the second half, but this novel follows another novel's plot, not too closely, but enough for resonance and structure. I would suggest David Copperfield gives her a path that helps keep her story on track and moving. And this is not a failing but a strength. It follows David Copperfield especially in its love stories. Victorian novels, specifically Dickens, were made for Kingsolver. She's got good guys and the bad guys and social evils and cruelty to children and a host of lovable eccentrics. She uses variations on names and situations from Dickens--the kindly neighbors who often take Demon in are the Peggots; his beloved child wife is Dori. And then, once you've met Angus, if you remember your Dickens--well, that gives you a strong idea of where the love story is going. Turning the overly sweet, soft wifey into a drug addict is a brilliant touch.

There is, also Victorian style, a happy ending. This is not to to suggest it is a happy book, only a hopeful book. The story is strewn with people dead of oxycodene and fentanyl and drunken accidents. There is a wonderful psychopath (like David Copperfield's "friend" Steerforth in Dickens) who everyone falls under the influence of. There is child labor and sexual exploitation and football, which both holds the community together and undermines it.

The community, by the way, is Lee County in the Appalachian west end of Virginia (NOT WEST VIRGINIA! ). My father's family is from there, and other family members of mine are from Tennessee north and east of Knoxville, where a good deal of the novel happens. This adds to the pleasure for me, but doesn't have a lot to do with anything except that I can vouch for at least a baseline of accuracy.

It's a big book, but goes like a houseafire, and makes me think our novels could use more Victorian models and Victorian virtues.

Go Kingsolver!

How about a southwestern Virginia Middlemarch next?

 

For another points of view, see the New York Times. The Washington Post, the Crimson and The Guardian, which does a nice job with the Dickens connection: "'Angus' Winfield not only has sobriety in the modern sense (she's dead set against drugs of any kind), but also possesses the human qualities that the angelic Agnes [in Dickens] singularly lacks. 'There's much to be said,' muses Damon, 'for lying around with a person on beanbags, firing popcorn penalties at each other for offside fart violations.' Take that, Victorian Angel in the House. Angus is a living and appealing alternative, farts and all, to the Doris and Emmys in a way that Dickens's Agnes never quite manages to be."

 

 

 

 

Agostino by Alberto Moravia

This small book is pretty much precisely as advertised in Kenneth C. Davis's Great Short Books. Themes and accomplishment, aside, you read this for the journey not the map: that is, the story takes second place to our experience of it. A thirteen year old boy is on vacation at the sea with his mother. He has a wildly guilty passion for her body, which begins with childish worshipfulness, but when she starts an affair with a young young working class man, the boy Agostino falls apart, starts hanging out with a little crew of tough boys who hate him for his relative wealth, and tease him and beat him up. They have an old sugar daddy with six fingers on each hand who makes a pass at Agostino, which leads the boys to insisting he's giving the old guy sex.

It's all sordid and angry and sad, and quite a wonderfully intense hour and a half of reading. Lots of pain, but also energy and passion.

Now I want to read more Moravia.

 

 

 

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Next on the Kenneth C. Davis's Great Short Books list is one I had read years ago, probably in the very early nineteen-eighties. I never really liked it back then (but it was required reading by an aspiring Second Wave feminist). I couldn't really warm to Edna Pontelllier, especially with all her assumptions about being taken cared of by men and her easy dependence on various servants, all black as far as I could tell. My only strong memories from my earlier reading were of the beach community and, of course, the swims in the Gulf. And I never accepted Edna's last swim. Edna seemed isolated and the only one of her kind.

I can't say I warmed to Edna much this reading either, but now I appreciate the beach resort, the community life, the view of a woman caught up in a destructive social milieu. I don't know if I got what Chopin wanted me to get, or what the late twentieth century feminist readers got, but I felt the place and time and especially the other characters-- the small, aging, unpleasant but inspired pianist; the wife-and-mother who seems to enjoy the life Edna is rejecting, but who also experiences a normal but intensely difficult child birth almost on stage.

Edna chooses to take a lover and really enjoys sex, but between her enjoyment of sex and the vivid story of giving birth, you understand why the book, published in 1899, famously destroyed Chopin's writing career. Claire Vaye Watkins (see below) says, "Unlike Flaubert, Chopin declines to explicitly condemn her heroine. Critics were especially unsettled by this."

It is then a fine novella, which perhaps is best read with sympathy but not identification with the protagonist. The childbirth and sex are well done, and Chopin did a good job on Edna's two little boys who are completely unsentimentalized little guys, happier (and nicer) in the country than in the city. Edna loves them episodically, but doesn't center her life around them.

Even the ending surprised me with the beautiful inevitability of the sensuality and opened me to see it as an inevitability of the place and time, of the limitations on the bourgeois young wife.

 

There's a good 2020 essay I'd recommend if you want to think more about The Awakening: "Unlike Flaubert, Chopin declines to explicitly condemn her heroine. Critics were especially unsettled by this." ("The Classic Novel That Saw Pleasure as a Path to Freedom" by Claire Vaye Watkins – adapted from Watkins; introduction to "The Awakening: And Other Stories," from Penguin Classics. Feb. 5, 2020 in the New York Times ).

 

Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

This is the third of my little short novels project. McCullers is pretty much all Southern Gothic here, with entertaining but exaggerated characters who all seem to be living out predetermined roles, like figures in a fairy tale. The focal character is a physically strong businesswoman who is a liitle gender fluid, but inspires a man to lover her and even marries him for a week and a half. Then she falls in love, and eventually her husband comes back, and a showdown ensues.

It's interesting, entertaining reading, but feels like it was supposed to be more serious that it actually is.

 

(Image of Vanessa Redgrave as Miss Amelia and Cork Hubbert as Cousin Lymon in the 1991 movie.)

 

 

 

 

 

Lincoln at Gettysburg: the Words That Remade America by Garry Wills

Garry Willis is an historian and author of a lot of books on politics and history. This little gem, published in 1993, covers the history of the Gettysburg Address succinctly, but focuses perhaps most interestingly on the rhetoric that Lincoln and others employed in the time of the Civil War–its basis in Greek oratorical forms, the mid-nineteenth century cemetery movement (that turned graveyards into beautifully landscaped places for contemplation), and, perhaps most interesting, how the Address was at the vanguard of a revolution in thought about the founding ideas of the United States as well.

I didn't read all the appendices, which include the famous orator Edward Everett's main address at Gettysburg, which went on for a couple of hours.One interesting fact is that Lincoln was never supposed to offer a long peroration–that was the Everett's job. Lincoln was always expected to do a brief few sentences–the actual dedication of the cemetery with all the dead soldiers from the great battle a few months earlier.

There are lots of enjoyable notes about Lincoln coming down the hall of the White House late at night, in his shirt tails to share something funny with his secretaries. But it isn't a book about humanizing the greats, it's about how Lincoln attempted through rhetoric to reorient the American project from the Constitution, with its details and compromises with slavery, to the Declaration of Independence and its clear statement on equality of human beings.

Really worth reading–another one of those books that I can't get through very fast, but so worthwhile.

 

 

 

 

The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy

This was Hardy's final published novel--1897. A different version had been serialized around 1892, then came Jude the Obscure in 1895 followed by this much revised Well-Beloved. It's an odd book to me, a little like a Henry James novella in which an artistic man plays out some fate or low-key tragedy. The artist here is a sculptor who we never see at work. He was born on a tiny stone cutters island in the south of England, where he has a long term relationship with a cultivated island girl, and a fantasy-love life in which a Spirit of Love keeps changing containers, i.e., women. It's pretty airy-fairy stuff to my taste. He deserts his first love, falls for a rich island girl, they run away together, then break up, more or less by mutual consent, and he goes about his shifting passion business.

At the age of forty, he goes back to the island, discovers that his first love, probably his true love, is dead, but her daughter looks just like her, so he falls in love with her for awhile, then leaves, and then, in his early sixties, goes back and tries to marry the daughter, the grand-daughter of his first love.

I can't say I'm enthusiastic about the book, but here's what I like: in the final part, when he's "old," the theme really is old age, and I don't read a lot of that. He doesn't feel his age, or really even look it, but is certainly seen as old by the twenty year old he wants to marry. He rails in his gentle way (really, far more Henry Jamesian than I would have expected from Hardy) and rediscovers the rich island girl he broke up with yea those many years ago.

For him, she takes off her veils, hair pieces, extraordinary make up. And puts her lined face in the sunlight for him. It has a kind of happy ending, probably as fantastical as his love life has been, and our hero focuses his days on local public work–salubrious cottages for workers, a better water supply. Very calm and practical, his tempestuous fire of love died out, his art of no interest to him anymore.

 

 

 

 

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Now we're looking at the one of the reliable Hardy classics. This was his fourth novel and first big popular hit, with lots of melodrama and suffering but a happy ending. A bold and beautiful young woman takes on the management of a farm for herself, working with an ex-love, but then falls for a bounder (it's a hard book to talk about without spoilers, because every chapter has more plot unfolding, fast).

Hardy's women, even in the The Well-Beloved are often capable and even with touches of the proto-feminist. The women (especially working class ones) seem to be far less restrained that the more middle-class Victorians' women do. Hardy is half a generation younger that the others, and he had cousins who were in service,and everyone when he was growing up was involved in some kind of working with your hands. Sitting in parlors doing fancy work and chatting wasn't really an option. His women seem to have wider stances and more defiant chins.

So this is one of Hardy's relatively cheerful stories, with a sheaf of funny but obviously beloved mechanicals, farm boys and drunkards. So different from The Well-Beloved.

 

 

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy

This is, as it is meant to be, a sweet beautiful book about friendship–Boy meets Mole, who is a cheerful humorous character who shares proverbs and other short wisdom. He also likes cake. The book has been a huge best seller, and is beautifully illustrated.  Boy and Mole help Fox who informs them that under ordinary circumstances he would have killed Mole, but Mole chews him free from a trap, and he becomes a mostly-silent, somewhat bemused companion. He's my favorite character.

Next they meet a stunningly beautifully drawn Horse who has even more wisdom to impart and a little magic. He says the bravest thing he ever said was "Help." He's the demi-god who makes everything right.

The hand-lettered text integrates beautifully with the art, but someone a beginning read would be unlikely to be able to read it. I wonder if children like it as much as adults do.

 

 

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

Nomi Nickel is a high school senior whose mother and older sister have run away from their Mennonite community in western Canada. She makes jokes about having no future but chicken killing at a local factory; she smokes cigarettes, has a boyfriend, does various drugs, skips school–does an infinite number of things forbidden by their branch of what she calls "the Mennos," and yet stays around to take care of her father, a sometimes clueless elementary school teacher who always wears a suit and tie. Towards the end of the book, he also starts selling or giving away all the furniture in the house. The center of his life had been his wife, Nomi's mother, and the church, led with appalling rigor by Nomi's mother's brother Hans, a.k.a. Hands and The Mouth. He puts an even heavier hand on the old traditions of the town, keeping the schools and hospital and church in line, and happily excommunicating/shunning those who don't conform.

It's a poetic story, full of as much of popular music and culture and Nomi and her friends can squeeze into it. It is colored by loneliness as well as creative anti-social behavior, and Nomi's yearning for her mother and older sister.

This is one of those books that meets the promises of its blurbs: it is edgy, different, moving, touching, and it presents love in the middle of a dysfunctional family that seems to be part of a dysfunctional culture.

 

In the Lonely Backwater by Valerie Nieman

This will be a short review, because we just had a long one in last issue. Ed Davis's review intrigued me so much that I read the book myself and highly recommend it. The voice of Maggie is intelligent and charming, and I love her passion for her lake and her North Carolina woods as well as the memoir by her Carl Linnaeus, whose Lachesus Laponica, or A Tour in Lapland, written in 1811, is her favorite reading matter.

Even though the novel has a murder, don't expect a standard mystery: Nieman is less interested in violence and her villain than in the flawed but ordinary people around the marina. Maggie's relationship with her alcoholic father is well-portrayed and moving. She may not be able to depend on him to be sober, and she may have to be responsible or herself far beyond what a girl just finishing high school ought to be, but there is also a lot of love there.

The surprise at the end is not my favorite part--I'm not sure I believe it, and I like to feel I can trust my narrators, when I like them, as I do Maggie. Still, like all the best novels, this one is not about its last page, but about the journey and the voice. The great strength of novels, in my opinion, is how we travel intimately with the characters and their lives and their places, and In the Lonely Backwater does this superbly.

 

 

 

 

 

TWO BY ELIZABETH STROUT

I Am Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

This is my second read of this short novel, and once again I am impressedand admiring, but don't quite understand the excitement. Four years ago, when I read it, I wrote: "This small novel is direct and compact. The central story line is about a writer with a repressive and deprived early life who now has a mysterious nine week illness that keeps her in the hospital. The heart of the story is about how her laconic estranged mother shows up and cares for her. A lot of things are left open-ended-- the snake when the little girl is locked in the truck, for example--but there is a sparseness to Lucy's life that appeals to me."

This time, the structure appealed to me most, and related to that (and my recent interest in novellas), it's smallness. Lucy's mother's visits alternate with references to parts of Lucy's life she is determined not to write about in this book, parts of the present and hints of the future. Her mother tells the latest about people in their hometown. Gradually Lucy reveals her odd and dangerous childhood. The present of the story--the story line-- is that the mother comes to the hospital and when Lucy gets better, she leaves. The themes and images and hints are of the relationship of mothers and daughters, the strength of dysfunctional families, a small town, New York City.

 

For my previous comments, see Issue #199.

 

 

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

I reread I Am Lucy Barton largely because of its relation to this novel I hadn't read before. The Lucy Barton world is interesting and marvelously written, but something doesn't quite click for me. The only thing I can put my finger on is that in spite of all the abuse and horror in everyone's childhood--all seems to be forgiven in the end. Here, Abel, a successful air conditioning business owner who ate out of dumpsters as a child is sweet and loving and gives his life at the end to get his granddaughter's toy unicorn back to her. He is listening to a failed actor who needs an ear. In this scene, and I came about half way to tears, which what I do with all Dickensian orphans, which is what most of Strout's people feel like to me. Things happen in Anythng is Possible like children being made to eat chunks of liver floating in the toilet. Creative torture rather than sexual abuse, the favorite of probably too many twenty-first century writers.

Again, I'll read more of her books, but they aren't on top of my pile.

 

 

 

TWO BY CORA HARRISON

Chain of Evidence By Cora Harrison

I read a recommendation of Cora Harrison's historical mysteries from Tana French, and couldn't find the first books available for Kindle at the library. I usually read mysteries and other genre on the Kindle, loving the speed and ease and not having to pay for them.

Harrison has a couple of series. One features a nun in the 1920's with a lot of Irish Revolution background. The second series I dipped into is in the 16th century (Henry VIII is the young English king). In the latter series, the sleuth is a brehon, a sort of judge/detective, a woman named Mara who administers the old Gaelic law, which seems progressive in comparison to to English law of the time. The Gaelic law seems to prefer fines to drawing and quartering, for example. That's interesting, as is a lot of the material about Gaelic traditions and values. It also has some fun sleuthing by Mara and her half dozen pupils (she runs a sort of apprenticeship/law school too, and-- oh--she's married to a minor Irish king-- not the brightest candle in the chandelier, but a real hunk). The ending has a nice twist, and there is (at least at first glance) murder by cattle stampede. Even though I have a good-humored feeling about it, I was shocked by some sloppiness. So sloppy, I wasn't even sure I was going to keep reading.

It's the ninth in the series, and I always suspect that successful or even moderately successful series genre writers start going too fast, or losing interest, or maybe being pushed by their editors or their fans to finish more books faster.

But this just seemed inexcusable: there was a twenty page passage halfway in that was about three drafts short of being finished. It was loosely written which doesn't necessary stop me because I read these things fast, but the details just collapse. Mara sends her assistant, Fachtman, on an overnight trip to bring a doctor back to look at their corpse. And while he's away, during scenes when Mara needs something done, Fachtman continues to do chores for her. He pops up as if Harrison just forgot he was away. Mara asks him to pass on a message to the students, to bring her things she needs--and all the while he's miles away! He has no lines, so he's only being used as a tool , but it just sets my teeth on edge like the sound of a dentist's drill.

 

 

 

A Shocking Assassination by Cora Harrison

This book from the Reverend Mother series is written so much better than the 16th century brehon book.

This one takes place in Cork just a couple of years after much of the city was burned by the British-backed Black and Tans. It's really a classic near-cozy mystery with a solid list of suspects to the killing of a corrupt city official in the middle of a morning market (indoors when the gas lights went out). The Republicans get blamed, and they are much in evidence, fighting to have all the counties of Ireland become free of England.

The Reverend mother is a cool character, even as (perhaps) an attempt is made on her life. There's a young Republican girl Eileen who is an alternate POV character, who has adventures breaking a boyfriend out of "gaol," and gives legs to the stately wimpled Rev. Mother.

There's a nice lightness to the telling in spite of death and danger and very heavy political background–the comfort a good mystery gives aficionados, I guess, that our mystery will be solved an our most important characters survive.

And I was truly surprised by the actual murderer!

 

 

 

THREE MORE BY MICHAEL CONNELLY

The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly

This is near the end of what Connelly has written about Bosch. The procedural and action here are clear and gripping as always, but Bosch is diminished: the star is Renee Ballard, who has a lot less resonance, even though she gets a new dog. Harry is an eminence grise, saving her bacon once or twice, but mostly following her lead, is sort of sad.

As always, this one is set n the present of the time of writing, so we've got the pandemic and masking and a demoralized LAPD with criticism of all cops after George Floyd. I know Connelly does his research, so I assume there's something to this. He manages a nice balance of how it feels to be a cop with the usual rotten cops and ex cops causing more crime than they solve. That really is an interesting quality of the books.

 

The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly

I've read this one a few times. This is where he's on leave for knocking Lt. Pounds through a window, seeing the shrink Dr. Hinijos, and solving the mystery of his mother's murder. It feels so much fresher than the later novels, Bosch's obsession with his calling works. Irving Irwin's emotions are a little mysterious, but Connelly is good on these people who have extremely mixed motives.

These novels from the 90's are when Bosch is angrier and rougher (on perps and himself)–altogether more dangerous and vulnerable and neurotic. By the time he has a daughter, he's a changed man. Still fun to read, but these early ones are the best, and why wouldn't they be? The whole thing with a money-in-the-bank series, I guess, is that people want the product. I wondered if that played into Cora Harrison's sloppiness.

You understand why Connelly wants to try a Bosch first person and to have Bosch a possible crook, and Bosch with his half brother Mickey Haller, etc. Etc. But the first ones are still best.

 

Trunk Music by Michael Connelly

This 1997 Harry Bosch book is another one that hits the sweet spot: lots of plot, redoubled and twisted; return of Eleanor Wish; both Jerry Edgar and Kiz Rider; AND Lt. Billets. Los Angeles and Las Vegas. A little low life Hollywood (bad film producer turned money launderer), a former beauty now apparently evil, but with a little gold in her heart. Some organized crime, a conflict with the Feds again. Nasty Chastain from internal affairs.

I've been embarrassed in the past about my multiple readings of these books, but I think I see what I'm after–in this case, on the Kindle, I was reading while we were traveling and I wasn't reading much at all, so I would read a couple of pages before sleep and turn away from it easily,

I am also always interested in what works in novels, which probably will never be how I write. And at this point, it is the familiar people, the lulling police procedure, much of it in Bosch's mind as he figures things out, probably in the end more like a writer than a cop, but still interesting.

 

 

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I've been reading about this popular book and the movie made from it, and about William Goldman himself, who was a successful screen writer and semi-successful novelist (well, his books always sold). He wrote screen plays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as well as The Princess Bride and for Misery. There is lots of stuff out there (i.e. on the Web) about his Hollywood experiences and relationships with Stephen King and the actors in PB. I read the 30th anniversary edition with the first chapter of Buttercup's Baby, and a lot of other meta material.

I think I'll describe myself as a reluctant enjoyer of the book. Goldman really does/did love all the adventure and excitement and his funny characters ("I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die..." as my nearly 4 year old grandson likes to recite).

But I have the feeling Goldman doesn't want to sink all the way in. He doesn't want to look foolish, maybe, to admit he loves the fantasy, so he does his elaborate parody and satire, and intersperses comments from "William Goldman" the screen writer. He's trying to be a cynical sophisticated grown up and a stand up comic (he must have loved working with Billy Crystal on the movie).

I get it why so many people like it, but there's just too much meta armature for me--some of it is hilarious and wildly clever, but I'm willing to believe the tale without the parody and cynicism.

Note on the reaction of the 6 year old big sister of the almost-four-year old: she liked having her father read it to her, but got bored and confused by the meta stuff, so her father skipped it. "Overall, she liked it, although I think it started too slowly for her. She basically wanted to get to the miracles as fast as possible."

Maybe that's the version I wanted.

 

 

 

A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

More rereading. This second book ends with Bran running away with the Frogman kids. Meanwhile, the wildling Osha takes Rickon and the appropriate dire wolf. This is to separate the boys.

Winterfell is a mess; Jon has just gone over to the Free Folk. Tyrion is alive but direly wounded. The Lannisters are in charge at King's Landing; Arya and Hot Pie and Gendry have just escaped Harrenhal. Sansa has been dumped, and is happy but doesn't know what's going to happen to her. Catelyn is at Rivverun with Brienne and Jaime. Major threads left hanging that will return: Stannis's plans; what's going on with Robb.

If none of that means anything to you, please ignore the rest too.

When I read this book the first time, years ago, all these details were mixed with the previous and following books. I was reading so fast that I didn't separate the books in my mind. I still have no idea what happened in what book, although I have these notes on the second book, and the first book had all the character introductions and infamous death of the one who appeared to be the protagonist.

Is it the next book that has the Red Wedding? When does Theon get his mutilation and demotion to Reek?

 

 

 

 

We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel by Eric Alterman  Reviewed by Joe Chuman

Joe Chuman writes: "[The] recently published We Are Not One [is] about America's history with Israel. It is by Eric Alterman, journalist, historian and long-time columnist with the Nation. The book is a biggy - more than 500 pages and packed with information. It is critical but tries to steer clear of polemics. Quite an achievement. This review comes with its own video. It appeared... under the auspices of the Puffin Cultural Forum."    (See Chuman's interview of Alterman on Puffin's Interview Series here. )

 

 

The installation of Israel's latest government, the most right-wing in its history, puts Israel back in the news. But Israel has never been far from the headlines. For a small nation, the size and population of the state of New Jersey, Israel commands attention far disproportionate to its size.

No doubt Israel as a focus of international awareness is tagged to its unique and tightly intertwined relation to the United States. It also results from the world's relentless fascination with Jews, which has served as a basis for prejudice, allegations of Jewish conspiracies, and much worse.

Books on Israel, its history, its origins, and its unique relationship with the United States abound in great numbers. A most welcome addition to the field is a magisterial treatise by historian and journalist, Eric Alterman. We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel is a comprehensive work of more than 500 pages packed with information in which Alterman strives to document every episode in America's relation to the Jewish state since its founding 75 years ago. It recounts and goes behind the scene to detail well-known events as well as those which have been mostly forgotten.

Inclusive of Alterman's concerns is Israel-American relations as a matter of foreign policy. But he is no less thorough in his coverage of the relationship between Israel and Israelis to the primarily non-Orthodox American Jewish diaspora. It is from this relation that the title of the book is most likely drawn. In my upbringing as a Jew, I was taught that Jews are a single people, unified by a common sense of peoplehood which needs to serve as a bulwark of loyalty to one's own. This never seemed the case to me, and today it is less true than ever. Israel and American Jewry are stridently divided. Most starkly, as Alterman documents, American Jews remain steadily left of center in their political values and voting patterns. Younger generations of Americans are becoming more progressive. By contrast, Israelis have moved consistently to the right, including younger cohorts of the population. As Alterman notes, American Jews comprise a “blue state” and Israel a “red state.” Indeed,70 percent of Israelis favor Donald Trump. Among American Jews, that number is reversed. This chasm is unbridgeable as never before.

Alterman is also concerned with the role of the press in shaping Israel's image and with major Jewish organizations that serve as a bulwark in defense of Israel and claim to defend American views, even as their positions radically depart from where the vast majority of contemporary American Jews stand on Israel.

I credit Alterman with courage in his undertaking. To write about Israel, or even to render a comment, is to place oneself before a firing squad. Some will upbraid Alterman for being an enemy of Israel. Others will condemn him for being too sympathetic. Still others will contend that he is obsessed with Israel's sins, while soft-peddling criticism of the Palestinians and the existential threats to Israel's security looming just over its borders.

Alterman's voice is that of the historian. He is deeply immersed in the issues, yet he partially floats above them to provide descriptions of events and their actors without becoming ensnared in polemics. This avoidance is not equatable with an absence of criticism. To the contrary, Alterman is a truth-teller committed to getting beneath “official” stories and headlines to reveal hitherto unknown facts and debunk accepted myths.

An early chapter deals with the role that the iconic novel and subsequent film, Exodus, played in framing the image of Israel and the new, post-Holocaust Jew in the American mind. Leon Uris's book, on the New York Times best-seller list for a year, found its place along with the Bible on the bookshelves in myriad Jewish homes. But as Alterman tells us, David Ben-Gurion admitted that the work suffered from the author's lack of talent, and Golda Meir opined that the novel contained “a lot of kitsch.” Both averred, however, that it was marvelous publicity and propaganda for the new nation.

The film version, starring Paul Newman, employed romanticized cowboy motifs, Arabs referred to as the “dregs of humanity,” and it is strewn with historical inaccuracies. But the film was a box office success, and as Alterman notes, “it continued to be shown at synagogue fundraisers, community centers, summer camps, and Hebrew schools for decades to come.” It formatted Israel's image in the American mind in the state's early years while playing fast and loose with historical verities.

Interesting facts abound. They are too many and too complex to recount, but a few I found of particular interest. New to this reviewer was the role of Harry Truman in supporting Israel's birth. Truman, coming from Missouri, harbored usual anti-Jewish prejudices, knew little about Palestine before becoming president and was certainly no Zionist. Yet, as Alterman makes clear, Truman had Jewish friends, a warm relationship with Chaim Weizmann, and was deeply moved by the plight of Jews in post-War displaced persons camps. It was emotion, more than political principles, that caused Truman, in the face of opposition from his State Department, to declare his support for the State of Israel just minutes after David Ben-Gurion declared its independence. As such, America's ties to Israel were launched at its very creation.

The `67 War was a watershed event that changed the image of Israel in the minds of different political factions. It would be useful to quote Alterman here:

“Before 1967, Israel had been understood to be a progressive cause, and the Arabs a regressive one. Israel had successively positioned itself in the anti-imperialist camp and had enjoyed good relations with other emerging nations, especially those in Africa. The socialist orientation of its dominant party, together with the 'David vs. Goliath' global image to which it had attached itself vis-a-vis the Arab world placed it within the geography of the 'good guy' camp for most liberals and leftists...”

“Regarding Black-Jewish relations pre-1967, US civil rights leaders, including, especially, Martin Luther King were almost uniformly pro-Israel...”

“The Six-Day War said 'good-bye' to all that. The cause of the Palestinians had long been part of the Marxist-inspired 'third-world' international revolutionary vanguard that included North Vietnam, Cuba, Nasser's Egypt, and other non-aligned or pro-Soviet governments opposed to the Americans and their allies...The Black-Jewish alliance had endured for more than half a century...Now the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a New Left civil rights organization, began publishing articles reporting on what it called Israel's conquest of 'Arab homes and land through terror.'”

Much else changed with the `67 War and factions and political dynamics concerning Israel have grown increasingly divisive and strident. The War enabled the settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and with the rise of the Likud Party, Israel has moved increasingly to the right. A contributing cause, no doubt, was Palestinian terrorism and the two intifadas which marginalized the Israel peace movement. In addition, the Orthodox sector of the population has grown and augmented its political power.

Alterman's treatise, which is presented chronologically, details in great complexity episodes in Israel's history and the involvement of a string of actors who were responsive to changing conditions and competing political dynamics. Nixon was known as an antisemite, but his bigotry's pervasiveness and crudity are shocking. Alterman cites Kissinger's discomfort with Jews, despite his own Jewishness, as he engaged in shuttle diplomacy. The author brings us back to the “Zionism is racism” controversy played out at the United Nations, and the role of Daniel Moynihan, which helped launch him into the senate.

Jimmy Carter and the Camp David Accords rightly receives a chapter that includes the painful controversy occasioned by Andrew Young, Carter's UN ambassador, when Young held a secret meeting with a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official. The meeting led to Young's forced resignation, which heightened Black-Jewish tensions. But, as Alterman often makes clear, such controversies were more complex than they were reported at the time: There had previously been private meetings between US officials and the PLO, which did not create a stir.

Lebanon, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and the complicity of Ariel Sharon are described in their complexity, as well as the allegations that the Iraq War against Hussein was pursued for Israel's benefit.

I found of special interest Alterman's chapter on Barack Obama. Its title “Basically a Liberal Jew,” was taken from a remark jokingly made by the president to an audience at New York's Temple Emmanuel in 2018. It's my view that Obama is a philosemite whose political career was launched in Chicago with the support of Jewish friends and associates. Though he has disagreements with Israel, it was Obama who had inscribed into law more than $3 billion given annually to Israel, which enabled Israel to construct its Iron Dome defense system, deployed to protect the state from incoming missiles from Gaza. Despite an unprecedented commitment to Israel's security, the contempt for Obama coming from Israel and the calumny issued from the Jewish establishment has been exceedingly harsh. No less has been the contempt for Jimmy Carter, who brokered the Camp David Accords,that generated the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Egypt comprises almost one-half of the Arab world, and one would think that Israel and its American supporters would be eternally grateful. But because Carter has been critical of the occupation, he has been the object of almost unmitigated calumny by those who have set themselves up to speak for Israel's interests, and by extension the American Jewish community – which they do not.

Such criticism opens the door to another major theme treated in Alterman's book, namely the exceptionless defense of Israel by conservative apologists no matter how indefensible Israel's conduct may be. Among the major voices in that camp are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. There are multitudes of individuals in the press, journals of opinion (Commentary the most noteworthy), and among neo-conservative pundits who also hold apologist views.

Criticisms of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the injustices and humiliations generated by the occupations, and abuses perpetrated by the military or by settlers, often with impunity, swiftly result in efforts to marginalize the critics. Very often there are charges of antisemitism, even against critics who are otherwise supportive of the Jewish state. Those pointing to Israel's excesses are summarily placed in the same category as those who wish to do Israel harm, blindly forgetting that criticism can be rendered in the service of positive support and care. Arguments that require an appreciation for detail, nuance, and complexity are subject to polemics and crude reductionisms. To this reviewer, it has long appeared as an odd and tragic state of affairs for a culture that has long been characterized and enriched by dialogue, engaged discussion, and a non-dogmatic stance in search for truth to avoid constructive criticism.

This obdurateness is rock solid and forms the basis of policy deployed by AIPAC when lobbying Congress, and is voiced in support of the Israeli government and its American allies. The political stance of Israel's defenders perhaps reached its most extreme manifestation in right-wing Jewish advocacy for Donald Trump in his alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu. The following is an illustration of where die-hard support for Israel has arrived. I cite from Alterman's chapter aptly titled, “Coming Unglued.”

“Trump's extraordinary largess to the Israelis was due in part to the similarities in how he and Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the world...Both politicians were profoundly corrupt...Both leaders displayed degrees of racism, nativism, and ethnocentrism that were considered extreme even by the standards of the racist, nativist, and ethnocentric parties they led. Politically, both were aspiring authoritarians who were eager to forge alliances with fellow illiberal politicians consolidating power based on ethnonationalist appeals in places such as Russia, Turkey, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, Oman, Azerbaijan, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Neither evinced any patience, much less respect, for democratic niceties such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or the separation of powers...Common enemies bred friendships of convenience. Netanyahu repeatedly excused Trump's antisemitism and that of his political allies. So did Trump's Jewish supporters, who were willing to make the same tradeoff that had appealed to the neoconservatives of a previous generation, when they had chosen to embrace antisemitic but pro-Zionist evangelical preachers beginning in the 1970s. As long as Trump was willing to indulge Netanyahu, they were willing to indulge Trump.”

The Trump-Netanyahu alliance is emblematic of where Israel has arrived. Israeli society and American Jews, except for the Orthodox (who comprise only ten percent of American Jewry) could not be further apart. With regard to political and social values, they reflect inverted images of each other. As noted at the beginning of this review seventy percent of Israelis, including the younger generations, support Donald Trump. With American Jews, it is the opposite.

Netanyahu is in the Prime Minister's office again, this time beholden to ominous reactionary forces that promise to undermine and transform Israel's democracy and its democratic institutions. In the past election, the Labor Party, the party of Israel's founders and founding vision, won but three seats in the Knesset. Meretz, the left-wing party, none.

As Americans move further to the left, Israelis move further to the right. The American Jewish community holds very little in common with their Israeli counterparts. It's a multi-tiered tragedy. I have personally known people of my parents' generation who devoted their lives to Israel and the Zionist cause. It was their guiding passion.

In a sense, Israel had always held them in contempt: eager to accept their support, while, in line with Zionist ideology, disparaging diaspora Jews for refusing to make aliyah, that is coming “home” to Israel, where they could be fulfilled as Jews. Today that contempt has been more fully realized.

Since evangelicals have revived their commitment to “Christian Zionism” they proclaim a special love for the Jewish people and for Israel. Their theology dictates the Jews need to be regrouped in the Holy Land to jump-start the second coming of Christ, at which point they will either be converted to Christianity or die. Israel has been willing to accept the “friendship” of evangelicals who support it with millions of dollars, assist in the immigration of Jews to Israel, and aggressively support the most right-wing and militarist objectives of the Israeli state. A tragic reality is, given that the evangelical population is many times that of the number of American Jews, Israel no longer needs the American Jewish community for its support. American Jews will increasingly be treated as irrelevant to Israel's interests.

In conversation with Eric Alterman, he opined that the breach between Israel and the American Jewish population (except for the Orthodox) cannot be reconciled. They are moving in the opposite direction and he believes the situation is hopeless.

Alterman further believes that American Jewish leadership for the past several decades has been committing a grand mistake. It has striven to construct Jewish identity on the two pillars. The first is reverence for the memory of Holocaust victims and the other is support for Israel. Yet, the Holocaust is long ago, and as his book makes clear, there is less in Israel to admire.

For Alterman, this current state of affairs opens up new opportunities. It provides a moment in which self-identified Jewish Americans can work to revive and rediscover the riches of their own traditions, religious and cultural. In such a turn, there is very valuable work to be done.

We Are Not Alone does not provide solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor, as suggested, does it offer ways in which Israel can resolve its internal problems, or how American Jewish organizations can relate to Israel with greater integrity as we look to the future. As stated, Eric Alterman's exhaustive treatise is a work of history, meticulously researched, honestly presented, lucidly elaborated, and eminently readable.

It is necessary reading for anyone who wishes to achieve greater insight and understanding into a central dynamic of American foreign policy and the place of Israel in the political life of American Jews.

 

 

 

COMMENTS IN RESPONSE TO THE LAST ISSUE

Jayne Moore Waldrop writes: "I enjoyed your Walter Tevis review. He was a great writer and now a Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame inductee. Here in Lexington we're closely connected to his writing, especially the early work done while he lived here or later work set in central Kentucky. I thought you might appreciate this story about the creation of the Harmon Room at the Lexington 21c Hotel. https://www.21cmuseumhotels.com/lexington/blog/2021/the-harmon-room-at-21c-lexington/ "

 

David Weinberger says, "Great issue of your newsletter....Exceptional! I loved the mix of genres, the books that were turned into movies, your engagement with the 1619 Project, the Twilight of the Self review, the photo of Paul Newman, and so much more."

 

Donna Meredith writes: "The 1619 Project has been on my To-Read list for some time, and I hope to get to it this year. I think Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns probably cover a lot of the same territory. They are also excellent eye-openers—full of facts we need to know."

 

Eddy Pendarvis wrote to share a "quip about Henry James that I read in Dan Simmons' novel, The Fifth Heart. The narrative is quoting a friend of James who supposedly said of his writing that far from biting off more than he could chew, he chewed more than he bit off. I love that, as James' style is so frustrating to me in all but his most action-filled works (like The Turn of the Screw)."

 

 

 

BELINDA ANDERSON SUGGESTS THE 1619 PROJECT FOR CHILDREN

 

Belinda Anderson points us toward some excellent resources for children that have been developed out of (or are related to) the 1619 Project:

 

The 1619 Project: Born on the Water

 

This is a picture book in verse, written by Nikole Hannah-Jones & Renee Watson with illustrations by Nikkolas Smith. The audio version is read by Nikole Hannah-Jones

 

Belinda also suggests

 

Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, by William Loren Katz. The 2012 edition of this nonfiction book is aimed at teen readers.

 

Black Past .   This website is one of many with lots of material--written and illustrations for learning.

 

 

 

MORE BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

Belinda Anderson also made this recommendation: "It is a book that would make a wonderful gift, for both children and adults: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, written and illustrated by Charlie Mackesy. [See my response above.]

"This is a famous excerpt from the book:

"“What is the bravest thing you’ve ever said?” asked the boy.

“Help,” said the horse.

“Asking for help isn’t giving up,” said the horse. “It’s refusing to give up.”    

 'Here's a passage I particularly liked:    

    “Is your glass half empty or half full?” asked the mole

     “I think I’m grateful to have a glass,” said the boy.

"It is a book quietly illustrated and kindly written about friendship and learning to let yourself be yourself."

 

 

 

MOLLY GILMAN RECOMMENDS KAGE BAKER'S NOVELS

In the distant future, two incredible discoveries were made—each alone, useless. First: the secret to time travel—but only how to travel backwards and return to the moment of departure. Second: the secret to immortality—but the procedure could only be performed on young children, who were not the ones with the vast wealth to afford it. Then one pioneer, known only as "Doctor Zeus", realized how to combine them. If one could send agents far, far back in time, and create immortals to live forward through history, those immortals could work to preserve "lost" treasures and otherwise cache great wealth for their future masters.

It worked, and Doctor Zeus Incorporated, aka "The Company", became (…WILL become?) the most rich, powerful, and secretly influential force in all past and future. The books of The Company series follow these immortal beings, who live in real time through the past with limited knowledge of the future, trying to find fulfillment in their work while dealing with the burden of knowing how everything, and everyone, around them will end.

 I always marvel that Kage Baker isn't up there with Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov of the science fiction greats. Her syntax is beautiful, her characters are dazzling, and the books' vivid sense of place is exquisite, especially prehistoric California. She was, among other things, a teacher of Elizabethan English, so no wonder the early books—which can only be classified as Historical Science Fiction—are so immersive. As the series proceeds, the other time periods seamlessly transition from known to the unknown and all feel just as grounded. I wish she was just on the other side of the gender revolution in having more of her characters being female, but her central heroine, the botanist Mendoza, is brilliant and carries the series. I take every opportunity to recommend this series, especially book one, "In the Garden of Iden", a great introduction which stands on its own well, and my personal favorite: book three, "Mendoza in Hollywood", for its lush immersion in nature. But the future books are stunning as well for the world-building and characterization. More people should know and enjoy this fantastic storytelling.

 

 

 

 

TROY HILL ON ISAAC BABEL

I first read Babel late last winter in an online class and group called Story Club led by the short story writer George Saunders. We read and discussed Babel's famous war story, "My First Goose," which felt all the more immediate given the recent invasion of Ukraine.

This summer I serendipitously happened upon a 1950s translation of the complete collection of Babel's short stories in the giveaway pile at our local dump and took it home. One story moved me in particular. I thought about writing something about it online and posting the story for public access but realized it isn't quite old enough to be in the public domain and translations restart the copyright clock. At any rate, I still felt inspired to type it up and send it out to a few folks who might also get something out of it, and it seemed like a good Christmas-time activity given the nature of the story.

Born in a Jewish ghetto in Odessa in 1894, Isaac Babel became a journalist and a writer of short fiction. His short story collection, Red Cavalry, was inspired by his experiences in the Polish-Russian war of 1920, where he served as a war correspondent and a supply officer in a Soviet regiment. Red Cavalry was published in the Soviet Union 1932 and, in the early 1930s, 0Babel was regarded as one of the most promising talents of Soviet literature. Ultimately, however, his ambiguous, expressionist style came to be at odds with the social realism endorsed by the state. Out of favor, he was arrested in 1939 by the NKVD (a previous version of the KGB), accused of espionage, and executed by gunshot in 1940.
Most of the stories in Red Cavalry depict the brutality and violence of war.

"Pan Apolek" stands out in this regard. The narrator of this story is stationed in Poland, residing in the house of a fugitive priest who has fled the Soviet Cossack battalions, but where the priest's housekeeper, Pani Eliza, remains. ("Pan" and "pani" are the masculine and feminine forms of a Polish honorific meaning "master" or "lord"—something akin to "mister" and "madame.") Under this roof, the narrator meets Pan Apolek, an itinerant painter who paints biblical scenes and portraits for money and travels with a blind accordion player. We learn that when Pan Apolek first came to town thirty years prior, he was hired by the local priest to decorate the village's new church. Once his murals are revealed and it's clear that Apolek painted local peasants in the image of the saints, including a trampy local Jewish woman as Mary Magdalene and a "lame convert" as St. Paul, he is declared a heretic by the Catholic church while becoming a hero to poor villagers. Toward the end of the story, back in the present, Pan Apolek tells our narrator "an unthinkable" secret gospel.

Here is a story written by a Jewish Odesan, serving among Cossacks (generally known to be anti-semitic), in an atheist Soviet army, stationed among Polish Catholics. From this swirl of ethnicities, nationalities, and conflicting beliefs, and despite the narrator's "bitter scorn for the curs and swine of mankind," emerges a tale of mysterious empathy.

You can check out a...recent translation of Red Cavalry by the esteemed Boris Dralyuk, who has also translated the contemporary Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov (among others).

 

 

 

SHELLEY ETTINGER'S YEAR'S BEST READS 2022

• The City We Became & The World We Make, a duology by NK Jemisin

• Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

• The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

• Love Marriage by Monica Ali

• Milkman by Anna Burns

• The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

• The President and the Frog by Carolina De Robertis
  

Shelley says, "My reading life still hasn't recovered to its pre-pandemic pre-Texas levels, still not reading as much and still reading much more crap than I used to, but I did manage to read some gems, and these are the best of them. The San Antonio Public Library system is a bright spot, really wonderful. Looking forward to a year with a book and a dog sharing my lap."

 

 

 

SPECIAL FOR WRITERS

Jane Friedman's excellent free newsletter Electric Speed suggests a web site for finding weather from the past for your nonfiction and historical fiction or just if you always wondered what the weather was like the day you were born: Wunderground provides hourly weather history going back to 1930.

 

 

Nikolas Kozloff sends us another article on writing by AI--a pretty even-handed piece-- an interview of indie para-normal cozy writer Jennifer Lepp who sees the bad and the good. [And... Another controversy continues: Fiction as the new flashpoint in the culture wars:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-fiction-is-the-new-flashpoint-in-the-culture-wars-cp8f0jkmp]

He follows up with article on the infamous American Dirt scandal--the scandal being cultural appropriation? Or, cancel culture?  Interesting, either way. Also, take a look at some thoughts on the issue in my occasional online journal A Journal of Practical Writing.

 

Some of the pieces from The New York Times may have paywalls.

 

 

Check out Odyssey Writing Workshops. They are an in- person and online writing school aimed at science fiction and fantasy writers: not cheap, but extensive in their offerings, which include marketing webinars and beginner level classes on character, dialogue, scene, etc. The prices range from under a hundred dollars (for a two hour webinar licenced for 60 days) to multi-class $2500 packages. A typical single class is around $250 for four sessions.

Reviews of these classes are welcome.

 

 

More Hints from a Professional Editor by Danny Williams

Got a nice novel manuscript in the shop this week. Has some mildly magical elements—something more than natural, but way short of dragons and crystal balls.* About half of it is set in 1860 or 1861 Virginia, on a quite wealthy horse breeding, trading, and racing concern. It's very carefully written, and even with my nearly pathological attention to detail I couldn't catch the author in a timeline slip or a substantial tense shift or anything.

Most of my advice was to take greater advantage of the setting, an opulent estate in the final years of the Virginia slave economy. There was a magnificent plantation mansion, and gala feasts and dances. Don't just say the woman was dressing for dinner, tell me about her gown, bustle, wig, or corset. The gaily clad menfolk, too. And that feast—what's on the table? All the bounty of farm, ranch, orchard, and sea are withing reach, so tempt me with some. And that opulent mansion, I want to hear about its colonnaded veranda, English oak woodwork, and manicured landscape.

The author had written some nice old-time-sounding dialogue, and I encouraged him to do more. Many of the suggestions I've actually learned in my academic study of Appalachian speech, which differs from modern Standard American English largely in its retention of obsolescent syntax.** Adding essentially meaningless auxiliaries to verbs: I might could do that. Other quaint redundancies: I like these ones. Using "anymore" positively, and "of" with times and seasons: Anymore, I like to sleep later of a morning. And one character was visiting horseman from Louisiana, so I would give him a little belle femme, merci, excusez moi, and à tout a l-heure.

Speech idiosyncrasies can add differentiation to dialogue. An individual might be prone to throat-clearing before speaking, cursing, or substituting long or obscure words for simple ones. A former co-worker ended every sentence with rising pitch, so every utterance sounded like a question. Nowadays, in every group of speakers there's probably one who begins every remark with "so." All these tools are obvious, but it requires awareness and effort for authors to prevent dialogue from sounding like their own.***

Maybe my input will prompt the author to reexamine the manuscript, maybe not. I honestly do not care much. This work brings me joy.

 

 

* Paola Corso, Giovanna's 86 Circles and Other Stories. Twenty-some years ago I had the pleasure of reading the manuscript of this collection. Ms. Corso's habitual setting is urban Appalachian, a much under-recognized genre, and many of these stories feature just this type of quasi-magical touches. Sadly, in the end I was denied the opportunity of working with this gifted fiction writer, poet, and photographer. University of Wisconsin offered her a quite modest advance, and my tightwad director would not allow me to match it. (No budget concerns on his pet projects, of course.) Anyhow, read this, and more of her work, for enjoyment and for instruction.

** Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech. After all the years and scholarship, this slender 1976 opus is still the place to start on Appalachian (or other old-timey) dialect. Quite possibly it will be as far as you need to go with the subject, sparing you some of the more ponderous tomes.

*** Must mention Ken Sullivan, former long-time editor of Goldenseal magazine. He had a real knack for taking submissions from all types of informants and somehow doing a great job of editing while keeping the writer's individual voice. I try to keep him in mind while doing my own work.

 

Send me some of your stuff—vague notions or developing manuscripts. I'll put a couple hours into checking it out and giving an opinion, for free. I would do every editing job in its entirety for free, except that I'd get so immersed I would have no time for cleaning the bird cage or showering.

 

 

Danny Williams, editorwv@hotmail.com    (See one of my other personae at Facebook Page "Sassafras Music Shop.")

 

 

 

GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE

• Joe Chuman has some excellent context on Anti-Semitism.

• Excellent story by John Loonam now available on the Summerset Review.

• Lewis Brett Smiler's story "Down the Stairs" is on Creepy Podcast . The podcast is an hour, but his story only takes about 34 minutes.

• Good list from Emily Temple at LitHub of her Best Books from the past that she read in 2022.

• The Hamilton Stone Review, # 47

• Mitch Levenberg reviews Carolyn Hagood's long essay  weird-girls-writing-the-art-monster

• Excellent introduction to Robert Gipe by his friend Wesley Browne in Undermain.art. See our review of his illustrated novel Trampoline here.

• December 2022 Issue of Savvy Writer has a good list of memoirs that deal with grief.

• MSW reviews "Foote" A Mystery Novel," by Tom Bredehoft at Southern Literary Review, November 2, 2022.

• Norman Danzig's story "The Angel of Death" has just been published at Blue Lake Review.

• Ayun Halliday's web page:   She makes cartoon-style hand lettered publication--doing things no one else is doing.

• Kelly Watt's short piece "Next Exit" is up for an honor!

• Troy Hill has new stories online: The Write Launch published his long story "Aquarium Life" and The Bangalore Review published his story "Ford Man."

 

 

HOW TO HELP WRITERS IF YOU LIKE THEIR WORK

Do you have a favorite author? Are you a writer who wants to do a favor for other writers–andmaybe they'll do a favor for you? 

 

Here's how:

 

• Write an Amazon review. Go to Amazon.com and search the book you recently (or a long time ago!) read.Click through to its Amazon catalog page. Scroll down below the ads and the editorial reviews and product details to Customer Reviews, and then scroll a little farther to REVIEW THIS BOOK.

• You don't have to have bought the book from Amazon.

• They may ask you to set up a reviewer's account. You only have to do it once, and you can stay anonymous if you choose or make up a handle.

• Give the book as many stars as you reasonably can. I rarely review books I can't give five. Inflated grades? For sure, but this is about publicizing books we enjoyed and admired.

• Write a review. Short is fine. In fact, short is probably better than long on Amazon. You can reuse the review on GoodReads and Barnes & Noble and anywhere else.

• Don't use foul language. They won't publish a review if they don't like the words in it, and they can be heavy-handed. It's a 'bot "reading" the review, not a person.

 

You will be doing literature a favor, and all of us with books in print thank you in advance!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 226

March 28, 2023

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Eddy Pendarvis on Free Indirect Discourse.
Article at At A Journal of Practical Writing

 

Above: Walter Mosley; stamps of Toni Morrison and Ernest J. Gaines!--and Valeria Luiselli betwen the stamps.

 

 

 

 

Now available: schedule for the West Virginia Writers Conference, Cedar Lakes Conference Center, Ripley, West Virginia, June 9- 11, 2023. To see workshops and presenters, scroll down to "Spring Conference 2023.

 

 

 

Suzanne McConnell's book of writing advice from and exercises based on Kurt Vonnegut's work is available in four languages already (English, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese) with Polish, Catalan, and Chinese coming soon!

 

 

 

Comments from Readers

Announcements

Lists

Reviews in this Issue

Read/Watch/Listen Online

Notes Especially for Writers

 

REVIEWS

This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer)

 

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

The Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas

Angel's Flight by Michael Connelly

The Adventures of Jake A Coal Camp Boy by Victor M. Depta

Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular by David Hollinger Reviewed by Joe Chuman

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

A Storm of Swords George R.R. Martin

Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall by Jim Minick

Fortunate Son by Walter Mosley

Parishoner by Walter Moseley

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

Lincoln by Gore Vidal

Christianity: A Very Short Introduction by Linda Woodhead

Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright

 

 

I want to call attention to the announcements section below with a number of exciting new books, some reviewed or to be reviewed in this newsletter. Also check the good reading online list. This includes stories and reviews and the latest article in my occasional publication, A Journal of Practical Writing, an online-only journal with concrete tips about writing and publication--revision, action, point of view, cultural appropriation, hints from a professional editor, a method for outlining, revision techniques for novels, and a lot more. The article is by Eddy Pendarvis, and it's called "Free Indirect Discourse: Two (or Three) Points of View at Once?"  It gives an excellent analysis of one of the important ways of telling stories in modern fiction.

The first review is of Jim Minick's excellent, just-published nonfiction book about a devastating tornado in the 1950's. This is timely in spring 2023 with deadly tornados hitting the South, and also of personal interest to me because of the tornado that ripped apart my hometown shortly before I was born.

Please let me know your reaction to any of the articles here-- as did these readers in the Comments from Readers  section.

Finally, there's an interesting Lit Hub piece about Tim O'Brien's Lake of the Woods and how it changed the writer's career. My review of the novel in Issue # 218.

 

 

Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall by Jim Minick

 

The Udall tornado struck on the night of May 25, 1955, and it was the worst ever in Kansas, killing nearly ninety people within the city limits of Udall, an all-American small town like the setting for dozens of movies and t.v. shows of the era. It had a water tower, kids on bikes tossing newspapers onto porches, a part-time mayor everyone knew personally, several protestant churches, and a handful of stores.

Minick makes a portrait of a town and its disaster into a highly gripping story. The first third of the book with brilliant simplicity just tells the stories, hour by hour: there is a bridal shower in the community center; people worry about the threatening weather; the radio warns of storms, but not tornados.  It hits unexpectedly, heralded by heavy hail and the infamous sound of a giant freight train. Some people get into their storm cellars (this is Kansas, after all, so many families had them). Teen-aged Bobby Atkinson is knocked out and wakes up with a broken leg, two broken arms, a smashed hand, numerous bits of wood and rubble in his skin and flesh--and a two by two board plunged in his back, puncturing a lung and injuring other organs. He doesn't know the extent of his injuries, but knows he is all alone in the rain and drags himself for help, not knowing most of his family is dead. He takes shelter in the family car for a while, and is discovered by a neighbor– who flashes a flashlight on him, asks how he is, and then leaves. Minick in his epilogue considers this incident closely along with other moments that could have gone worse or better, right or wrong, that would have changed this history.

Bobby is just one of many people who we follow through the storm: one family in a storm cellar chops through debris to let another family in. People are stripped of every stitch of clothing, babies and young children smashed dead. The elderly and the little ones were most vulnerable.

Minick's stand-out characters are probably Bobby Atkinson with the broken bones and Mayor Earl "Toots" Rowe whose boss gives him six weeks off to help organize the recovery. Toots leads people searching through the rubble, talks to the media, and, perhaps above all, convinces everyone that if they just work together they can rebuild their flattened town and recreate their community.

Another large chunk of the book is the rebuilding, the year after the tornado, which is not as breathtaking as the night of the tornado, but in some ways perhaps even more interesting. It details the support that poured in and the ordinary and extraordinary efforts and kindness of people to one another. There are a few incidents like the man who abandoned the wounded Bobby Atkinson teenager, but more of the story is about making common cause and helping out your neighbors.. Money is raised from the region and the nation. Large groups of Mennonite men, trained in disaster relief as conscientious objectors come and help with the search for bodies. The Red Cross is there and the Salivation Army and the National Guard. Unions send volunteers to put up houses, and churches and other organizations send donations.

Almost unbelievably, the schools are rebuilt in time to have classes September, four months after the tornado. Homes go up in weeks and months, and the businesses downtown. It's a town of only 1,000 people, but still, that is a lot of structures. It is in the end, an astounding and inspiring community and government partnership that rebuilds Udall.

The last part of the book is about commemorations and forgetting.

Minick reminds us that the Udall Tornado was just ten years after WWII ended, and that it was also in the middle of the Cold War. People feared nuclear holocaust and had fresh memories of war. They were trained in civil defense and ready to work together. That sense of commonality also makes it a time many Americans look back to as The Golden Age: small towns where you knew your neighbors; strong family structures, men generally considered the heads of families. Women who worked outside the home were teachers or perhaps post mistresses or clerks in a family store. People theoretically knew and took strength from their place, both the town and their role in it.

Minick doesn't make this point directly, but it is also clear that this was a largely homogeneous demographic. As far as Minick tells us, and his exhaustive and excellent research suggests that he didn't miss a lot-- everyone was white. Many people weren't that many generations from immigration, but the War had forged a common identity. So while the wonderful outpouring of aid and support was partly natural human kindness, it was also the natural human tendency to identify with those who are most like us. There was enormous camaraderie and communal identity with these small town European background white folks in their familiar roles and lives.

Minick ends with an epilogue wondering if we will be able to use this kind of good will to combat climate change, which is an interesting and timely line of thinking. I would add that I also wonder if we will be able to have such communal problem solving when everyone is not of similar color, religion, background, and experience. The Udallians rebuilt and stayed: many survivors married each other and, even if they left for school or work, often came back to live.

When will we begin to see Our Town in the lives of the Others, whoever they might be?

 

 

 

 

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

She is an impressively accomplished writer, not forty yet, Mexican but living in the States and writing in English. I thought at first this book, for all of its charm and detail, was going to go off into a workshop-type story about writing stories. She even has an afterward about how the novel was commissioned by an art gallery, and how she found Mexican workers in a juice factory who read sections as she wrote, and then recorded their reactions to give her ideas.

I assumed this was all meta stuff, clever, but fanciful. Well, according to Wikipedia and other sources online, it really happened. She is a nonfiction writer, too, and I'm beginning to think this is much more of a mix of documentary and surrealism rather than a hoax. The photos at the end of the book seem to be actual markets and businesses. So it seems my suspicious nature still makes it a joke on me.

But without regard to all this apparatus, it is a charming short novel, told, for the first four fifths or so, by Gustavo "Highway" Sánchez, a man who is a security guard at the juice factory, who becomes, in his forties, an auctioneer. Here he makes up stories to add to the value of what he sells. He considers himself to be an artist giving value to the objects, not lying.

Oh, and he also has his teeth replaced by Marilyn Monroe's teeth, and his estranged son kidnaps him, drugs him and has the teeth removed. There's more with teeth, sad and funny, with an art gallery of clown images (maybe real?) and all sorts of characters, and a chronology by the translator of the book into English–it's a trip, solid and engaging.

 

 

 

Lincoln by Gore Vidal

I have been reading books about Abraham Lincoln. First there was the Garry Wills book about the Gettysburg address, and then a lecture related to that book, and now I have read Vidal's excellent novel, which, at least according to Vidal's afterword, hews pretty close to the historical facts. It is long and follows the political details with great care, which may not be to everyone's taste, and it certainly helps to have some general background on the Civil War--I've never studied it, but I was a teenager at the hundredth anniversary of the War, and of my home state West Virginia's secession from Virginia during the war. A lot was being written and broadcast at the time, and I was particularly struck by the nonfiction book Andersonville about the gory tortuous details of one prison camp for Union soldiers. It was the first really vivid book on human horrors visited on other human beings--I read it before I read books on the Holocaust or chattel slavery.

Part of what is so appealing here is that cynical, louche ol' Gore Vidal clearly loves Lincoln for having at once high ideals and a brilliant sense of politics. He was, as Vidal presents him, completely underrated by most of his peers, who saw him variously as weak, racist in the way of most white Americans of his time, and somehow consistently choosing the right people for his cabinet. He seemed able always to strike deals that would move his objectives forward. And his objective, certainly not new news, was to hold the United States together as a single nation.

It is a thoroughly character driven novel. Vidal has the story arc from history and so focuses on the people, men mostly, although he does better with Mary Todd Lincoln that most accounts do. He does not give Lincoln a turn at point of view, which I think is an excellent choice. The point of view characters include Lincoln's young secretary John Hay who wrote extensively about Lincoln; Seward, the slippery Secretary of State who Lincoln beat out for the Republican nomination for president, who seems to be the character Vidal most identifies with for his cleverness and, maybe, for his desire for an American empire to include Mexico and the Caribbean. Vidal did one of these big historical novels about Aaron Burr too.

Mary Lincoln is also a point of view, and s he is often astute in her judgement of people and her devotion to her husband, but she also has serious mental health problems, which include her unbridled purchases both for the White House and herself. She isn't an easy character, but Vidal offers a plausible version.

The least successful of the point of view characters is probably Salmon Chase, who is a hypocrite without much sense of humor. A canting Christian abolitionist, he spends most of his time plotting against Lincoln in hopes of becoming president himself. Finally, there is David Herold, one of John Wilkes Booth's dim-witted assistant assassins.

In spite of all the politics, there are plenty of well-conceived dramatizations of action, including a couple of times when Lincoln rides alone at night and has his hat shot off by secessionists, a visit to an active war zone, Mary Lincoln's carriage accident, a lot of Hay's visits to a high-class brothel, and the well-documented assassination at Ford's theater itself.

Really a brilliant book that brings out all the best of Vidal's cleverness and jaundiced eye toward political behavior and poseurs-- and also his honest admiration for those who hold the line against true evil.

 

 

 

 

Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright

I began this book with one of the 5 novellas in it, "Big Boy Leaves Home," because it was one if the recommended short novels in Kenneth C. Davis's Great Short Books: A Year of Reading―Briefly. I've talked about several of these already in recent issues (Agonstino, Ballad of the Sad Café, The Awakening, Bonjour Tristesse, etc.).

This one is a wonderful sharp story, and I meant to read just this one, but decided to go on with the whole volume of Uncle Tom's Children with its five brilliant, appalling stories of Black life in the U.S.South in the first half of the twentieth century.

At some point James Baldwin took Wright to task for writing "everybody's protest novel," and it's true that these stories are all about witnessing and protesting and throwing it in the faces of nice white people what it was like to be black in the South during Jim Crow times. I'd just say that yes, these are protest novels, but many novels are something besides straight literature, and in all honestly, I think the strength of a novel is that it can be all at once poetic in language and profound in its human insights, and also a witness to political injustice.

The thing that shocked me in Uncle Tom's Children, aside from the constant and extreme brutality, is that the first three stories have a lot of white people characters, and not all two dimensional villains. Black writers' work today often leans towards worlds that minimize white participation, but Wright was frequently writing to white people, for maximum shock and educational value.

He also has a real respect for the committment of the Communists, of whatever color. The CPUSA was in the nineteen thirties a solid allly of black activists, present for demonstrations and ready to die themselves in the cause of stopping White supremacy. They had an agenda, but put themselves on the line, and Wright includes them on the side of angels in his books.

These novellas start with a couple of pretty depressing stories of bootless defiance, death, and a handful of survivors: Big Boy of "Big Boy Leaves Home" is one of a group of boys who skip school and set off a blood bath by swimming in a white man's pond where they aren't supposed to be, being caught there by a white woman who sees them naked and throws a fit. Her fiancé shows up with a gun– and before it's over, a home is burned down, a lynching is perpetrated, and Big Boy gets away by the skin of his teeth at terrible cost to his community. It's mostly dialogue, more heavily transliterated that we usually do in the 2020's, but more real than you want it to be.

Wright today is painful to read, but he is still the best at what he does. Two of the other novellas have adult protagonists going through moments of great crisis: a successful preacher and leader of his people has to decide whether or not to go against the white people who consider him a good representative of his people and participate in a protest for food relief. This one, set during the Depression, and in spite of a vivid and brutal beating, has a strong, hopeful ending of black and white people marching together for bread.

The final novella, added in later editions after the publishers rejected it for the first edition, has an older woman losing her sons, one to prison, and one to the torturing white supremacists. She, like the preacher, has to decide if she is going to take action, and she does--against a white spy who has infiltrated plans for a communist meeting. She takes her action knowing her son and she will die. One of the things Wright does brilliantly is get complex motivations and thoughts in the mind of a person of limited formal education.

This is a classic of American literature.

 

 

 

The Adventures of Jake A Coal Camp Boy by Victor M. Depta

The publisher calls these stories flash fiction, and the back cover recommends "other humorous works" by the author.  In fact, these are Depta's memory pieces of a boy growing up in a Southern West Virginia Coal Camp after the Second World War that are indeed brief and often have funny elements, but they are also a serious portrait of a certain kind of poverty and of a large, loving, but frequently dysfunctional family.

The boy Jake is around 5 in the first pieces, and he is a teenager on his way out of poverty by joining the the army at the end.  In between we have his affectionate but often absent and drunken mother, and his grandparents and especially his Aunt Thelma, who is fiercely protective of Jake and also pretty fierce and foul-mouthed. Jake starts a brush fire and kills a copperhead with a hoe. He catches a big catfish that tosses his uncles out of the boat, and he is taught to kill and clean a chicken for dinner.

He's a sensitive yet practical child who loves the beauty of his mountains and recoils from the coal dust and the general poverty caused by the withdrawal of the resource-extracting companies that left so much of West Virginia scarred physically and spiritually.

There are good times with Jake's friends, struggles with a a slew of coarse grown uncles he avoids for his own safety, and loneliness in the midst of crowds of families and neighbors. The brief pieces create a much greater whole than their parts, as entertaining as those parts are.

It's a brief, strong collection that delivers precisely what the title promises, and much more.

 

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

I almost stopped reading this science fiction novel recommended by Molly Gilman in the last issue  because the beginning has dialogue that felt too slangy-jokey to me. Obviously if you're doing time travel (for the overview of the set up of Kage Baker's series, see Molly Gilman's introduction), you have to deal with how people talk, but since we don't' really know how people talk in our future, and since Baker chose wisely not to use sixteenth century Spanish for the protagonist Mendoza's story, I feel pretty strongly it would be easier to suspend disbelief with a more neutral diction.

But all my complaints disappeared once Mendoza, a new Company operative sent to Queen Catherine Tudor's England, falls in love and starts speaking, to the "mortals," the non-cyborg people, in Elizabethan English. She handles that so well–naming when the people are speaking Latin and then the local English, and then, in the team's private quarters, speaking ywentieth century English. The story isn't highly plotted–it's more situations. Young Mendoza loves her botany and her job of saving plants that will be becoming extinct and keeping them in Company storage till they're needed. And then a tall smart handsome Protestant young man with a past comes into her field of vision, and it's all ill-fated love story– lots of young sexual love, lots of Mendoza's boss Joseph working apparent miracles and throwing humorous fits, lots of the older team member Nef listening to Company radio broadcasts special for the operatives with reports on what's happening in London at Catherine and Phillip's court. And of course the burnings at the stake and worse, which become not just reports, but reality for the characters.

 

 

 

 

MORE MOSLEY!

Parishoner by Walter Mosley

Pretty bloody, and probably one of his hand-tied-behind-the-back books, but I don't fault him for churning them out, making a fortune like the old Victorians, feeding the hunger, but also doing serious work.

This one plays with ideas about sin and can there be forgiveness for people who have been professional or near-professional killers. The book has a home-made church of the unforgiven (my name, not his) where our protagonist Xavier "Ecks" Rule, a parishoner, has found fellowship and direction. He gets called out on a mystery–where are three now-grown baby white boys who were stolen as babies and sold?

Mayhem ensues, heads bashed in with baseball bats, sexual exploitation of children. It's all dramatic, and, as always, Mosley is dependable for his heart being more or less in the right political place. I don't think his stories are always as deep as he thinks they are, but I keep reading, am always willing to give his work a try.

 

Fortunate Son by Walter Mosley

This tale is just an inch off the plane of real-world. It's the story of two brothers, one black and one white, not genetically related but deeply connected. The white boy is Eric, brilliant and athletic, whom everyone wants to love and who loves no one–except his brother, and the brother's mother who loved Eric too. Eric comes to believe that everyone he cares for will be lost, killed or seriously damaged.

The Black brother Tommy/Lucky is one of the lost ones–taken away from Eric and his father by Lucky's genetic father and grandmother, and plunged into maybe fifteen years of almost every kind of disaster that typically befalls poor young Black men in America: he doesn't fit in at school, disappoints his father, is beaten, drops out, becomes a drug runner, slips into the prison industrial complex.

No one finds him, no one stops him or notices he is spending every day in a secret overgrown passage between streets where people throw trash that he cleans up, where stray dogs and parrots live. When a body is tossed over, he and another runaway build a tomb for it.

In juvenile hall, where he is sent for a murder he's innocent of, he is raped and beaten. He ends up in his late teens on the street, never bitter, always looking at the bright side of things–finding good in the worst of his sufferings.

After many years the brothers reconnect, and at that point it seems a toss up if the end will be (a) death and disaster for everyone; (b) death and disaster for one of the brothers who will sacrifice his life for the other; or (c) some kind of happy or semi-happy ending. Mosley's choice seems fairly arbitrary to me, but it is doesn't harm the pleasure of this quirky, fabulist, very moving novel.

 

 

 

 

SHORT TAKES: SECOND LOOKS AND MORE

 

Christianity: A Very Short Introduction by Linda Woodhead

This was a reread of one of the Oxford "Very Short" series, little bitty books which often give me just as much information as I need at a particular moment. This one begins by distinguishing western Christianity and Eastern Orthodox, the former deeply concerned with sin, the latter less sin-oriented. Then it moves on to three broad categories that I find very useful: (1) Church Christianity– organized, priests and hierarchy, obedience valued (examples are the Roman Catholics and Lutheran Churches;  (2) Biblical Christianity– mostly Protestant, with Bible reading and interpreting that can be highly individualistic or requiring obedience to a leader (example would be the Anabaptists who became the Baptists); and (3) Mystical Christianity, which is a kind of unmediated apprehension of the supernatural (ranging from Quakers to certain cloistered visionary Catholics). The point with mystical Christianity is that authority comes not from the book or the church hierarchy but from within the believer. These versions of the religion are extremely different, and of course there are combinations– Biblical churches with a lot of authoritarianism, for example.

The little book ends with an overview of the increasing importance of the Southern hemisphere Christians who tend to stay out of politics, are increasing in numbers, and often mix Biblical and mystical.

 

 

Angel's Flight by Michael Connelly

Angel's Flight is still in Connelly's Bosch novels sweet spot (written in the late nineteen nineties). This has all my favorite elements-- quirky characters, Los Angeles places, police lore-- but I got tired of the multiplying plots. The first crime, the murders on Angel's Flight, led to a previous crime that had to be solved to solve the first crime,and then several more twists and turns with other crimes and the sad involvement of Bosch's old partner Frankie Sheehan. It's a good Bosch, but it has what a visual artist friend of mine used to call "eyelashes," when you work too long on a painting and start doing unnecessary little curves and dots and curlicues–eyelashes.

 

 

 

 

 

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

 

This was another of the short novels recommended by Kenneth C. Davis in his Great Short Books list. I somehow bought a cheap but really weird translation to English, possibly a machine translation. It frequently got pronouns wrong, and probably some words as well, but on the other hand, some of the passages were quite delightful such as the narrator's voice when she is mulling over what kind of people she and her father are (light, not serious, selfish). Those parts are lively English, rather as if a young French woman were writing in good but not precisely correct English.

It's a very tightly told story--all voice, a funny take on sex as pleasure and conquest, with the girl, still in her late teens, following her dad's lead in having affairs. There is a shocking but not completely unhappy ending. It's easy to see why it was so scandalous and popular in the late nineteen fifties. It's more fun than it should be--there are no really admirable characters, but it is refreshing to experience life as a young materialist and sensualist.

What on earth would this character have been like at fifty?

 

 

 

A Storm of Swords George R.R. Martin (nothing but spoilers)

Continuing to go through GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire for pleasure and learning how to tell a big story. This is book number 3, dead center of what he has actually published-- more than a thousand pages of mostly prime real estate including the deadly weddings--evil Joffrey's' and, of course, the Red Wedding.

The book follows Brienne the Maid of Tarth who is far better with her sword than with relationships. She is taking Jaime Lannister south. They are captured by Vargo Hoat and his so-called Brave Companions who enjoy lopping off hands. And feet.

Then there's the whole Jon Snow-joins-the-wildings-but-not-really plot with the delightful Ygritte. Jon suffers, fights, flees the wildings. Is accused of treason by his brothers at the Black Watch, and ends up getting elected Lord Commander of the Black Watch due to Sam's politicking. Possible King Stannis takes action and saves the Wall from the wildings and their giants and mammoths. I had totally forgotten that part from my earlier reading.

Meanwhile, Arya walks off leaving the Hound nearly dead. Littlefinger pushes Lyssa out the Moon window (I've been watching the actor who played Littlefinger so well in the HBO series, Aiden Gillen--in The Wire and I just can't shake the idea that his Baltimore councilman character is about to do some semi-medieval treachery on the Starks or the Lannisters).

Here, Jaime does a few almost decent things, including telling Tyrion he Jaime was responsible for what happened to Tyrion's first wife. He gives Brienne a sword and a quest.

Tyrion shoots his dad in the privy with a crossbow after strangling Shae.

Meanwhile, back with the dragons, Danerys exiles Jorah Mormont. I've totally lost the order in my breathless rush. But the breathless momentum is the name of the game in this novel, and you feel GRRM having a wonderful time. And I find it fun just to name the events I remember. At some level is a huge bloody soap opera, but if you're categorizing, so is the Iliad.

 

The Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas

I read this 1974 post apocalyptic feminist novel because the writer died recently and I saw her obituary. The style is competent, although I had that feeling I get with good science fiction, even with Octavia Butler sometimes, of too much haste in moving the story forward. This one has a really awful culture in which men are not only patriarchal brutes, but literally only have sex (at least in theory) in order to reproduce, and then give those boys who are born rigid training to get rid of the "fem" stain. The fems do most of the physical labor and the generations of males are kept apart–in fact the idea is that if fathers and sons meet, they'll kill each other. That's an interesting idea. The plot involves one pair in which the father wants to go back to the ways of the Ancients and leave his riches to his son.

The main characters are two young men, sometime lovers, one an official helper of people ready (or who should be ready) to die, the other an outlaw who provides "dark dreams" to people with a hemp product. The third is a fem who is trained in articulate speech and running.   She is clearly going to be our guide to the next novel.

The world is, as per usual, supposedly destroyed–no "unmen" (non white races) or brute animals at all. People live, barely, on various seaweed products. The women cleverly make foods of their milk as well.

Most of this could have been written yesterday, except that one of the hated "unmen" groups is long haired "freaks." With the importance of hemp and the interesting father-son hatred, it is a reminder of the early seventies.

I liked it, will read the next one, and maybe the much later pair of books.

 

 

Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular by David Hollinger Reviewed by Joe Chuman

Puffin Cultural Forum. You can find Chuman's interview with David Hollinger here.

 

Political scientists in decades past gave scant attention to religion. It was considered an archaic phenomenon that was epiphenomenal to economic and political forces that were the drivers of policy, whether international maneuvering by nations or conditions within those nations. Moreover, in the United States, since at least the 1930s, it was assumed by intellectuals and academics that religion would steadily fade away in the wake of the advance of scientific knowledge and as the population became increasingly educated. Sociologists found that as education spread and people climbed the economic ladder, they became less religious. Religion, at its base, was superstition embraced by the undereducated who were not society's prime movers. In brief, religion was not a significant political actor.

History has shown these presumptions to have been dramatically short-sighted. In the past four decades, religion has come out of the closet and asserted itself with the power of the long-repressed. On the international stage, the Islamic Revolution in Iran of 1979, which was also an assault on Western values, launched a movement of religious nationalism that has taken hold around the world. Its influence continues to be felt in nations such as Turkey, Russia, and India and throughout swaths of the Muslim world. As such it threatens democracy and liberalism, and resonates with the footsteps of fascism.

The movement embracing religious nationalism has its American expression as well. Since the late nineteen seventies, the Christian Evangelical subculture, which had been politically quiescent for half a century, became repoliticized. In the process, it has dramatically transformed the political landscape, rendering it far more conservative. It forms the backbone of the Christian Right. During the administration of George W. Bush, the movement had hundreds of Congressional members in its pocket, and Donald Trump would not have become president without the support of evangelicals and their allies. The evidence is irrefutable: Long ignored, religion must now be construed and understood as a powerful political actor.

This is a subtext of David Hollinger's most recent text, Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. Hollinger is emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He has authored and edited a dozen texts on American religion and related subjects. I was familiar with, and admired, Hollinger's work while I studied for my doctorate in religion at Columbia University. I came upon Christianity's American Fate, when reading a laudatory review of the work by Linda Greenhouse, long the Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times, in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books.

Christianity's American Fate is an important book. Numerous texts have dealt with how American society has arrived at this strange and perilous moment. We have become viciously divided as political adversaries are denounced as enemies and compromise and dialogue have completely broken down. Irrationalism flourishes, with 35 percent of Americans and more than 68 percent of Republicans embracing "The Big Lie." Conspiracy theories, which in the past were relegated to the lunatic fringe, have become increasingly normative. The Republican Party, bereft of any program, remains in the thrall of Donald Trump, a pathological narcissist and liar, seemingly totally lacking in empathy and without any interests beyond augmenting his personal power, ego, and wealth.

There are many complex causes that have brought us to this state of affairs. David Hollinger's perspective looks at the contribution of religion, primarily the rise of evangelical Protestantism, which is almost completely aligned with the Republican Party and its reactionary politics. It is a stance built on resentment and total disparagement of any ideas or programs put forth by the opposing party. As the subtitle of the book suggests, religion's move to the right, somewhat ironically, is taking place at a time when American society is becoming more secular, as increasing numbers of the formerly faithful are abandoning the churches.

The virtual takeover of the Christian landscape by evangelicals cannot be understood in a vacuum. As Hollinger makes clear, it can only be illuminated by situating its development in the broader context of American Protestantism. The propelling dynamic has been competition between evangelicals and so-called mainline, or ecumenical, Protestant churches, as Hollinger prefers to call them. The latter has been comprised of the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Northern Baptist, Congregationalist, Disciples of Christ, and several smaller denominations. These two major branches of Protestantism developed almost independently from each other and appealed to distinct sectors of the Protestant majority, based in great measure on class, educational level, temperament, and geographical region.

Hollinger makes the interesting observation that the conventional assumption that evangelical Christianity confronts the believer with difficult challenges, whereas ecumenical churches require less of believers, is false. He maintains that the opposite pertains, and this conclusion segues into his prevailing thesis.

According to Hollinger, the ecumenical churches demand an openness to the complexities of modernity, including an appreciation for diversity and relations with other denominations both within the Christian world and beyond it. They also require a range of social obligations that evangelicalism has walled itself off from. As with so much of American history, race and racism is a great divider. Here Hollinger cites the observation of Randall Balmer (whose book "Bad Faith" I reviewed in an earlier newsletter) that in response to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which ended racial segregation in public schools, evangelicals founded their own private, segregated academies. Under Jimmy Carter's administration, these private schools had their tax-exempt status removed. Their subsequent anger caused them to re-enter the political fray while turning their backs on Carter, who was a devout born-again Christian. As Hollinger mentions, it also enabled evangelicals to posture themselves as victims of an aggressively secular culture despite the reality of their massive political clout.

In Hollinger's view, the ecumenical denominations, who throughout most of American history comprised the Protestant establishment, were in concert with Enlightenment values, were cosmopolitan in outlook, embraced science, and in many ways were consonant with the values of the secular world. He also discusses at length their support of racial equality and their activism in the civil rights movement. These commitments cleaved a greater distance from the evangelical subculture, which created a redoubt from the complexities and racial outreach that the mainline churches engaged. As Hollinger notes:

"Evangelicalism created a safe harbor for white people who wanted to be counted as Christians without having to accept what ecumenical leaders said were the social obligations demanded by the gospel, especially the imperative to extend civil equality to nonwhites."

This observation could not be of greater political consequence. It directly explains how evangelicals became tightly identified with the Republican Party, who after the Civil Rights Act appropriated their "Southern Strategy, ensuring that it become a bulwark for whites discomforted by racial integration.

Hollinger notes that Billy Graham, the most popular of evangelical preachers and personalities, vividly reflected, as well as propelled, the divide between ecumenical Protestants and evangelicals. When asked to comment on Martin Luther King's Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech Graham responded, "Little white children of Alabama will walk hand in hand with little Black children only when Christ comes again." So much for racial and integrationist priorities.

The ecumenical churches reached their high water mark in the 1940s and `50s, when churchgoing was a mark of social probity. As they moved up the economic ladder, even some evangelicals joined mainline churches. Its members could pride themselves on such luminaries as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, and Protestant leaders were, for example, influential in the founding of the United Nations and its adoption of the human rights regime.

However, the 1960s was an inflection point for these established churches, as it was for many mainstays of American culture. Having crested, ecumenical churches began to rapidly lose members, indeed some hemorrhaged badly. Hollinger explains why. One cause is what we might refer to as a paradox of liberalism. Hollinger underscores that the ecumenical churches embraced broadly liberal values. They were early proponents of the civil rights movement, and in the 1960s were in the forefront of protesting the war in Vietnam. They embraced science, respect for social pluralism, and engagement with civic life and the secular world. With such values comprising their intellectual foundation, it should not be surprising that the children of members would decide to not be affiliated with the churches of their parents. Many left entirely.

A second cause coheres with the sociological observation cited above, namely as the educational level of adherents rose, they abandoned religion altogether and joined the population of the unaffiliated. A final cause for a decline in membership was a declining birth rate among those who remained in the churches.

Statistical losses of these churches are dramatic. Hollinger notes,

"Former ecumenicals constituted the vast majority of 'nones'... Between 2010 and 2018, the Disciples of Christ declined by 40 percent. The United Presbyterians lost 40 percent between 2009 and 2020. Lutherans lost 22 percent between 2010 and 2019. The Dutch Reformed...lost 45 percent between 2000 and 2020. The Episcopalians lost 29 percent between 2002 and 2019." The affiliated Jewish population, of course much smaller, experienced analogous losses, as did Roman Catholicism. Catholics became ex-Catholics. Protestants became post-Protestants. Hence, the United States, which has had the most religious population in the industrialized West, has become increasingly secular. Some sociologists speculate that the United States is at long last following Western Europe, which is arguably a post-religious society.

Hollinger includes two others factors that have led to the increasing secularization of American society. One has been the influence of America's Jewish population. Though never more than 3.5 percent of the population (today through assimilation and intermarriage it is below two percent) the influence of America's Jews has been disproportionately great. Prior to the influx of millions of Jewish immigrants between 1881 and 1924, the United States was readily identified as a "Christian nation." The Jewish presence and contribution to society changed that. Many arrivals from Eastern Europe were themselves secular, and many were predominant intellectuals.

Jews excelled in positions of leadership in law and medicine, academia, literature, the arts, Hollywood, and in science. Think J. Robert Oppenheimer, I.I. Rabi and Albert Einstein, among other luminaries. The social work and psychotherapy fields (following Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis) were greatly peopled by Jews, who for many replaced the church pastor in providing emotional support and counseling. Hollinger provides interesting insight as to how the philosophical professorate, William James and Josiah Royce being the most influential, implicitly carried forth Protestant values. After World War II, antisemitic barriers were removed the place of Jews in philosophy departments rapidly rose, so that by the 1960s one in five members of the leading philosophy departments was a Jew. Also influential was the role of Jews in the second wave feminist movement, whose leadership was almost entirely comprised of Jews, from Bella Abzug to Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

Jewish attorneys also spearheaded legal cases promoting the separation of church and state. They were active in such organizations as the American Jewish Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union which were at the forefront of pushing ahead the cause. I personally recall conferring with Leo Pfeffer, a prominent attorney who held to lead the separationist legal movement.

Through the influence of Jews, Anglo-Protestant cultural hegemony noticeably declined and America shifted from being a Christian nation to becoming "Judeo-Christian." Notable was the 1955 book by sociologist Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, proffering that Catholics and Jews were equal partners in defining an understanding of American society.

A second secularizing influence, which was frankly new to me, was Hollinger's discussion of international missionary activity carried on by the ecumenical Protestant churches. This initiative was vast and its influence in altering the domestic landscape was far-reaching. While the purport of missionary work was to convert others to Christianity, many missionaries returned with a newfound respect for the integrity, sophistication, and wisdom of those whom they encountered overseas. The authenticity of their religious cultures had profound effects. Those effects would lead ecumenical Protestants to question the importance of their own denominationalism. In time, ecumenical Protestants acceded to a growing cosmopolitanism and greater commitment to the universal needs of humankind that transcended parochial and local interests. It gave rise to a pluralist appreciation that added to the increased secularization of society at large. Evangelicals would have none of this, and in time filled the missionary space from which the ecumenical churches had withdrawn.

David Hollinger does not provide a solution to the state of affairs that he has so amply analyzed. But he is a powerful witness to what he refers to as a "remarkable paradox," namely that America is "an increasing secular society..saddled with an increasingly religious politics."

An aspect of contemporary American secularism, spearheaded by younger generations, is that it is generally more progressive than the politics of their elders. Hollinger notes that even the children of evangelicals are becoming disaffected from the churches of their parents. They are tired of the doctrinal rigidity and politics obsessed with a narrow range of issues laced with contempt for gays, and women's equality.

Perhaps this is where the long-range future lies. As the older generations depart, they will be replaced by a more benign politics that conforms to a society that is inexorably becoming more diverse and pluralistic, in which equality and mutual respect will become fundamental to our very survival. Demographics and time may have the last word.

 

 

 

 

 

READERS RESPOND TO THE LAST ISSUE--including a lot of praise for Elizabeth Strout!

 

Carole Rosenthal: Strout is a calming narrative voice in these wobbly world times because Lucy Barton is straightforward and charmingly so, as well as curious.  Lucy displays direct firm common sense in her occasionally surprised examination of her own reactions.  My favorite of those LB books is Oh, William!  Very loving, and complicated  in a common sense way.  Best to read all of the Lucy books.  I prefer Strout's Lucy Barton books to the also quite excellent Olive Kitteridge novels. Lucy is gentler, Olive sharp.

 

Dennis Cavanagh says:  Strout is my favorite novelist. What I enjoy is the very harsh exterior of her characters that underneath is actually a very caring person in a stoic New Englander sort of way. An example is Olive Kitteridge, a character in [the] novel of the same name. Olive Kitteridge criticizes her husband for being too nice to everyone. Yet, she goes out of her way to prevent someone from attempting suicide. Perhaps due to my being named after my dad's house in Litchfield Maine (The Captain Dennis House), I am partial to New England characters that are caring and sensitive but don't want to show that part of themselves because it would make them seem weak to the outside world. Yet, underneath that rough exterior, they do care a great deal.

 

 

Eddy Pendarvis writes to say she is a huge fan of Thomas Hardy. Here are her favorites of his novels.. She says, "These are in order from love to like. The last two are pretty far down from the other two groups, as my memory serves anyway."

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Jude the Obscure

The Woodlanders

Return of the Native

The Mayor of Casterbridge

A Laodicean

Two on a Tower

Under the Greenwood Tree

The Well-Beloved

A Pair of Blue Eyes

Desperate Remedies

The Hand of Ethleberta

 

 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Lit Hub strikes again: 13 movies better than the books they are based on.

 

 

Ed Davis's always-interesting list of events in Yellow Springs, Ohio area.

 

 

 

New Book by Leora Skolkin-Smith....

Stealing Faith: A Novel

 

 

 

Kelly Watt's poetry chapbook, The Weeping Degree, was a finalist in the San Miguel de Allende chapbook contest sponsored by @poetrymesa and Wild Rising Press!

 

 

 

Suzanne McConnell's book of writing advice from and exercises based on Kurt Vonnegut's work is available in four languages already (English, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese) with Polish, Catalan, and Chinese coming soon!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim Minick's Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas  comes out in May from the University of Nebraska Press, but you may pre-order here.

 

 David Laskin author of THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD and THE FAMILYwrote : WITHOUT WARNING is a ddpage-turning disaster narrative in the tradition of THE PERFECT STORM and ISAAC’S STORM:  spare, vivid, suspenseful, meticulously researched, utterly harrowing.  But the havoc an F5 tornado wrecked on this quintessential Kansas small town in the spring of 1955 is only part of the story here.  By taking the arc all the way from the calm before the storm to the months-long labor of rebuilding and reanimating, Jim Minick has brought an entire community lovingly to life. At heart, this is a book about how what’s best about our country confronts and overcomes the worst of our weather. 

 Jim Minick is the author or editor of seven books, including the award-winning Fire Is Your Water and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. His work has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Poets & Writers, Tampa Review, Shenandoah, Orion, Oxford American, and The Sun. His newest book is Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas, a nonfiction work forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in 2023.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coming in May, Tamp, Poems by Denton Loving

 

 

East Tennessee poet Denton Loving's second collection centers on the bond that endures between father and son, even after death. In plainspoken poetry that is often narrative in form, the writer's personal experiences living on an inherited cattle farm and tending to an aging orchard are detailed. Loving explores and celebrates the physical and psychological landscapes of his native Appalachia--its mountains and valleys, its flora and fauna--with language that is lyrical and bursting with sudden shocks of emotional power. These are poems that serve as witness to the natural world, blurred with history and mythology to examine the eternal father-son paradigm. Readers will be reminded why Ron Rash has said that "Denton Loving has the talent to convey what he has seen that we too might see, and feel, and know deeply."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE

Do you live in New York City? Just interested in how services are really delivered to people? Check out Harvey Robins's piece evaluating Mayor Adams' priorities and management style.

New at A Journal of Practical Writing : Eddy Pendarvis on Free Indirect Discourse.

Hannah Brown's latest Oren story "Hawaii and Mexico," organized around a conversation with her charming adult autistic son, appears in Lilith.    Don't miss it!

New Review of Eddy Pendarvis's book on women and ballet in Appalachia, click here.

Jay Klokker's Poem "Shaving the Ghost" in Shark Reef.

Lynne Squires' small, powerful essay on shoes of the Holocaust "So Many Shoes.

Cheryl Denise reads from her new book of poetry, Fences.

Take a look at Joe Chuman's post on Eating Animals and his piece on visiting the Holocaust Museuma in Washington, D.C. I was especially taken with what he wrote most recently on Identity Politics and the present state of America. He says, among much else: "My concern is that identity politics diverts from the overarching sources of economic oppression that require our militant protest," and then, later in the essay, "Reason is a weak force compared with the power of group cohesion."

And don't miss an article in Forward (thanks Elaine Durbach!) on Walter Mosley as a Jewish writer!

New issue of The Jewish Literary Journal.

New Issue of Innisfree! Poems by Bruce Bennett, Zoë Blaylock, Grace Cavalieri and Geoffrey Himes, Helen Chinitz, Ginny Lowe Connors, Nicole Farmer, Robert Gibb, Melanie McCabe, Abbie Mulvihill, Jean Nordhaus on Matthew Thorburn, Allan Peterson, Roger Pfingston, David Thoreen, John Tustin, Dick Westheimer, Mark F. Wiegan, Terence Winch, and Anne Harding Woodworth on Terence Winch.

 

 

NOTES

ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS

Lewis Brett Smiler writes to say, "I submitted my story 'The Sculptor' to a new magazine called Ghoulish Tales. Ghoulish Tales opened for submissions on Dec. 17, 2022, and closed on Feb. 15, 2023. They announced that they had received exactly 1,106 submissions. I believe this is the first time I've ever seen a publishing outlet give out this information."

 

 

From Jane Friedman: a downloadable data base of 1,000 "best" literary journals.

 

 

New at A Journal of Practical Writing : Eddy Pendarvis on Free Indirect Discourse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 227

May 16, 2023

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Back Issues     MSW Home     About Meredith Sue Willis     Contact

For functioning links and best appearance,
read this newsletter in its permanent location.

 

Fritz Eichenberg wood cuts for Jane Eyre: Lowood Schoo; Jane meets Mr. Rochester; Mr. R. tamed.

 

 

For writers: Danny Williams, editor extraordinaire, offers us a sample of some of his concerns and what his editing looks like. It's a .docx file here. Read the first part, in particular, about tenses.

Birgit Matzerath is a well-known pianist and piano teacher who also has written a book More Than the World in Black and White about her life (see our review here). She keeps a lively, insightful blog, and the current blog post should be of interest to all creative workers. It compares preparing The Well-Tempered Clavier for performance with packing for a forced move from one apartment to another: both of which she recently had to do-- simultaneously.

Now open for registration!    The West Virginia Writers Conference, Cedar Lakes Conference Center, Ripley, West Virginia, June 9- 11, 2023. To see workshops and presenters, scroll down to "Spring Conference 2023

 

Hamilton Stone Review #48 is now available to read online!

Poetry: Matt Hart, Donald Revell, Jeff Knorr, Jeff Gundy, Moriah Hampton, Claire Keyes, Lisa Bellamy, Stephen Mead, Michael Lauchlan, Howie Good, Barry Seiler, Michael Hettich, Stephen Gibson, Liana Kapelke-Dale, Claire Scott, Sharon Whitehill, Nancy Smiler, Tim Staley, J.R. Solonche, Phillip Sterling, Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith, Heikki Huotari, and Jane Simpson.

Prose: Brian Michael Barbeito, Brian J. Buchanan, Conor Hogan, Eleanor Lerman, and Connie Draving Malko.

 

 

My brother-in-law David Weinberger, who writes about knowledge and the web, sent me this link to an article in Salmagundi: Rick Moody interviews ChatbGPT.  In the interview, Moody questions the chatbot about modernism and the "traditional" nineteenth century novel.  I recommend taking a look at it. I responded that I thought it starts out pretty well, if dull--that is to say, it seemed like an encyclopedia entry, but the longer it goes on, the more it begins to sound like a desperate undergraduate writing an exam. The comments on individual novels were painfully--shall I say--derivative? It sounded less derivative when it talked about literary theory, but that may be because I know novels a lot better than I know literary theory.

David responded with some background notes. "These chatbots," David writes, "have what one might call a default bland voice, which makes them sound smug and male. A lot of bot'splaining going on. The commentary is literally derivative, but not of any specific work. [Note: man'splaining ironically ahead. Skip if you already have an idea about how these bots work.] Rather it's derivative of billions of pages of source material dissolved into words, phrases, and word-parts that are then computed into their statistical likelihoods of following one another. And because it's building its comments out of statistical probabilities of how words go together based on how words have gone together, the ideas tend to be very middle of the road, which works out to being western and white.

"You can, however, tell it to reply as a feminist, as a Ugandan, as Jordan Peterson, or what you will, and it will do the best it can to comply.

"Some people are talking about chatAI as bullshitters, but I don't think that that's exactly the right word if we think bullshitters know when they're bullshitting. These systems literally have zero idea of the connection of words to reality or truth. So, if you ask them for a source for what they just said, they will blithely make one up, not knowing they are doing so...exactly as they are making up prose with no way of knowing if what they're saying is true.

"It's been programmed to apologize, and also to deflect 'personal' questions about it by telling us it's just a computer program."

 

 

In this Issue

Background Notes on Chatbots by David Weinberger

Belinda Anderson and MSW Discuss Jane Eyre

Comments from Readers

Announcements

Book Reviews

Good Stuff Online

Especially for Writers

 

REVIEWS

This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer).
They are by MSW unless otherwise noted.

 

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Bronze King by Suzy McKee Charnas and The Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas

City of Bones by Michael Connelly

Fences by Cheryl Denise

LaBrava by Elmore Leonard

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley

Another World: Ballet Lessons from Appalachia by Edwina Pendarvis

Dora/Lora by Larissa Shmailo

Mad Dog by Kelly Watt

 

 

Another World: Ballet Lessons from Appalachia by Edwina Pendarvis

This is a book like no other I have ever read with its study of women and ballet--primarily in Kentucky and West Virginia. Pendarvis, Professor Emeritus at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, includes rich data from surveys and interviews of women who took ballet as children in the Appalachian region. She organizes the book around a handful of themes and conclusions, but also makes room for short biographies of roughly two dozen Appalachian women who studied ballet, mostly in the twentieth century. The biographies are a wonderful way to learn about the kind of people who are the pillars of our communities: working, studying, achieving, parenting. They include several races and ethnic groups, and they are women who grew up nearly poor and those who were comfortably affluent.

Pendarvis herself was one of the girls who studied ballet, and her sister Annette Burgess studied as a young woman at the famous School of American Ballet (SAB) in New York City and then made a career as a dancer and as arts administrator. Burgess was not the only one of these Appalachian dance students to make a career in dance. Several of the women were and are professional performers and/or teachers of dance. Some of them own their own schools of dance.

Another delightful element of the book is a wealth of black and white photos provided by the dancers. Some of the photos are professional dance images, and some are family snapshots of little girls in tutus and ballet positions. The family photos always have expressions of bliss of their scrubbed young faces. They seem transported by the experience of dance.

The themes Pendarvis emphasizes grow out of the dancers' responses to her interviews. One is the apprehension of beauty in and through dance. Second is mastering physical and artistic skills and challenges--especially important for those who grew up before Title IX, when sports did not always welcome American girls. The very opportunity of expending energy in a way that was acceptable--structured and beautiful, but always challenging-- was itself important.

Finally, dance was a link with the women and their own mothers, who often sought out the classes for them and paid for them, and even made the costumes. Pendarvis relates these themes to the landscape and Appalachian folkways of women supporting each other and creating community. She writes In Chapter 11, "The experiences described by Appalachian women who studied ballet in the twentieth century suggest that ballet's relevance to their lives had much to do with their childhood ideas of beauty and the kinds of challenges they found worthwhile and pleasurable. Those ideals reflected their family life; community; the landscape with its contours, seasons, flora, and fauna; and the world as portrayed in movies, television, books, and magazines. In addition to offering access to beauty and accomplishment, ballet was meaningful in that lessons and performances engaged them in a unique community composed mostly of girls and women, a community that offered camaraderie they enjoyed and, in some cases, treasured."

This is. then, a book about empowerment. Shy girls discovered the ability to take the stage; some learned to be more connected to the world beyond their small coal mining towns. Some of the women are and were, of course, feminists, but others would not think of themselves that way. Nor was ballet transformative for every girl: Pendarvis, for example, gave up lessons while her sister went on. But all of her interviewees saw themselves as changed by their experience with ballet. The preponderance of their memories are of camaraderie, positive body images, and expanding horizons.

 

Fences by Cheryl Denise

Cheryl Denise's world is at once full of rural pleasures and challenges like difficult tenants and taking care of recalcitrant sheep. She writes in a clean, apparently direct style, but underlying the family narratives and bright metaphors are sophisticated emotional depths. The poems are often narrative and autobiographical, as in "Calling In Sick," in which the speaker doesn't go to work because "I can't take another day without poetry." The poem ends with "I can hear the metaphors/knocking at the door."

I especially love her narrative poems from her Mennonite childhood, and her continuing but low-key, even self-deprecating, but strong commitment and faith. One wonderful example is called "The First Gay Wedding in the Godshall Family," which is about the simple life and Mennonite history as well as about a family facing a new reality.

There is also a group of deeply personal poems about fear and depression including "Panic Attack," in which her husband wants to "fix" her as if  " I am an engine/or leaky faucet." One called "Mostly I Hate My Mind" has the wonderful lines "I loathe confident women who look like Christmas/but never unwrap...."

There are poems about marriage, and about early love, and about skiing a 54m cross country celebration of the men who saved an infant Norwegian prince in 1206. She has poems about her realistic, fraught, but also funny poems about her relationship with sheep ("...They baaa/ as if their mouths are full of marbles,").

The poems always invite you in with a clear situation or a welcoming familiar line, and then before you know it you are caught up in her world, where there is farming and service and family and frustration--and subtle redemption through language.

 

Dora/Lora by Larissa Shmailo

I've read a number of Larissa Shmailo's works (see my review of SlyBang here), and have always been impressed by her ability to use sometimes extreme experiments in language and story-telling to moving effect–she never merely shows off with her pyrotechnics, but always illuminates some dark corner of human experience. This collection, on the other hand, has largely straightforward verses, mostly with relatively plain language.The central poem "Dora/Lora" is a long narrative that uses a loose, roughly iambic pentameter line to narrate family history: how her parents and other family members in Ukraine survived under the Soviets in the nineteen thirties, and then under alternate waves of Soviets and Germans during the Second World War. One question she is exploring is what did her parents have to do to survive? They were in work camps, worked as translators and laborers. Clearly they were working for the Nazis in some fashion– but how much? Were they really collaborators?   What about the Jews murdered in some of the same camps where they were? She asks, "Is complicity possible without choice?"

And even while suspecting the worst, she clings to her mother's assertion that she once opened a gate for a resistance fighter. The story line of this long narrative poem is clear, but the events and suffering and betrayals and non-choices are complex and cloudy. Shmailo pulls us through wrenching experiences with her. What really happened? Was whatever they did worth it becuase of the middle class life in the United States that they achieved for their children? Can you love a kapo?  Is it possible even to guess what was done to them--and what they might have done? This is harrowing stuff:

 

There are other excellent poems in the collection as well: a couple that start with Anna Karenina; a terrific "Fall of Icarus;" a "Personal Theology" with these wonderful lines:

Uncomfortable everywhere in life, like a stray cur, homeless in your soul, you wait like a dog to be walked.
And yet, you are a sunflower, open, spiral, connected by mysterious mathematics to the stars, as far as Andromeda
                                                             (p. 23)

Larissa Shmailo, Dora/Lora (New Orleans: Unlikely Books, New Orleans, 2023) 86.

 

 

 

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

This is a stunningly gorgeous novel. It is at least superficially about Billy Lynch a drunk who is much loved by everyone. He has a meticulously caring wife and friends, and a great sorrow, the so-called "Irish girl" who he saved a lot of money to bring over to the States to marry. He heart broken when his his best friend Dennis (father of the narrator) tells him the girl he loves is dead.

This is the crucial plot point that is explained early, and becomes an important turning point later in the story.

So there's a story line, and a main character, and a not-quite peripheral narrator, but, in fact, it is a group portrait. The first chapter, which establishes this, is worth the price of admission alone. Billy Lynch's family and friends gather for a post-funeral meal in a little restaurant chosen by Billy's widow, and the voices are multiple in many registers, getting the basic story in front of us, interacting with each other, remembering each other as children and youth, creating a milieu. I wondered if and how McDermott could top that, all the voices, and she doesn't exactly top it, but she does a different thing, which is to let all those people reappear both as texture of the fabric of the world and also with parts to play in Billy's sad story and their own stories. We discover gradually that the narrator's father has been in many ways at the center of the action.

 

 

 

Mad Dog by Kelly Watt

This appears at first to be a mix of beautifully rendered landscape and life in an apple-growing region of Ontario. The main character is Sheryl, a fourteen year old girl having a summer of boredom and self-awareness and burgeoning sexuality–but also strange dreams and visions, that we gradually realize may have actually happened. For a long time appealing realism and interesting characters prevail, as the narrator's uncle Fergus picks up a handsome young hitchhiker, but the atmosphere is increasingly fraught and the realism begins to tremble with bad things just under the surface. It is, in the end, a well-rendered horror novel without any supernatural trappings.

Uncle Fergus, whose trajectory, along with Sheryl growing up, is the heart of the story, is attractive, insightful, and creative. He has a past as a depressive who can't hold a job, but has managed to become a newly minted pharmacist, only he is also a drug dealer–and is gradually revealed to be one of those terrible charismatic leaders along the lines of Jim Jones and David Koresh who fascinate and destroy. This is revealed to us very gradually by Sheryl, in whose point of view we are deeply embedded.

One of the most brilliant accomplishments of this novel is that Sheryl, in spite of the horrors and weirdness, is a thoroughly real barely-teenaged girl. She reads Nancy Drew mysteries that belonged to her disappeared mother and occasionally spies on the adults around her and their activities (you aren't supposed to talk about what happens in the night world during the day). She feeds the rabbits and the large vicious white mongrel whose hind legs don't work.

At the same time, she is part of certain sinister and terrifying rituals. All the time, she is a normal, slightly petulant fourteen year old who doesn't quite know if she wants to have sex with the slightly older James Dean lookalike hitchhiker or to hang out with her younger cousin and bike into town to spy on an old schizophrenic. Would Fergus's brothers and wife have followed him with such unquestioning enthusiasm? The search for an answer is part of the project of the novel: why do we get caught up irrationality? Who gets away from it, and who doesn't?

 

 

 

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

This was just delightful: totally unexpected, too. It was written in the very early 1900's, and Frances Hodgson Burnett was British but lived often in the U.S. She had a couple of husbands, sons, wrote Little Lord Fauntelroy and The Secret Garden. A professional writer who found her niche writing for children.

This book is totally melodramatic and moderately racist in its depiction of a faithful South Asian servant, Ram Dass, who is at least clever, athletic and smart. He runs around salaaming and being described as showing his "black"face). So if you can get around that, you get the story is of a rich girl sent away to school from her father British in India to London. Then the beloved, indulgent father dies after investing in diamond mines with an importunate friend and losing all his money. Immediately, the evil school mistress turns Sara from cosseted favorite student into an unpaid teacher of French AND an errand girl, who is pretty much starved and frozen.

The ending is all sappy and of course her wealth is returned and she helps the other disdained girls and gets a new father figure.

What makes it delightful is the energy of the story telling of course and details of food and objects, but also, above all, that Sara is the same person rich or poor. She makes up tales to entertain the other children, she is interested in other people and everything else, reading everything she can get her hands on, and her behavior is controlled when she is angry rather than angelic. She explicitly imagines killing evil Miss Minchin, and then why she would do better to manage her impulses. She is definitely good and heroic, but also very thoughtful and analytic in a way appropriate for a child.

 

 

 

 

SHORT TAKES and SECOND LOOKS

 

LaBrava by Elmore Leonard

I almost always enjoying being in Elmore Leonard's world where the bad guys tend to be either monumentally stupid (and hilarious) or else lovable–occasionally both, and the good guys have more than a touch of outlaw in them. After all, Leonard was a writer of Westerns first, primarily for financial reasons, and he switched his talents to crime fiction when people stopped buying Westerns. The genre never got in the way of him enjoying his project (see Dennis Lehane's idea of what that project is).

LaBrava is set in Miami, and the mostly-hero is Joe Labrava, a photographer and ex-secret service agent, among other things. He gets in the way of a plan for a blackmail-with-threatened-murder caper that centers on a former almost-movie star, a "boat lifter" from prison in Cuba who likes to do go-go dancing in a leopard skin patterned undies, and a few other colorful individuals. It's the dialgue, as usual, that carries the story, plus Leonard's affection for his players.

Take a look at these excellent pieces about him and his work plus his ever entertaining advice on how to write:

• Martin Amis Interviews Elmore Leonard

• Dennis Lehane's appreciation of Elmore Leonard

• Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

 

 

The Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas

There are lots of really interesting ideas here in Charnas's all-female societies in her post-apocalyptic world. The critique is that she stops too soon, doesn't elaborate as much as she might. Alldeera a grows up in this, has a baby among the Horse women (derisively called Mares by the other main group, the fems). They reproduce using some fuzzy method from ancient laboratories, but it requires semen from a stallion, and this is handled with great interest. Essentially the Horse Women are call lones of their "motherline--" each line looking pretty identical. I'm not quite sure why the stallions are needed, but that's where it's fuzzy.

Alldera's baby, of course, was the result of intercourse with a human male, a rape, if you follow the thinking that says any sex between a master and a slave is rape. Meanwhile, there is a colony of quarreling Free Fems, and no one coming over the desert anymore from the Holdfast. And no men in the present story at all.

Charnas does a good good with the quarreling and dysfunction of te fems, who are having no babies at all. They fantasize endlessly about going back to the Holdfast and taking it over, killing whatever men are left, saving the fems. Alldera is torn between her two groups, grows older to become a leader. Her daughter is growing up mostly as a Horse Woman.

There is some wonderful speculation about social forms and cultural norms, and it's left wide open about a return to the holdfast.

I intend to read the two much later books, and this one didn't feel dated at all (all that horse love is wonderfully well done) but I'm not satisfied–I don't quite know why, except for that not quite going far enough.

 

 

The Bronze King by Suzy McKee Charnas

Charnas in a different mood: a young adult novel, maybe even young young adult, set in New York City with lots of fun scenes in Central Park and Upper West Side apartments (and one on Park Avenue) plus good stuff in the subways. The narrator Tina makes friends with a sorcerer from who appears as a busker-violinist in a rust colored corduroy suit, and with a tortured teen ager from a wealthy muiscal family, and of course their project is to save the world from the Kraken and its mini-thug helpers who mug the good guys and lurk in the subways. Good clean fun Saves the World!

 

The New York Times obituary of Suzy McKee Charnas has a lot of information about her work.

 

 

City of Bones by Michael Connelly

My records say this is my third reading, but it feels so familiar it seems like four. Or more. At any rate, it's a favorite: in the sweet spot of Connelley's Bosch books. Bosch is still a detective even though he decides rather at the end that h e's going to quit.  It's third person limited all to Bosch, by far the best way Connelly came up with for telling the Bosch stories. It has an authentic intensity of feelings for the victims, particularly a kid who was murdered years ago after lifelong physical abuse. There are the usual miserable low lifes including scenes in a trailer park, a little bit of wealth dripping around, walk-ons by Irving and Kiz. Jerry Edgar doing his thing. A killer in plain sight from early on, a doomed love affair for Bosch. Lots of Los Angeles. What more could I ask?

 

Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley

There's a new Walter Mosley sleuth, Joe King Oliver,or some variation on that, ex-cop, former hound-dog, traumatized by Rikers and suffering with his own trauma for ten years. An angry ex-wife, a beloved teen daughter. Questionable friends, good friends, including one handy sociopath–it's all pretty familiar if you read a lot of Mosley--the the wounded warrior protagonist, the psycho friend (remember Mouse from the Easy Rawlins books?). And me? I'm a sucker for it all. The New York setting, the race excursions, always strongly done and complicated. And I don't even mind paying outrageous money for a license to read his work from his Big Five publisher because I like his politics and his world outlook.

 

 

 

READERS RESPOND

 

 Ernie Brill says, "LOVE your review of Richard Wright one of my very special writers, especially for Uncle Tom’ s Children, one of my favorite books of all time that I fought to bring into the ninth grade English curriculum at Northampton High School. I can write you more about it in terms of the fantastic projects my students did with the many options I gave them, ie write a pov 'story section from Silas ( the husband of the raped woman in 'Long Black Song'), write a POV of Sue’s son’s white girlfriend,  for musical inclined students, - you have been hired to do the soundtrack for a movie of 'Uncle Tom’s Children'--what music will you choose for the best 'fit.' You are hired to create a heaven banquet for all the heroic characters in Uncle Tom's  Children.  Research African American 'soul food' and prepare a menu. For historians, research some of the major floods in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties."

 

 

 

An Exchange about Jane Eyre between MSW and Belinda Anderson (see the audio workshop Belinda is giving this summer):

B.A.: What is your take on Jane Eyre? I seem to recall in my youth thinking it a romantic novel. Some contemporary reviews call it a feminist novel. But after finishing it again recently, I was dismayed by the ending that JSTOR Daily describes in an article called "Sorry but Jane Eyre Isn't the Romance You Want it to Be" as "Jane's seeming surrender—her willingness to re-enter a dysfunctional, if not abusive, relationship. [This] infuriates scholars, too, especially those immersed in feminist theory." The article discusses how differently the novel has been viewed over the years.  "'In the 1840s, Jane's love for herself was so subversive it bordered on revolution. In 2019, her love of Rochester is so shocking it borders on treason."

MSW:Those are great quotations, Belinda. I have always been a huge fan of Jane Eyre, starting when I was thirteen. When I was in college, people talked about how Jane would only take Mr. R. back when he was a widower, of course, but also when he was blind and broken, so she was in charge--I think it really is proto-feminist, anyhow, but the most recent time I read it, back in 2015, I was struck by what a jerk Mr. R was--a spoiled brat who did very nasty practical jokes as well as not being honest with J. My favorite parts were always the parts about Jane's childhood. We had a set of Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights with terrific woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg.    Here's what I wrote in 2015, the last time I read it.

B.A. Here's a bit of synchronicity. I've been reading Edna Ferber's Buttered Side Down, a collection of short stories published a century ago. Jane Eyre shows up in her story, "The Homely Heroine." She starts off with, "There never has been a really ugly heroine in fiction."  Then she continues with Jane as her primary example "There's the case of Jane Eyre, too. She is constantly described as plain and mouse-like, but there are covert hints as to her gray eyes and slender figure and clear skin, and we have a sneaking notion that she wasn't such a fright after all. This is from the short story "The Homely Heroine," by Edna Ferber, in her collection Buttered Side Down.

 

 

 

 

GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE

New York Times piece on Scholastic pre-censoring books because of language calling out racism.

Diane Simmons' excellent essay in Body  "An Old Portrait in a Dark Closet" about a trip to south Georgia to explore her family roots.

New Essay at A Journal of Practial Writing: George Lies on Switching from 3rd to 1st Person in Fiction.

What is Upmarket Fiction, as compared to Literary Fiction and Commercial Fiction?   Excellent explanation from Carly Watters here. The short answer is it is great for book clubs.

Phyllis Moore suggests a list of Essential Historical Novels from Abebooks.com.

Take a look at Valerie Nieman's blog post about a year of promoting her small press novel, In the Lonely Backwater. It's an excellent story of contemporary book promotion--with ideas and hints that may be useful to all of us writers. My review of the book is here.

Rachel King on Character and Landscape.

Joe Chuman on Gettysburg, the Address, and Garry Will's book Lincoln at Gettysburg.   See my review of the same book here.

Rick Moody interviews a chatbot at Salmagundi..

New Barbara Crooker poems can be viewed at http://www.barbaracrooker.com/online.php

Do you live in New York City? Interested in how services are really delivered to people? Check out Harvey Robins's piece evaluating Mayor Adams' priorities and management style.

Review of Eddy Pendarvis's book on women and ballet in Appalachia, click here. Ours is here!

New at A Journal of Practical Writing : Eddy Pendarvis on Free Indirect Discourse.

Hannah Brown's latest Oren story "Hawaii and Mexico," organized around a conversation with her charming adult autistic son, appears in Lilith.    Don't miss it!

Jay Klokker's Poem "Shaving the Ghost" in Shark Reef.

Lynne Squires' small, powerful essay on shoes of the Holocaust "So Many Shoes.

And don't miss an article in Forward (thanks Elaine Durbach!) on Walter Mosley as a Jewish writer!

 

 

ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS

 

Danny Williams, editor extraordinaire, offers us a sample of some of his editing. Read the first part, in particular, about tenses. . It's a .docx file here.

Dani Shapiro on Letting Structure Reveal Itself (From Lit Hub)

Valerie Nieman, author of In the Lonely Backwater (see our review here)has great ideas for publicizing her books, which, my dears, is something we all have to do these days. Take a look at her book's birthday offer here.

Dorian Gossy writes about publicizing her new book of short stories, The House on Figueroa at a library reading:: " I read the title story yesterday at a library reading & liked how it sounded. The audience of 12 seemed to like it, too! The 2 readings I've done have had an 'open mic' afterward, & apparently this is how a lot of readings are going these days. There's an intimacy there in the room that you don't get when it's just you performing.I think the format may incite more interest in the featured reader & her or his book....the town-hall form is a good populist one overall. Got takers of all my books, anyway. Donated proceeds to the library, which I think may have inclined folks to buy them even more.

"

 

 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Belinda Anderson's "The Plot Thickens" conference call workshop begins June 8 through New River Community and Technical College. "Readers love trying to figure out what's happening and what's about to happen," Anderson said. "This course focuses on the element of plot in relation to character and setting. Knowing how to compellingly present a course of events is important in both fiction and nonfiction." The class is designed both for experienced and beginning writers.

Starting June 8, 2023, "The Plot Thickens" will meet for three weeks on Thursdays at 10 a.m. This is an audio-only course, offered for convenience and available by phone or internet. Students have attended from as far away as Montana as well as the college's geographical service area in West Virginia. Plot is an important ingredient in Anderson's own writing, including both fiction and nonfiction. "Mystery builds upon mystery in this engaging tale," author and publisher Cat Pleska wrote about one of Anderson's books. "It's a thinking person's wild ride."

The registration deadline is May 18. For further information, please contact Gloria Kincaid (304-793-6101, gkincaid@newriver.edu).

 

 

 

Burt Kimmelman's new poems in Steeple at Sunrise continue his exploration of syllabic forms. The book's first section contains individual poems written in recent years, each standing on its own as a unique experience. "Plague Calendar," which follows, consists of especially brief and understated poems presented in the order of their inception. They subtly chronicle an individual's psychological endurance over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, person and landscape reveal a transformation in recent time, an individual's experience of daily life.

 

 

Silent Letter, poems by Gail Hanlon from Cornerstone Press . “Gail Hanlon’s masterful, uneasy mixture of ghostly epistles, imagistic memoir, and involute but plainspoken metaphysics sketch a quiet wilderness of self, a grief-land of beautiful questing and questioning. ” —Gregory Lawless, author of Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania​ .

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Book by Leora Skolkin-Smith     Stealing Faith: A Novel

 

 

 

 

 

Kelly Watt's poetry chapbook, The Weeping Degree, was a finalist in the San Miguel de Allende chapbook contest sponsored by @poetrymesa and Wild Rising Press!

 

Suzanne McConnell's book of writing advice from and exercises based on Kurt Vonnegut's work is available in four languages already (English, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese) with Polish, Catalan, and Chinese coming soon!

 

 

 

Jim Minick's Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas  just came out from the University of Nebraska Press.  David Laskin author of THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD and THE FAMILY wrote : "WITHOUT WARNING is a ddpage-turning disaster narrative in the tradition of THE PERFECT STORM and ISAAC’S STORM:  spare, vivid, suspenseful, meticulously researched, utterly harrowing.  But the havoc an F5 tornado wrecked on this quintessential Kansas small town in the spring of 1955 is only part of the story here.  By taking the arc all the way from the calm before the storm to the months-long labor of rebuilding and reanimating, Jim Minick has brought an entire community lovingly to life. At heart, this is a book about how what’s best about our country confronts and overcomes the worst of our weather."

See our review here.

 

 

 

 

Just Out: Tamp, Poems by Denton Loving

 

East Tennessee poet Denton Loving's second collection centers on the bond that endures between father and son, even after death. In plainspoken poetry that is often narrative in form, the writer's personal experiences living on an inherited cattle farm and tending to an aging orchard are detailed. Loving explores and celebrates the physical and psychological landscapes of his native Appalachia--its mountains and valleys, its flora and fauna--with language that is lyrical and bursting with sudden shocks of emotional power. These are poems that serve as witness to the natural world, blurred with history and mythology to examine the eternal father-son paradigm. Readers will be reminded why Ron Rash has said that "Denton Loving has the talent to convey what he has seen that we too might see, and feel, and know deeply."

 

 

 

 

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Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 228

July 17, 2023

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Back Issues     MSW Home     About Meredith Sue Willis     Contact

 

For functioning links and best appearance,
read this newsletter in its permanent location.

Michelle Zauner                            Honorée Fanonne Jeffers                                  Valérie Perrin                                  Jesmyn Ward

 

 

 

 

 

In This Issue:

• Harvey Robins' articles at City Limits critiquing New York City policies: "Let's put the public back in Public Policy" and what Mayor Adams needs to do to fulfill some of his promises

• One of Shelley Ettinger's wonderful voice pieces in the summer 2023 issue of Allium: a short story called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Pee."
  

• Interesting scholarly article by Nichole Nelson, Ph.D., called "Fractures within Fair Housing: The Battle for the Memory and Legacy of the Long Fair Housing Movement" about that includes interviews from South Orange and Maplewood, NJ.

• Jay Klokker's Poem "Shaving the Ghost" in Shark Reef. Also see the poet's posthumous collection  First Stars.

• Lynne Squires' small, powerful essay on shoes of the Holocaust "So Many Shoes

• Article in Forward (thanks Elaine Durbach!) on Walter Mosley as a Jewish writer

 

Comments from Readers

Announcements

Book Reviews

Short Takes

Good Stuff Online & Elsewhere

Especially for Writers

Writers George Lies Uses for Writing Tips

 

 

 

REVIEWS

This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer).
They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted.

 

Bruchac's Sacajawea: The Story of Bird Woman and the Lewis and Clark Expedition reviewed by Eddy Pendarvis

Day After Night & The Red Tent by Anita Diamant reviewed by Danny Williams

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Steeples at Sunrise: New Poems by Burt Kimmelman

Tamp: Poems by Denton Loving

The Known World by Edward P. Jones reviewed by Diane Simmons

A Feast for for Crows and A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

The Bright Forever Lee Martin

Every Man a King by Walter Mosley

Left Is Not Woke by Susie Neiman reviewed by Joe Chuman

Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

 

 

Let me introduce this issue by thanking the people who have been sharing reviews that enrich this online newsletter. This issue's reviewers include Eddie Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, and Danny Williams. Joe Chuman once again sends a reviews from his substack blog. He often interviews the authors he reviews at his Puffin Interview Series . I love the broadened perspective-- and I love getting ideas for what to read next.

Everyone reading this is invited to query me about what you might want to review--or just send a finished review as a .doc or .docx file attached to an email to me.

 

This issue includes along with novels and nonfiction two very different and very wonderful books of poetry by Burt Kimmelman and Denton Loving.

First, though, in this issue is Ernie Brill's alternative list of historical novels. We had a link to such a list put out by Abebooks.com recently, and Ernie Brill found it weighted too heavily toward novels that aren't particularly accurate to history.

 

 

READER RESPONSES

 

Ernie Brill has an alternative list of historical novels to the one from Abebooks.com. He says: "With all due respect, the list of 'essential' historical novels is very flawed. Many of them are best-sellers where there is often a question of historical veracity, i.e. Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, where the aristocrats including dear beloved Sidney are beleaguered by what is portrayed as French Revolutionaries who are basically nearly faceless beheading barbarians or vengeful simmerers like Madame LaFarge.  Methiinks there was a little more to it than that, such as the real life  remark leading up to the insurrection by Marie Antoinette who replied to the wails and cries of the desperate starving masses with the quip, 'Let them eat cake ' ( And it is NOT true that the renowned HOSTESS cupcake was named after her). Most of these novels take place either on the European continent and in some relationship to England OR to some colonial outpost that England conquered and controlled such as India, Australia, New Zealand, and more than a few African countries.

"So, globally speaking, in the best tradition of Americans almost universally (in the US that is) we have lists made by white Americans (at least ninety percent if not more by my count0 about white history of Americans and Britishers.  So, completely omitted, is any history of six of the seven continents of the world, especially Asia, Africa, South America, and Antarctica although we hear there is a new Antarctica novel on ice that will be soon be available thanks to global warming and may meet some major publisher's seal of approval- Penguin, perhaps

"Here is my own list of historical novels that I hope remedy the lack of a wider view of the history of the world. I am preparing the ultimate INTERNATIONAL READING LIST OF INTERNATIONAL WRITERS OF OUTSTANDING ASTONISHING FICTION AND POETRY. If you are interested, email me at erbrill69@gmail.com.  The books are so superior to most of the books on most lists that it is almost laughable. But then I am only one person with friends from other countries such as Turkey, The Philippine, The Ukraine, Chile, Mexico,, Palestine, and Brooklyn so they give me titles of the latest gems. Let me offer some of the best."

• OF NOBLE ORIGINS- SAHAR KHALIFEH- complex social justice political issues and characters portrayed in the most intricately artistic way about Palestine/Israel circa 1930.

• STALINGRAD and LIFE AND FATE - Vassily Grossman. in scope and skill one of the greatest historical novels ever written anytime anywhere. A two volume work smuggled out of Russia in the late 1940s but the second book was smuggled out FIRST and published as LIFE AND FATE. The second part appeared over twenty years later to international fanfare. Panoramic  and in-depth barely describe the astonishing accomplishment this book offers for understanding WWII. At the same time, this book demands a commitment from the thrilled reader to stick with it, takes breaks, and marvel over the skill. If you can make the time what with work and family and other responsibilities you may have, you'll be glad you did.

• EL SENOR PRESIDENTE- Miguel Angel Asturias. This searing portrait of a Dictator set the standard in international fiction for the dissection of brutes along with a searing offering of conditions and processes that create success for fascism to engorge a country. Asturias also wrote a fiery magically realist trilogy about the murderous mass machinations of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and other Latin American countries; it was affectionately known as The Banana Trilogy. For this internationally unforgettably valuable deed, he was never allowed to set foot on US soil. The three books are The Cyclone, The Green Pope, and The Eyes of the Interred.  Make sure you have at least three or four rolls of duct tape to put the top of your head back on after it explodes and lands on Venus or Uranus.

• GOD'S BITS OF WOOD- Ousmane Sembene. Sengalese communist railroad workers lead a national shrike against French imperialism, a landmark event that was the beginning of getting France to leave Senegal. Sembene had been one of many African young men forcibly drafted into WWII. When the war ended he became involved in a massive dockworkers strike in Marseilles and later wrote, in French, the short novel The Black Docker. This was the rehearsal for Gods Bits of Wood that wowed the world. In his artistic evolution Sembene decided to make films to reach more people; less than ten percent of the population in Senegal spoke or read French. He became the father of African cinema known first for his brilliant short films Black Girl, The Money Order, and Emitai then spent years raising money for his longer films.

• STORMING HEAVEN - Denise Giardina. One of the most powerful US labor novel about the tumultuous battle of the US Miners Union in the Appalachians for union recognition. liveable wages, safe and healthy working conditions. Multiple points of view and a driven story beyond first rate.

• BELOVED - TONI MORRISON. A withering story of the horrors of slavery that no one can walk away from and not be changed in some and/or many ways.

 

 

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

This book was given to me as a birthday present by my husband over a year ago. It took me that long to pick it up--800 pages of family saga--a historical epic that begins when the Creeks and Cherokees still inhabited central Georgia. It tells two simultaneous stories, a twenty first century one and and a mid-nineteenth century one, about the black and black-indigenous people who lived on a property that was appropriated by white slave owners. It expands to a small community where everyone of all races is related. The people of color know it, and so do the white people, although many of them don't want to recognize the historical facts.

It is the mixed race, but black-identifying, people who end up with the property. One of the progenitors is a monstrous white man who particularly enjoys sex with little black girls. The absolute corruption of absolute power is embodied in him as he builds a special little house for these girls he both coddles and viciously violates. Most of the other characters have at least a few redeeming qualities.

The twenty-first century story has a main narrator named Ailey (yes, after the dancers) whose family and beloved sisters embody a panoply of human types: professional/educated/ne'er do well/drug addicted/scholarly/religious and much more.

The novel does many things well, including lovingly describing fried chicken, ribs, sweet potato pies and lots of greens. Jeffers also dramatizes generational and individual arguments about the righteousness or wrongness of eating pork.

Along with the gripping story line, Jeffers delineates folkways including traditional repasts after funeral "homecomings," and the affectionate politeness the young use to their elders, even to those who don't deserve it. Jeffers contrasts that gentle formal and respectful country behavior to that of the white wife of one of men. The white girl is better than the monstrous pedophile enslaver mostly because she doesn't do anything criminal, but she is at once insensitive, rude, jealous, condescending, and dumb. She's balanced out somewhat by Ailey's aunt-by-marriage, also white, and (am I taking this personally?) a much more interesting because more nuanced character.

It's a hard book to speak about briefly, because of its weight of themes, its multitude of characters and events, but it is all a pleasure. It has been a best seller, and with good reason.   It is Jeffers' first novel, but she has published a great deal of poetry, and she captures the music of people's voices with just enough reminders of the different levels of diction and dialects. The chapter titles sound like poetry, but the novel is thick, muscular, and sensual.

 

 

The Known World by Edward P. Jones reviewed by Diane Simmons

I am always looking for the delicious book that makes turning on my bedside lamp the best part of the day.  The Known World by Edward P. Jones has been one of those books.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2004, so I don’t know where I’ve been.

But I’m OK with being out of it, since it has meant this wonderful book is new to me now. 

The story is unusual, apparently based on records the author came across, telling of the complications that ensued in a section of pre-Civil War Virginia when black people sometimes bought themselves out of slavery, then went on to own enslaved people themselves. And then, what happened when white (or black) plantation owners fell in love—real love—with people who were their own property.  And how people got along living together in the face of all this. 

I don’t know that I have ever seen a more human account of the condition of slavery in this country.  It isn’t generally a nice account; unspeakable things happen as is inevitable in such a system, and in a time and place where an idiotic sense of racial superiority on the part of some is always available to trump everything.  At the same time, the telling does not deal in politics. It is just a story that imagines how real people would have tried to live their lives and to make the thing work.

Then the language. Sometimes I think you have to be from the South or the West to “get” the constant humor and imagery that has traditionally been a requirement for anyone looking to speak or write in those parts of the country.  Indeed, I read a review of The Known World, no doubt written by an Easterner, generally approving the book but tut-tutting over the unnecessarily long Jones-ian sentences.  

But I’m from the rural West, and I bathed in Jones’ sentences—oh not humor, exactly, just the poetry of daily language pushed to the max--to the point that I had to read the book a second time, just for the pure pleasure of listening.

 

 

 

 

Tamp: Poems by Denton Loving

Denton Loving is a widely respected poet from the Cumberland Gap region where Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia meet. He lives on a farm, and his poems touch gracefully on the natural world: "Needleless, the beetle-eaten pine stood/through its last snow but fell in seedtime winds" ("Spring Signs").  His trees and animals, however, form the context for his people.

Who work. I love how many of his poems are about chores and jobs and the machines people use to do the jobs and chores. One poem is called "Riding the Lawn Mower," and is about the narrator's trials with getting his mower repaired: "After the first small-engine repairman/tells me five miles is too far for a house call..."). Then, like Christ at Gethsemane, he wants to be relieved of the burden of taking the engine apart himself, as his father taught him to do, but in the end, "...I crawl onto summer-warm grass/like my father taught me. I pull/S-pins and retaining springs, freeing/suspension arms and the ant-sway bar...."

The father is the subject of probably half or more of the poems–poems of mourning and memory. The wonderful "The Fence Builder" has the narrator interacting with the grave digger for his father's grave. "My graves don't rise or sink," says the grave digger, and the narrator, in his own work, taps and tamps the clay and levels the damp ground, just as "...the man in the casket//taught me to tamp around wooden posts,/to make a new fence last."

Loving also moves far from home: there are poems about dreams and ancient Egypt, and Henry Adams. It is a deeply satisfying collection with a low-key but absolute seriousness as Loving explores life as he is experiencing it. I don't think I have ever read poems that appear to claim so little yet accomplish and move us so much with their perfect alignment of word-to-subject.

 

Bruchac's Sacajawea: The Story of Bird Woman and the Lewis and Clark Expedition Reviewed by Eddy Pendarvis

 

Coyote was always changing things. He was not like brother Wolf, who liked things to stay just as they were. No, even when things were good, Coyote had to change them. And he was so curious. Whenever he saw something new, Coyote had to go see what it was.
That is how Coyote is.

 

And that is how Joseph Bruchac introduces Sacajawea's loss of her childhood home in his fictionalized biography, Sacajawea: The Story of Bird Woman and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. His epigraph is surprisingly fitting to the history of a Native American woman and the famous expedition in which she played an important role.

Bruchac, of Native American heritage himself, tells the story primarily through two narratives alternating by chapter: one by Sacajawea and then one by William Clark, co-leader with Meriwether Lewis, of the expedition. In the novel, Sacajawea and Clark tell Sacajawea's son—Jean-Baptiste, nicknamed Pompey—about their westward journey five years earlier. "Pomp" had been with them on the journey, but he was just a baby then, too young to remember it. Sacajawea's chapters are introduced by excerpts from Native American myth. Clark's chapters are introduced by excerpts from Clark's journals, with one or two exceptions—an excerpt from a letter by John Ordway, one of the young Kentuckians who volunteered for the journey, and four by Meriwether Lewis, the man Jefferson appointed to head the expedition.

Clark adds to Sacajawea's account of her captivity, telling Pomp that she was taken from her Shoshone village five years before she and her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, Jean Baptiste's father, joined the expedition.

In telling Pomp about how she and Toussaint met, Sacajawea said the French-Canadian man had been trading with the Indians for years and knew some of their language, which was why he and his wife were asked to join the expedition. She told the boy that, although Toussaint wasn't known for his bravery, he had an important quality:

How did I meet your father? Your father was not a young man even then. Even though he was self-important, it was said among all the tribes that knew him that Toussaint Charbonneau was a man of little courage. Whenever he met danger, he was not slow to run and go in the opposite direction. . . . But he was also known to be clever. . . . Perhaps your father's ways have been chosen by him to put our people at ease. A man who makes people laugh is always welcome.

She goes on to tell how Toussaint won her in a gambling game he persuaded her captor to play. She didn't mind being given to the older man—life promised to be easier and more interesting with him.

For me, the most engaging facet of the story was the fantastic endurance so many members of the expedition showed. It's amazing that only one of the original company of about thirty members died. On a journey that included temperatures far below zero; near-starvation; attacks by grizzly bears; swarms of gnats nearly impossible to keep out of their eyes and almost blinding them at times; in addition to the (surprisingly few) threats from members of hostile tribes. The frostbite, wounds, infections, sores, and illnesses the hardships brought were treated with remedies such as wild onion poultices, "eye water" (a lead acetate solution of uncertain safety as lead acetate is a likely carcinogen), cream of tartar, rattlesnake rattles (not considered a sure means of shortening Sacajawea's labor birthing Pomp, but used in hope it would help), and a sweat-hole in which sat those deemed needing to sweat out toxins.

As I read Bruchac's fictionalized biography, published in 1985, I felt like I came to know Sacajawea (today, often spelled Sacagawea, sometimes spelled Sakakawea) and other major figures in that famous search for a northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean. The author's note at the end of the book describes the considerable research he did and also mentions that a descendant of Sacajawea's, Eileen Charbonneau, read the manuscript and endorsed it. I finished the novel gratified by having learned so much from it. Even better, I'd been enthralled by this tale of adventure and ordeals faced with such courage on that hazardous expedition begun in May of 1804 and ending in September, 1806.

I was so intrigued by the characters, their adventures, and their misadventures that after I finished the novel, I pulled The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited (and abridged) by Bernard DeVoto, off a bookcase full of books my uncle had given me, but I hadn't yet read. Published in 1953, DeVoto's book offered a more detailed take on the experiences of the white men leading that "Corps of Discovery" commissioned by Thomas Jefferson in 1803. One thing I learned is that there were interesting disparities between Bruchac's fictionalized William Clark and the man of Clark's own journal entries. One disparity is Clark's entertaining indifference to standard spelling and punctuation (such standardization as there was at the time anyway). Here's an example from his entry of May 16, 1806:

Rained moderately all the last night and this morning. . . . The rains unfortunately wet the Crenomuter in the fob of Capt. L. breaches, which has never before been wet since we set out on this expedition, her works were cautiously wiped and made dry by Capt. L. and I think she will receve no injury from this misfortune. . . . . the few worm days which we have had has melted the snows in the mountains and the river has rose considerably, that icy barrier which seperates me from my friends and Country, from all which makes life estimable, is yet white with the snow which is maney feet deep.

Among the relatively few consistencies in Clark's spelling was his spelling of "squaw" as "squar." Actually, the fact that he spelled "moccasin" as "mockarsin" makes me wonder if Native American phonology might've had something close to an "r" sound in those words. He didn't typically add sounds to words.

More sobering was the realization that Bruchac's Clark is much more generous in spirit toward his slave York than history suggests is the case. Bruchac's good-natured Clark says of his "man-servant" (note the greater literacy of this Clark):

I have known York longer than anyone. . . . We have been constant companions since before he accompanied our Corps of Discovery as my personal servant—he ended up doing as much as any man among us. . . . It is difficult to imagine a man who has been closer to me in many ways. Nor can I imagine what our great adventure would have been like without him along.

 

York did contribute to the success of the expedition; and Bruchac goes on to have Clark compliment the man further:

 

And you should have seen him that first day as we traveled up the Mississippi and when we reached its boiling waters. . . . York bent his back into the oars of the pirogue better than any other man. That is how he always was, taking on as much work as any man in our company and doing it with a glad heart. I shall never forget the way he would laugh, even when we were in the worst of danger. His was a laugh big enough to shake the sky.

None of this affection comes through in DeVoto's excerpts, from Clark's journals, which focus primarily on how astonished Indians—most of whom had never seen an African American—were with York's appearance. Even though that lack might be due to DeVoto's choice of excerpts, some contemporary accounts of Clark's behavior toward York after the expedition conflict with Bruchac's portrayal of Clark's extraordinary good will toward his slave.

Not long after reading Bruchac and DeVoto, I came across the article, "Getting Sacagawea Right," in The New York Review of Books.. The article was about a new biography, Our Story of Eagle Woman: Sacagawea: They Got It Wrong, written by the Sacagawea Project Board of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. Published in 2021, this biography says Sacagawea wasn't taken from a Shoshone family by Hidatsa warriors. In fact, she wasn't a Shoshone. Her father was a Hidatsa, and her mother was a Crow. The biography also disputes popular understanding of her life after the expedition. Although history has portrayed her as dying of "putrid fever" in 1812, this fate has been disputed by Native Americans for some time. The descendants of Sacagawea who wrote this recent biography offer evidence that she lived into the 1860s and describe some incidents of her long life.

That "facts" about this woman and others who made history two centuries ago have been questioned or disproved is not an anomaly. History changes; and that's probably mostly a good thing. Historians' dissatisfaction with old truths, like Coyote's interest in new things, often comes out of that useful (if sometimes dangerous) trait, curiosity. Maybe some important details of history are always going to be as unstandardized as Clark's spelling; and we have to be satisfied with probabilities and the joy of discovery. Bruchac's Sacagawea offers an enticing introduction to one of the most dramatic periods in U.S. history and is likely to inspire young and old readers to seek further insight to that time and how it has been recorded.

 

Also see the review of Getting Sacagawea Right from the New York Review of Books--mentioned above.

 

Steeples at Sunrise: New Poems by Burt Kimmelman

This book of short, spare poems is thick with natural phenomenon, usually simply named rather than turned into elaborate metaphors: crickets, gulls, sand, sea, light, dark, sun. Where the language is heightened, it is stunning as in "End of February: from the Parapet" where he names the long vista he sees from park to suburbs to city and ends with "the vague sea." (p.59) This is simple and yet so true to what we actually perceive as we scan the horizon from a high place.

Or again, there is the clear, powerful language at the end of "Night, Late Summer"-- "an empty/dark full of life, waiting." (p.43). What strikes me here is the choice of one or two syllable words, often repeated, tapping out a close imitation of the reality of how we perceive but are usually unaware of.

The first half of the collection has a number of poems addressed to other poets and other poems. One three-poem run that especially moved me was "Bridges On the Hudson", "Ritual," and "It is This," (pp. 17,18, and 19).

In the second half, the poems are almost ascetic, organized as Kimmelman explains in a prose introduction, in the order in which they were composed, during the Covid lock-down. Many are set around the parapet of a county park in Essex, County, New Jersey overlooking suburban New Jersey towns and the New York bay and the skyline the city itself. These poems are about weather, seasons, and what Kimmelman calls, "the hope and thrill of the natural world's insistence on life (p. 30)." These poems are like Japanese syllabic poetry, and they also have a quality of black and white snapshots, a "take" on the world that stops, freezes, pulls you in, and leaves you with a sense of time and place organized.

The final poem, "The Trees in Late May" (p.62), captures East Coast summer greenness in a way I've never encountered before: "green/ alone what there is/ to know, to remember." This whole poem instructs in what it means to be part of the natural world in spite of, or as well as, what is separate and special in the human worlds.

 

 

 

 

Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin

This is the English language debut of Perrin's novel. She is a bestseller in France, and there is something ineffably French about this novel which manages to be at once full of event and mystery and yet leisurely and amusing with its ceremonies and details of daily life.

The main character Violette is a cemetery keeper, and the other employees at the cemetery are quirky and amusing and sometimes wise and sometimes foolish One named Elvis only sings songs by Presley; Violette's predecessor as keeper is Sasha who is a kind of guru who takes his retirement in wandering the word, but especially India.

Violette grew up in foster-homes, her life narrowed and darkened by a lack of love and family. Early, she marries Philippe Toussaint, a mama's boy who lets her earn their living while he rides his motorcycle and picks up women. The couple has a terrible loss that binds them and wrenches them apart.

Violette returns to life by organizing and recording other people's funerals and grief. There is a lot of satisfaction in the second half of the novel as mysteries are unreeled, especially what happened to Violette and Philippe's daughter. Perhaps the most striking revelation, however, is that Philippe proves to be more complex than he seems.

I liked it very much.

 

For a different take, see Kirkus, which called it "Overstuffed, at times rambling, but colorful and highly enjoyable and pulled together by an engaging narrator."

 

 

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

This, Ward's second book and the 2011 National Book Award winner for fiction, is tight, vivid, and powerful. It ends with a black working class family's harrowing experience during Hurricane Katrina in their tiny Gulf Coast Mississippi community, and the material has an angle that is very fresh to me, especially the loyalty and love among the siblings in a motherless family. The story is carried by the voice of a wonderful teen-age narrator who is reading mythology for her summer homework, and identifies with Medea of mythology.

The father of the family drinks too much but also spends a lot of his time trying to reinforce the family home for the coming storm, which most of the family and neighbors downplay.

We discover after a while that the narrator is pregnant and in love with a handsome jerk. She has also, since she was twelve, been having sex with most of her brothers' friends, and at least one of them is crazy about her.

She identifies herself not only with Medea but also with her nearest brother's white pit bull who gives birth in great detail early in the novel. Part of the fascination of this novel is the almost heroic passion of this brother for his dog, and the sport of dog fighting is one fascinating part of the novel, as is the question of whether a mother pit bull can fight while she is nursing puppies.

Most of the characters would look like losers to a big swath of affluent America, but while there is much violence and heart-breaking loss, there is no sense of victimhood. The young people have the big-hearted courage of survivors, which often means having people to love and be loved by. There are also, of course, all the classic narrative conflicts: people versus nature; people versus each other, people versus themselves and versus society.

And that doesn't even mention the details of flood or the big basketball game or the brutal bloody dog fights.

 

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Okay, Jesmyn Ward is wonderful and deserves her accolades. This book is memoir, published in 2013 and centering on five deaths of young men between 2000 and 2004, starting and ending with her beloved younger brother. It is held together by a solid structure in which we get sections on how each young man died, told in reverse chronological order, although we know from the beginning that the last story/first death is going to be her brother.

Between the reverse order stories of the deaths by murder, suicide, a car accident caused by a drunk, etc.-- is a roughly chronological story of Ward's early years and her parents' marriage. We get the stories of the parents. of her and her two sisters and one brother. plus their extended family, and their community. We get a sense of the enormous stresses of a life with no financial rescue net, although with many supportive people. The family sometimes lives in houses, sometimes on the West Coast, mostly in Gulf Coast Mississippi, sometimes in an old mobile home, sometimes in a better double-wide or in her grandmother's crowded household. Her father leaves and comes back; there are decent paying jobs, but more housekeeping and gas station attendant jobs. There are food stamps and surplus food. Ward is bookish and smart and eventually gets access to a private, mostly white school where she, who has lived in a largely black world, meets the faces of blatant good old Southern white racism. She wins scholarships to major universities, gets excellent jobs on the East and West Coast.

And comes home as often as she can, often, it turns out, to mourn.

The setting is mostly very small towns in coastal Mississippi but there are also passages in Gulfport and New Orleans. She writes brilliantly about a community and a culture and about the effects of being not-seen by the dominant class. Nor does she turn away from the painful gender distinctions and injustices among her beloved family and friends. She writes very clearly and with a broad perspective of the effects of racism and a sagging economy.

She is, of course, aware of how these personal stories fit into the large historical and social picture. She refers to the nineteen-sixties history of the Black Panthers, whose community building in Oakland, California, was witnessed by her own father, and she refers to W.E.B. Dubois and many other thinkers and creative writers.

Her title comes from a speech by Harriet Tubman.

Emotionally, this is a hard book to read, but it is also impossible to stop reading.

 

 

The Bright Forever Lee Martin

This is a kind of psychological thriller, although what Martin really seems to love best is recreating life in a small mid western American town in the early 1970's–the music, where people hang out, who is rich, who is poor, the beauty of children, the community activities. His most interesting characters are two misfit unhappy men who come together. He is especially interested in Mr. Dees, the withdrawn math teacher who lives alone, puts up purple martin houses, loves best to teach children one-on-one in summer math tutorials. He is deeply drawn to Katie Mackey, either loving the child romantically or wanting to be her father.

The thinness of the line between those two is a lot of what the novel is exploring. The couple down the street from Mr. Dees, Clare and Raymond R, are also small town losers, she yearning for love, he for some kind of status as a man.

Raymond begins to do favors for Mr. Dees. There is a shocking crime.

The complexity of the novel is about who is responsible for the crime, both in the whodunit way and also in the moral universe. The characters are all pushed to extremities–everything possible to go wrong does go wrong, and the deck is perhaps stacked against Raymond R., who we are told repeatedly as a child had to eat his fried egg sandwich everyday for lunch at school under a leaking steam pipe because he couldn't afford hot lunch. Most of the adult characters have no relatives, no back story, are figures of experiment, to see what happens when they are are existentially challenged.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the novel is in its details: the flowers Katie's mother grows; Katie riding her bike at night with no shoes on; the purple martins and the Cooper's hawk, the smells of summer; Mr. Dees's carefully prepared daily breakfasts. The beauty of everyday life balances but doesn't outweigh the human evil.

 

 

 

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Ubik makes it clear why Philip Dick is such a popular science fiction writer. He has a lot of humor, or more like a wry flavor, very visual and thus both easy to imagine and to make a successful transfer to movies

This one is set in the future from its publication in 1969-- 1992! Its future is wonderfully done, but misses the greatest change of all, which has been digital technology. He has instant newspapers available, but they are made of paper that comes spooling out of a machine. People have collections of cd's and tapes–no streaming, no real climate disaster.

But his misses on the future really don't matter-he offers an alternative world that feels just about as real as the one we actually got. The science fiction plot part is about a discovery that deeply cooled corpses have a lingering presence called half-life and can talk and influence the living.  

The novel is stronger on action than characterization, but very disquieting just the same. Oh, and the clothes! Everyone wears such great outfits: "At this moment, with the chilly, echoing building just beginning to stir, a worried-looking clerical individual with nearly opaque glasses and wearing a tabby-fur blazer and pointed yellow shoes waited at the reception counter, a claim-check stub in his hand."

A tabby-fur blazer. Not a sweater or a vest, but a freaking blazer!

I don't want to gobble his entire oeuvre at one time, but I'll definitely read more.

 

 

Left Is Not Woke by Susie Neiman reviewed by Joe Chuman

Susan Neiman's Left Is Not Woke is a timely, compelling, and necessary book. For me, it is also personal.

Neiman is an adept philosopher and public intellectual who has taught at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and this is the latest of her nine books. Her upbringing in Atlanta during the Civil Rights Movement sealed her identity on the left. She has lived for years in Berlin, where she lectures and serves as the director of the Einstein Forum. Neiman, in this book and others, has been a staunch defender of the Enlightenment. In the current volume, she contends that the left has abandoned its Enlightenment foundations, gone astray, and ironically serves conservative interests.

Clearly, her critique does not pertain to the left in its entirety, but to those elements that have appropriated a woke agenda. As she notes in the book's introduction, Neiman proudly identifies as a leftist (not a liberal,which on her continent signifies libertarian) and as a socialist.

As with Neiman, I am a child of the `60s and the antiwar movement. I have written earlier essays on the emergence of identity politics as the basis of tribalism which ominously fractures American society. It has also divided the left in ways that leave me feeling betrayed. Political positions and ideologies that have shaped my identity are carried on in the name of a progressivism I cannot recognize. Left Is Not Woke validates my discomfort and does so with tremendous power vested in far-reaching erudition and expressed with compelling clarity.

Neiman lays out her thesis at the beginning of her text:

"What concerns me most...are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress."

To those who proclaim that the problem of dealing with threats and wokeism coming from the right requires our primary attention, Neiman contends that only if the left can heal its divisions can the right be successfully challenged. She notes, "The right may be more dangerous, but today's left has deprived itself of the ideas we need of if we hope to resist the lurch to the right."

Here in a nutshell is the dynamic inherent in wokeism:

"Can woke be defined? It begins with concern for marginalized persons and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization. The idea of intersectionality might have emphasized the ways in which all of us have more than one identity. Instead, it led to a focus on those parts of identities that are most marginalized, and multiplies them into a forest of trauma."

"Reducing each to the prism of her marginalization" is the central dynamic concept that drives her thesis. It is a current political phenomenon that defines au courant leftism that disturbs me greatly as well. Identity politics has forsaken universalism and replaced it with a politics of group interest which pits one group against others and in which victimization is a prevailing currency. At the same time, a recognition of supervening political and economic powers and interests that mold and govern the values and lives of society as a whole have been abandoned.

She cites the late sociologist, Todd Gitlin, who commenting on identity politics noted:

"On this view, the goal of politics is to make sure your category is represented in power, and the proper critique of other people's politics is that they represent a category that is not yours...Even when it takes on radical temper, identity politics is interest-group politics. It aims to change the distribution of benefits, not the rules under which distribution takes place."

It is those rules that require a broader, abstract, and universal commitment. Identity politics has coalesced into tribalism. On the left, tribal identities, Neiman avers, are two: race and gender.

It is reductionism, the fixation on race and gender and the consequences that flow from it, that has spawned a vicious tribalism, a vaunted and destructive valorization of victimhood, a bewitchment with an ideology of power inequities, and a destructively distorted politics.

It should be self-evident that this reductionism is empirically false. A person's selfhood and identity are far richer and more diverse than where they are placed within the framework of race (isn't it an irony that racial identity has become a political obsession at a time when science denies the reality of race?) and one's gender. As Neiman states:

"A moment's reflection shows even those (i.e. race and gender) to be less determinant than supposed. The life of a black person is dramatically different in America and Nigeria...And being Nigerian is only an identifying description outside the country; in a land whose citizens are divided by fraught histories and more than five hundred languages, saying you're Nigerian means nothing at all. Being a Jew in Berlin and Jew in Brooklyn are experienced so differently that I can assure you they amount to different identities. A Jew in Tel Aviv has another identity again; but a Jew born in Tel Aviv has a fundamentally different stance in the world than a Jew who moves there later in life. Is there an Indian identity that holds equally for Hindus and Muslims, Brahmins and Dalits? Can you identify someone who is gay without mentioning whether he lives in Tehran or Toledo?"

She quotes the historian Benjamin Zachariah:

"Once upon a time, essentializing people was considered offensive, somewhat stupid, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, but now this is the only so when it is done by other people. Self-essentializing and self-stereotyping are not only allowed but considered empowering."

Stupid and anti-intellectual. It was my mentor, Cornel West, assuredly a race man, who emphasized that every culture is a product of "radical hybridity." Every culture is comprised of a multitude of sub-cultures adhering to different values, and people are often at each other's throats.

Universalism, which used to be a hallmark of the left, by no means decries diversity. What it does call for is the capacity for abstraction that speaks to a universal humanity. And it is this universalism that allows for a richer appreciation for diversity, even as it emphasizes as a foundational value that all human beings share a common nature. It has also been, and ought to be, the basis for progressive activism. All people are capable of feeling pain as I do. All people strive for recognition of their dignity. As Neiman correctly observes, "Appealing to the humanity of those being dehumanized is the universal form we use to respond to oppression everywhere. That Jefferson and Kant did not practice what they preached is no argument against the sermon." Tribalism, by contrast, "...is a description of civil breakdown that occurs when people, of whatever kind, see the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else." For woke politics, identifying people by their race and gender is all that matters. Facts, details, nuance, individual values, and beliefs within those all-encompassing categories command scant attention when rendering political assessments. We inhabit a tribalized world constructed on the axis of crude ideologies in which power inequity is the sole dynamic: oppressors and the oppressed, victimizers and victims.

Neiman draws on her scholarship of the Enlightenment as its defender at a time when the Enlightenment is under attack in academia and among those on the left who see it as little more than a source of political oppression. Among the values the Enlightenment proffered, and which created the modern world, were reason, universalism, objectivity, and equality. The politics that concern Neiman are no doubt a product of postmodernism, which has made attacks on the Enlightenment a centerpiece of its theorizing and which Neiman cites only implicitly.

Among Enlightenment critics, reason, its capacity to objectify "the other," and its alleged role in creating totalistic frameworks of order and hierarchy, have been held responsible for creating the evils of European imperialism, colonialism, the oppression and genocide of non-white non-European persons.

Neiman directly takes this and related claims to task. In the first instance, to assert that the Enlightenment was the source for the emergence of colonialism, genocide and, the slavery of non-white peoples and others unlike themselves is to be profoundly blind to history. Didn't the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Mughals, Aztecs, and multitudes of pre-modern people also build empires and perpetrate the subjugation and slaughter of others centuries before the modern era? I once spent a morning with the famed ethicist, Peter Singer. Singer is Australian, and I posed the question to him about the claims that the Enlightenment was the cause of the horrors and oppressions that have been a tragic reality of the modern world. I recall him recounting to me how evidence had revealed the wholesale murder of thousands of indigenous New Zealanders by a neighboring tribe many years before the white man arrived in that part of the world. Clearly, people do not need the categories of Enlightenment reason, science, and hierarchical taxonomies to fuel or legitimate paroxysms of hate, cruelty, and murder. Modernity has undoubtedly brought its frustrations and problems, but a unique capacity for cruelty, violence, and oppressing others is assuredly not one of them. To so believe is simply not to look and to be led by a misguided romanticism as to the presumed goodness of pre-modern peoples.

Neiman furthermore claims that an informed reading of the Enlightenment, despite contrary assertions, is not Eurocentric. It's an important corrective to what are facile allegations that the Enlightenment was uniquely responsible for the panoply of modern atrocities. Assuredly, one can find in the writings of Enlightenment luminaries, Hume, Kant, and Voltaire, among others, disparaging and bigoted remarks about Africans and non-white peoples. But the Enlightenment emerged as a movement in opposition to the absolute claims of religion and ecclesiastical authority. In defiance of that authority, Enlightenment luminaries powerfully asserted the role of reason, free inquiry, and tolerance. In so doing, despite incomplete knowledge, they often invoked the achievements and superiority of non-European cultures.

Here it is instructive to quote Neiman at length:

"There are few challenges more bewildering than the claim that the Enlightenment was Eurocentric. Perhaps those who make it confuse eighteenth-century realities with the Enlightenment thinkers who fought to change them – often at considerable personal risk. When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they're echoing a tradition that goes back to Montesquieu, who used fictional Persians to criticize European mores in ways he could not have safely done as a Frenchman writing in his own voice. Montesquieu's The Persian Letters was followed by scores of other writings using the same device. Lahontan's Dialogue with a Huron and Diderot's Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage criticized the patriarchal sexual laws of Europe, which criminalized women who bore children out of wedlock, from the perspective of the more egalitarian Hurons and Tahitians. Voltaire's sharpest attacks on Christianity were written in the voices of a Chinese emperor, and an indigenous South American priest...the Enlightenment was pathbreaking in rejecting Eurocentrism and urging Europeans to examine themselves from the perspective of the rest of the world."

"Enlightenment discussion of the non-European world was rarely disinterested. Its thinkers studied Islam in order to find another universal religion that could highlight Christian faults. Bayle and Voltaire argued that Islam was less cruel and bloody than Christianity because it was more tolerant and rational."

"...it's fatal to forget that thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot, and Kant were not the first to condemn Eurocentrism and colonialism. They also laid the theoretical foundation for the universalism upon which all struggles against racism must stand, together with a robust assurance that cultural pluralism is not an alternative to universalism but an enhancement of it."

It is such universalism that has laid the groundwork for future progressive movements, which in our time, as noted, has been jettisoned in favor of tribalism, and tragically, reason is now identified with oppression.

The salience of tribalism and the valorization of non-Europeans feeds into a political construct hewn along the binary of victims and victimizers. Here Neiman's analysis is especially compelling. As a human rights academic and activist, I have long acknowledged that human rights starts with the victim. Victims of human rights abuse merit primary consideration. Neiman would agree. But I have long argued that being a victim is a condition; it is not a virtue. What matters most is what one does with one's victimhood.

Neiman cogently develops this thought. She prefers to return to the model, as she states, in which claims to authority are focused on what a person does to the world and not what the world has done to you. This approach "allows us to honor caring for victims as a virtue without suggesting that being a victim is one as well." Yet in our current political moment, being a victim and the experience of powerlessness is construed as an inevitable basis for political authority. "Victimhood," she notes, "should be a source of legitimation for restitution, but once we begin to view victimhood per se as the currency of recognition, we are on the road to divorcing recognition, and legitimacy, from virtue altogether."

For the woke left, a world of victims and victimizers is a world suffused with power for which the philosophy of Michel Foucault is the reigning academic authority. For Foucault "power is everywhere." "Power produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth." Power, as Neiman observes, "was woven into the very fabric of our language, thoughts, and desires." The yen for power is insinuated in all human institutions and political strivings. Neiman concludes that Foucault is a nihilist. In his worldview, justice, recalling Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, is nothing but a masked expression of the self-interests of the powerful.

Power consumes not only justice but reason. This contention has been a mainstay of those who bash the Enlightenment. As Neiman asserts:

"Twentieth-century thinkers as different as Foucault, Heidegger, and Adorno were united in viewing what they called 'Enlightenment reason' not merely as a self-serving fraud but even more as a domineering, calculating, rapacious sort of monster committed to subjugating nature – and with it, indigenous people considered to be natural. On this picture, reason is merely an instrument and expression of power...reason is a more polite but manipulative way of hitting someone over the head."

But the falsity of the equation should be virtually self-evident. Reason's function, as Neiman notes, is to uphold the force of ideals. It is to question experience and spur us to move toward something better. It is to imagine that something could be different. But to view reason as merely a form of power is to ignore the difference between violence and persuasion, and persuasion and manipulation.

A more complete review of Susan Neiman's Left Is Not Woke would include her critique of evolutionary psychology, which she sees as negating altruism and reinforcing the self-interest underlying tribalism. It would also include her commitment to progress, which a Foucauldian philosophy denies, and which needs to be reclaimed.

Sectors of the left have fallen prey to ideologies that have caused it to undermine the very goals for which progressives have long struggled. Susan Neiman's Left Is Not Woke provides a brilliantly argued, compelling, and necessary corrective. This book merits urgent attention.

 

Also See Joe Chuman's review of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life  by Robert Alter. He interviews authors at the Puffin Interview Series with Dr. Joe Chuman.

 

 

 

 

SHORT TAKES

 

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

It's the kind of book I'm glad has been a best seller—interesting and lively, sharing a different world, heart-in-the-right place. I wasn't even jealous of the young writer with her sudden success in both the worlds of books and music—the odd way in which it all opened up for her after her mother died, and her inadvertent belief that somehow, inchoately, her dead mother was putting a foot on God's neck to demand he do something good for her daughter! Great image.

Zauner has paid her dues, years of writing songs, working in bands, networking, the whole thing. The driven child, the smothering mother who is so passionate for her child.

And boy does this book make me want to go out and eat Korean.

 

 

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

Such a pleasure to read to my granddaughter on a long Amtrak ride. It was good to me as an old adult, and was just right for a bookish seven year old.  I'm sure she didn't get everything, and also she already knew the basic story from a short version of the book or maybe from a cartoon.

My only complaint is the gendered roles of the motherly types, and the way 8-9 year old Fern fades away as a character and then falls in puppy love on the Ferris Wheel with Henry Fussy.

On the other hand, Charlotte herself is part of a matriarchy.

Wonderful book.

 

Every Man a King by Walter Mosley

Another Joe King Oliver novel. He has lots of good stuff as always, but also seems to be going over the top, maybe to keep himself and us stimulated.

More rich people, fewer working class. That was one of the charms of Mosley's early Easy Rawlins books, that the cast of characters was working class with just an occasional affluent person dropping in, usually to perpetrate some evil. This one has a particularly convoluted plot and urban fantasy elements like imaginary hideouts all over New York and a computer with a list of Ten Thousand Things, a trove of blackmail-worthy information on various public figures.

It also has a couple of black women who have hooked up with extremely dangerous and powerful white men, including our hero Joe Oliver's grandmother.

The first Joe Oliver book dramatized the PI's fall and time at Rivers which turned him from police work to being a PI. This one just refers to that in passing. Joe calls in a lot of friends with special skills. Always worth a fast read, but this one isn't as good as Mosley's earlier books. Perhaps a classic example of a pot boiler?

 

 

A Feast for for Crows and A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

Finishing my reread of Martin's Fire and Ice novels. Feast for Crows, the darkest yet of George R. R.'s books, depressing, actually, with too much of Cersei's snotty asides for my taste (basically every line she utters has one).  She is maybe on thing that was better in the Game of Thrones HBO series because she was nice to look at, and while you knew she was evil, you didn't get smothered in unvarying pettiness.  Lots of Brienne the Maid of Tarth. a little of Arya and Sansa (did GRRM perceive this as his women's book?) but no Stark boys, no or very little Jon-on-the-Wall.  And above all no Daenerys and no Tyrion! The Jaime parts are good as he seems to have grown and actually changed, is making some pretty fair leadership moves. 

I'm still wondering why so much animus toward Cersei, the least nuanced of the point of view characters. The book ends with a statement from GRRM saying Hey, I bet you thought there was more! He talks about how he realized it was going to be too big a book and broke it n two, but with the timelines overlapping. Essentially Feast is the Lannister-Kings Landing story, and he'll pick up the Ironmen and Riverun later. Okay, that works.  It leaves Brienne hanging--quite literally.  But no Hound, also missing in all of the above.

And--A Dance with Dragons! Yes, I finished rereading the last book in my big reread. This one caused me a lot of problems with interference from the HBO show–in which Jon is brought back to life, Daenerys actually goes on to Westeros, blows up King's Landing, and of course the not-big-enough showdown with the Night King who doesn't even exist in A Dance with Dragons. It's a funny feeling, unsettling in fact, that the t.v. show was good enough to confuse me about what I'd imagined/visualized from reading and what was done so well, mostly, on film.

But of course, the strength of novels is the detail, the relatively leisurely pace, all kinds of descriptions of food. Sometimes I think I was in a hurry to get to the parts that I had forgotten weren't in the book. Cersei's walk of shame is there. We don't see Sam or Sansa and Littlefinger in this one. I'd totally forgotten the return of Varys, who finally shows his true colors! It's poor Jeyne Poole who gets tortured by Ramsay not Sansa. I also kept forgetting that these events ran simultaneously with the events in A Feast for Crows.

So lots of confusion, a sense of less organization that in the early books, but if you're still reading by this time (for the second go in my case!) it's the world you love and want to be in, as big and broad and thick as it can be.

But where's The Winds of Winter? I want more books!

 

 

Day After Night & The Red Tent by Anita Diamant Reviewed by Danny Williams

Anita Diamant's Day After Night​ [is about] Jewish women in a British internment camp in Palestine. It's not about Jews, it's about women. Anita D. wowed me with this, and totally wowed me with The Red Tent​. I'm a Bible type guy, and this book made the Old Testament so real I could almost taste the dust. And a view of history quite different from the one which finally made it into the canon. A book which will stay with me.  The Red Tent​ is, to me, one of the best things ever. So true, that there was no Judaism or anything like it until Ezra's speech centuries later. It was a belief that there is one god, and that's about it. And the alternative view of Dinah's story. The version in the OT was necessarily one-sided, and used the accusation of rape in an attempt to justify the horrific murders. 

Light After Dark​ is another rich story of women.​

 

 

 

 

GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF!

• Try to get hold of the Summer 2023 issue of Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life available from The Cultural Center, 1900 Kanawha Blvd. East, Charleston, WV 25305. Lots of good stuff as always, but don't miss Edwina Pendarvis's piece on the fascinating Phyllis Wilson Moore, "Heroine of West Virginia Literature."

• One of Shelley Ettinger's wonderful voices in the summer 2023 issue of Allium, a short story called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Pee."

• A fantasy subgenre new to me: Curio fiction, in which just one element in the otherwise mundane world is fantastical: Kafka's The Metamorphosis is an example. See Diane Callahan's article here.

• An appreciation of Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone by Steve Sullivan-- go to page 34.

• Nikolas Kozloff suggests this Simon Critchley piece on whether the self is a narrative or an episode.

• Read online Joe Chuman's review of Jonathan Alter's biography of Jimmy Carter, His Very Best. See Joe Chuman's review of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life  by Robert Alter. Joe interviews authors at the Puffin Interview Series with Dr. Joe Chuman. His reviews and interviews are always worth a look-- and a read! Also see his recent "ORIGINALISM AND PRESENTISM: IDEOLOGIES THAT FURTHER REND THE SOCIAL FABRIC – Part one."

• Ten Year anniversary of the Jewish Literary Journal.

• New publication for Rural regions with a liberal slant: Barn Raiser.

• Check out these reviews by John Loonam: Once Upon a Prime  and  Close to Home.

• Harvey Robins writes excellent articles at City Limits critiquing New York City policies: "Let's put the public back in Public Policy" and what Mayor Adams needs to do to fulfill a few of his promises
  

• A lot of brouhaha about Martin Amis's death: here's a 1998 article by him on Jane Austen--he's a Janeite!

• Interesting scholarly article by Nichole Nelson, Ph.D., called "Fractures within Fair Housing: The Battle for the Memory and
  Legacy of the Long Fair Housing Movement" about that includes interviews from South Orange and Maplewood, NJ.

• New York Times piece on Scholastic  pre-censoring books because of language calling out racism.

• Jay Klokker's Poem "Shaving the Ghost" in Shark Reef.

• Lynne Squires' small, powerful essay on shoes of the Holocaust "So Many Shoes.

• And don't miss an article in Forward (thanks Elaine Durbach!) on Walter Mosley as a Jewish writer!

 

 

ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS: Links and More

 

• Dorian Gossy writes about publicizing her new book of short stories, The House on Figueroa at a library reading:: " I read the title story yesterday at a library reading & liked how it sounded. The audience of 12 seemed to like it, too! The 2 readings I've done have had an 'open mic' afterward, & apparently this is how a lot of readings are going these days. There's an intimacy there in the room that you don't get when it's just you performing.I think the format may incite more interest in the featured reader & her or his book....the town-hall form is a good populist one overall. Got takers of all my books, anyway. Donated proceeds to the library, which I think may have inclined folks to buy them even more."

• Jane Friedman's newsletter hits the mark again: An excellent piece by Allison K. Williams on why a manuscript gets rejected--emphasis on the query letter and opening pages.

• Pamela Erens interviewed on her writing process.

• Francine Prose on censorship--especially Elizabeth Gilbert's decision to withdraw her upcoming novel set in Siberia in the last century as an act of solidarity with Ukranians suffering under Putin's war. Thanks, Nikolas Kozloff.

• George Lies writes: "I've read New York authors and writers books in fiction, detective, literary, social commentary, and classics, and learned many writing tips and genre forms from their words, like: E.L. Doctorow (the imagination, mixing past with now), Grace Paley, S. J. Rozan (detective writing), Bernard Malamud (how to open stories!), Paul Auster (read most books, surrealism at times), James Baldwin (social comments), Gertrude Stein (her little book on writing, others), John Cheever (city life with a twist)— and many of the Algonquin crew writers."

• Suzanne McConnell's book: writing ideas from Kurt Vonnegut.

 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

 

A good place for women to advertise their work (if they are over 60 years old!) : Persimmon Tree online journal advertising rates.

Silent Letter, poems by Gail Hanlon from Cornerstone Press . “Gail Hanlon’s masterful, uneasy mixture of ghostly epistles, imagistic memoir, and involute but plainspoken metaphysics sketch a quiet wilderness of self, a grief-land of beautiful questing and questioning. ” —Gregory Lawless, author of Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania​ .

New Poems: Tom Donlon's Apart, I am Together

Poet Laureate of West Virginia Marc Harshman says, "Tom Donlon displays an uncanny ability to see the prosaic details of our lives through a lens of faith and beauty that lifts the best of the work into realms of wonder."

 

 

 

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.

 

BACK ISSUES click here.

 

 

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Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 229

September 10, 2023

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Back Issues     MSW Home     About Meredith Sue Willis     Contact

For functioning links and best appearance,
read this newsletter in its permanent location.

 

Dr. J. Nozipo Maraire; William Makepeace Thackery; Larry Schardt; Martha Wells; Henry Makepeace Thackery; paintings by Munch.

  Contents:

Announcements

Book Reviews

Especially for Writers

Good Stuff Online & Elsewhere

Interview

Lists and More: Where to Start Reading about Africa

Short Takes

More Recommendations

 

 

Poem by Dreama Frisk!

and

A short list of where to Start Reading about Africa
from Tinashe Chiura

 

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REVIEWS

This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer).
They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted.

 

 

 

Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth Exhibit Catalog with essays etc. by various curators and scholars including Jay A. Clarke, Jill Lloyd, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen and ArneJohan Vetlesen.

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and
Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson Reviewed by Diane Simmons

Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter by J. Nozipo Maraire

When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri

Rules of Prey by John Sandford

My Runaway Summer: Escape to the Jersey Shore by Larry Schardt

Black Orchids by Rex Stout

Fer-de-lance by Rex Stout

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

The History of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackery

The Element of Fire Martha Wells

The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells (Book II Raksura)

 

I just read my first offical genre romance novel--not romance as in Pride and Prejudice. A recent piece in The New York Times about a new (pink) bookstore opening in our old neighborhood in Brooklyn, Park Slope inspired me. The bookstore is called The Ripped Bodice, and the article touches on the feminist argument that romance novels are really about women's desire and sexuality and thus woman-centered and intrinsically feminist. I did a little superficial research on the web about the reasons people read (after all, it is the only genre I've never dipped into at all). I found everything from Leave me alone I like it to Everyone deserves some cheerful endings to a farily comprehensive 2019 piece in  Vulture by Jaime Greene . The big idea for me was Greene's comparison of all the explicit sex in male-written books (often about sex between agin men and nubile women) that everyone considers literature to romance novel sex. I assume there is some difference in writing style, other topics and themes involved, but I saw myself in Greene's typical "serious" reader who boasts they've never read romance. Thus I have always disdained romance novels without reading them and ignoring the fact that it is a woman dominated genre.

So now I have to read some romance. I plan to do a conventional, say, Regency romance, but I started with When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri--see below for my response. It's a light Lesbian love story, clever with an interesting world to explore. More anon, when I've actually dipped in more toes.

Meanwhile thanks to people who shared suggestions for this issue (Tinashe Chiura for some starter books about Africa ; Troy Hill who put me onto Faulkner as a detective writer. and especially DIane Simmons for her review of The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson .)

                                                                            

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Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter by J. Nozipo Maraire

This is one of the works given to me for an introduction to Africa and African literature by a young woman I met at the Clark art museum this summer.

I have of course read a little: Chinua Achebe's novels and Wole Soyinka's memoir; books by the amazing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and a handful of other writers from various African nations (mostly Nigerians?), but this new list came from a young woman with connections both to the States and to Zimbabwe as well as the rest of Africa. Her first suggestions was a satiric article on How to Write about Africa. an essay first published in Granta by Binyavanga Wainaina.

Then she suggested this 1996 novel by Dr. J. Nozipo Maraire, a book that is often used in introductory African studies courses. It is the only novel by Maraire, a multi-talented Zimbabwean neurosurgeon and entrepreneur.  It is a wonderful book, concise, in the voice of a character addressing her daughter who has gone to study in the United States. I assume it is a fictional version of a letter Dr. Maraire's mother never wrote–based on family history and family stories, and including family complexities, including the tensions between generations   To learn more about Dr. Maraire, click here.

There are lots of other tensions and connections that light up this excellent work: the narrator's' younger sister becomes a freedom fighter during the struggle against colonialism that changed Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. There is information about the damage done by bigotry and colonialism, but there is also a wonderful trickster cousin who works as a servant in the home of a government official and repeatedly copies files and plans, sometimes in great danger to herself, but always with good cheer and excellent story-telling.

There is also a family friend (probably a cousin too?) who is the great hope of the village, who goes to England to become a doctor--and fails to get his degree, and doesn't come back until his mother is dying. He is in language, affect, clothing--and with his white wife--like an Englishman, and his mother and the village are horrified. He won't speak his native language, and he won't touch his mother. It's a grim story, and how it differs from the narrator's determination to keep her daughter grounded even as she goes away to study. This is perhaps the most powerful messages in the book--that we don't have to reject our past or the future. There are ways to live with both.

The most powerful thing, of course, is complexity: this is what fiction does that no other form can–to show, with sympathy, completely different viewpoints and life styles. There are a couple of outstanding passages: the failed doctor's return; but also a scene in Europe where the narrator faces the soft (or fairly soft) bigotry of an Italian countess-socialite. Three sister-cousins preparing goat and tripe dishes for a village party and talking about politics is quite lovely too. The whole connection of urban and village by blood and memory and responsibility to visit and participate in celebrations and mourning was striking to me, the sense of being part of something very human and very large.

It's a wonderful book that has a broad view and, yes, may be the best introduction to the complexities and passions of modern Africa, not just Zimbabwe.

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The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson Reviewed by Diane Simmons

My plan was to save this book to read on a long trip, but I snarfed it all up it before the trip even started. It is that delicious, with literary journalist Erik Larson using diary entries, letters, and other documents to show us Churchill before and during war.

It's a fun read. Still I learned something about Churchill that I hadn't really understood. His absolute thrill with the excitement of the war meant that he would not dream of making a deal with Germany, as the Germans so completely expected him to do. And, somehow—at least if the materials available to Larson are to be trusted-- he conveyed his excitement at being at the center of a conflict for ages to the British public who rose so famously to the occasion.

Splendid.

I was also taken with the way in which, even in the darkest days, the social whirl that surrounded Churchill and his class continued. The partying continued every weekend at Chequers though his being there was nightmarishly dangerous.
Then, on one memorable evening, Churchill's young adult daughter, Mary, travelled with friends to a London club; they were excited to see a popular entertainer. But the club took a direct hit and the entertainer was decapitated. At the same time, many nearby flats were destroyed. Evening spoiled? Not at all. Mary and her friends located another club where they danced until dawn.

I paused to see how I felt about this. The pluck that won the war? Or shocking disregard by the privileged class for the suffering of those who had just been bombed?

But Larson does not remain always in Britain. Goering seems to have left a nice paper trail, and Larsen's mockery of this fat fool (vile) is entertaining: his certainty that he had Britain in his pocket; his greed for stolen art; his ludicrous costumes that he wore to prance about his hunting lodge. Given that we won, and Goering ended up taking a cyanide capsule, it is all great fun.

Here's a problem, though, that I had with the book. The RAF, seen with excitement at the beginning, gets dropped. What happened? Were there not enough letters and papers for the author to draw from? Are they still top secret? Did the author of so many similar books of research and reportage, just get tired of the whole military thing. I had to find another book—a "real" history, as I said to myself—to learn more on this story.

Still, it's a great read. You don't want to miss Churchill dictating to long suffering typists from his bath and appearing in company in a blue silk romper, especially designed for his taste and comfort

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The History of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackery

I had a lot of trouble getting through parts of Thackery's (probably) second-most famous novel (after Vanity Fair). I'm a fan of Vanity Fair, although I've always found it a bit cool, and of course I generally love the Victorians and feel comfortable with the writing and the world, but I realize reading this that I'm not such a fan of Victorians doing history: I like George Eliot's Romola better than most readers do, but it doesn't hold a candle to her novels set in her near past, especially the rural world where she was a girl.

This one is set during the War of the Spanish Succession, and while Thackery clearly loves and hates his morality-challenged heroine in Vanity Fair, he seems somewhat more interested in Henry Esmond as a theory, a what if. The beauteous Beatrix Esmond is another one who is out of control with her desire for power, and of course all she has to play with is her beauty and charm, and I don't think Thackery feels nearly as much for her as for Becky Sharpe. On the other hand, there is the really nifty and somewhat shocking choice of who Henry actually marries--not a spoiler because there is a fictional preface by Henry's daughter that tells all the surprises, namely who Henry actually marries--not Beatrix but Beatrix's mother, and a mothering figure in Henry's life..

The plot is interesting (see Rich Horton's 2017 review here) or the Wikipedia entry. So it's set during the reigns of William and Mary and then Anne, and there's a sense Thackery is enjoying the putative looser morals of the days of Restoration England. The plot is full of the young rake who should or should not have been king, Anne's younger brother James known as the Old Pretender,.

But once the Old Pretender plot gets going, I was fine. It was the endless War of the Spanish Succession that I had trouble following, and Thackery's assumption that we all know about the Duke of Marlborough, which we don't anymore.

There are a lot of real life characters making appearances--Jonathan Swift, and Addison and Steele as well as the politically and royal personages.

The first third, about Henry the supposed bastard boy who has to decide between Catholicism and Protestantism, is excellent, and I liked the final third when politics and love and Henry's sacrifice come together so well. It's the end of Henry's fascination with Beatrix, and the end of the Stuart dynasty. The British got the German Hanovers instead, all the and eventually Victoria and the Windsors.

I'll have to reread it someday after I know more of the history.

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Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

    Booker Prize/National Book Award Finalists don't always do it for me, but Shuggie Bain deserves its accolades.  It was suggested to me as a book about a growing up gay in Glasgow, but Shuggie's gayness is in many ways the least of what the book's about. The story is about a family and alcoholism and the limitations put on women in a certain society and the poverty that comes with these things. Agnes is the alcoholic mom, and she has two children with a solid man she left for a thrilling Lothario type, Shuggie's dad. Big Shug is a bounder to be kind, but he is also run ragged by the demands on his overworked male plumbing as he chases anything, as we say, with skirts.

   The POV is usually Shuggie, occasionally Agnes, but Stuart also comfortably uses a semi-omniscient viewpoint. He will see Agnes in one of her black-outs through the eyes of a potential lover, or he follows Big Shug for a while as he seduces various women but also gets caught by them.  He's a big talker who can't get ahead in life, at least partly because of his sexual adventures.

There is also, of course, an economic and housing system feeding the poverty where the story is embedded.

Agnes is pathetic and not really very easy to identify with: you get a sense of who she might have been during one year when she is sober and working, but you know it isn't going to last, partly because of an opening section of Shuggie as a teen living on his own.  She wants to be "posh," and dresses Shuggie in shiny shoes and blazers, and insists on a more standard English than most of the people speak, which thus further victimizes him with the kids on the street and at school.

Not that he is helped socially in his world by loving My Little Ponies and having to practice walking like a man. He even memorizes football scores in hopes of fitting in. His older siblings run away in their  different ways–the sister marries and moves to South Africa when she's still a teenager; the talented artistic brother disappears inside himself and eventually out of the house.

So much goes wrong, and you can feel it hanging over everyone's future, and yet Glasgow and its suburbs and public housing somehow come out with a kind of dark beauty like an Expressionist woodcut that makes the city and the families attract rive and fascinating.

Shuggie is through most of the book his mother's care-taker,and eventually achieves a certain limited hope. 

The novel has an interesting structural quirk: it begins with Shuggie in his mid teens, living on his own, away from his mother, being prey to abusive men, but also holding a job. So we know he is going to survive at least to that point. Then, the final short section is set in that same time frame and location, Shuggie's teens on his own, but we get added to the situation a friendship that lifts him up so we have hope as well as despair, companionship as well as loneliness.

Excellent book.

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When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri

    So this was my first foray into romance novels. This was published this in 2018, and Perri only has a couple of novels, but lots of journalism and book reviewing credits. This novel is about upscale lives in New York City, both Katie and Cassidy, who alternate point-of-view chapters, are big-deal corporate lawyers, one a beautiful Kentucky blonde coming off a break-up with a man that we never can figure out why she liked, the other an affluent tailored-suit who is frequently mistaken for a "sir" by random strangers. There is a lot of internal questioning and big offices and bars. Beautiful fabrics, large amounts of alcohol, a fair number of really funny wise-cracks and witticisms.

Cassidy is the more interesting character with her scorched-earth picking up and dropping of short term lovers. She is proud of never falling for anyone seriously, especially a previously straight woman. Katie just never thought she'd fall for a woman at all. Katie's newness to Cassidy's world allows us to be newbies too and explore alongside Katie.

There is a lively selection of Lesbian characters, many in the food industry, so we get a glance at that too. There is a lot of bar life at a particular moment in time on the Lower East Side. There are barriers between our lovers; there are baby steps toward each other; there are sexy scenes, mostly the beginning of love making and then a jump cut to the aftermath.

Perri (by choice or by the rules of her genre) does an interesting trick of creating an atmosphere of hot women and Katie looking up the definitions of various sexual acts--but not much of this is dramatized. Neatly done--and somehow, you the reader don't feel cheated. You get your thrills, but the story stays on character, not flailing bodyparts.

In the end, the romance and where it's going seems obvious and maybe a little dull. What I really liked was the wit and the glimpse of a 'loisaida' Lesbian bar culture. The book is light in the way of being fun and what I've discovered in the romance trade is called HEA--Happy Ever After.

Will a hetero romance be this clever and enjoyable?

I did start an Amish romance novel once, and that was certainly exotic to me. But I didn't finish that one.

My Runaway Summer: Escape to the Jersey Shore by Larry Schardt

Larry Schardt is a teacher at universities and in business and many other areas where he explores human behaviors and motivates people to live life to the fullest. In person, he offers an enormous cheerful grin and a peace sign and welcomes everyone with "Rock 'n' Roll!!!"

And it works. You just have to smile back.

His writing works the same way. This memoir/autobiographical novel of his fifteenth year tells about one of his big life lessons, and he wants to share it with everyone.

His father was physically and verbally abusive, apparently just to him, not to his several siblings or his mother. Everyone in the family works, delivering papers or otherwise, except the frequently drunk father.

So in his fifteenth summer, inspired by the Summer of Love, Woodstock and many rock songs and groups, he runs away from home. He hitchhikes with another boy to Ocean City, New Jersey, even though he really wants to go to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco.

The adventure is about half fun (he finds a place with hundreds of musicians and would-be hippies plus lovely girls to look at and one to love) and half terror of being picked up by the police along with no money and often no food. He can't get a job, and it's cold on the various vacationers' porches where he sleeps. Every morning smells delicious pancakes and bacon that only give him an ache of hunger.

By the time he gets home, he thinks he is lucky to be alive, and at the same time lucky to have had his experience. He writes, "The ideals of the Love Generation made a permanent home in my heart."

Check it out: a wonderful mix of affection for his desperate, raw young self and uplifting hope.

  

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Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth Exhibit Catalog by various curators and scholars including Jay A. Clarke, Jill Lloyd, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen and ArneJohan Vetlesen.

We saw this exhibit at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA. This is the second time that an artist famous for one type of theme is opened up for me through his landscapes. The first one, also at the Clark some years ago was the landscapes of Gustav Klimt. This year, it is Edvard Munch.

Yes, I know, we all think Munch = "The Scream." You can buy Scream cups and Scream socks and no doubt someone is selling it on toilet paper. A number of his works as a young man are about high anxiety and men and women torn apart from love. These landscapes, still with an edge, some some Expressionist, some frightening (a series of children and others just outside looming forests) and some are about life springing from corpses and crystals and the cycle of life-- are yet grounded in real places in Norway, and are just stunning.

There are paintings of starry nights just outside Kristiana/Oslo, and there are shores and beaches and vast high pine forests and suburban houses and gardens and scenes of plowing and lumbering. There are also woodcuts different pressings of the same gardens and houses, and repeats of the fraught images of a man and a woman or two women, one dead or representing death.

I loved the exhibit, and the book and its essays and introductions to sections bring it all back for contemplation and new insights even when the color and impact are muted by the format.

 

 

 

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SHORT TAKES

 

 

The Element of Fire Martha Wells

This is I believe her first book, free standing, and quite solid for a first book--it was somewhat slow opening up, lots of tunics and rapiers and other high fantasy stuff, castles and a world of Fay. But once it gets rolling, there are at least three excellent POV characters, especially Thomas is a near middle age head of the queens guards, excellent duelist and strategist, many past lovers etc, including the dowager queen Ravenna who is one of the good characters, but probably under used.

The other major POV character is Kade, half fay, half the child of the last king. She's young, not as clear thinking as she could be, full of surprises. She performs a few too many unexpected/unexplained magics that probably please Wells' hard-core fantasy readers,but are minor annoyances to me.

I was also interested in the present king who along with Kade was pretty much abused by the previous king while Ravenna was off winning wars and such. Several good bad guys, Roland, the king's cousin/Svengali, who has a plan for betraying and becoming king. That's the fun part. Lot of ugly monsters, bad and good fairies I mean fay.

Anyhow, she writes very well and keeps me going even with the too-much fairy stuff.

 

 

 

The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells (Book II Raksura)

I like this Wells series very well, including this book. I liked the beginning and the end– everything about the Raksura world and their personalities and politics and imaginary biology and culture. The magic, as always for me is ehhh... but I take it as long as it has internal consistency.

Moon, having found his people and being loved by a "sister queen" of the Indigo Cloud colony/hive, is our guide through the worldl--he is both important to it and new to it. The genders are bent, nothing too kinky really, but interesting variations based on real life fauna: sterile males who are warriors, huge powerful queens who lose their temper and kill each other a lot. A non-flying caste or perhaps other genus of the species who do most creative work like gardening, art, child care. These and warriors are both male and female. Anyhow, I love all the anthropology part, and the neat relationship between Moon the young consort and huge old incredibly strong and smart line-grandfather Stone.

So, for a plot, the decimated survivors of the colony find a new home, a "mountain tree" that is actually their ancestral home. Then they discover their tree is dying because someone has stolen the "seed," without which the giant tree rots and dies. So Moon, Jade, Stone and others go on a quest to find the seed.

Now there are lots of new people and races and magic and danger and etc. They come across a city build on a leviathan in a freshwater sea. Some of it is probably Wells setting us up for the next several books, but I sped up my reading, just wanted to know how they got out of it all, who lived and who died.

Once they get the seed, they go home with a final challenge from another, larger Raksura colony where Moon got everyone into trouble. And then they get to go home.

I especially enjoy the snippy/dangerously strong/low boiling point queens consorts and warrior castes. There is relatively little actual killing, given how much arguing and posturing and even fighting they do. Also, Wells handles well the story element that many languages are spoken, but everyone in the novel seems to be translated into a sort of well-educated American teenager–not a lot of slang, but a light tone. It probably makes the characters more likeable than they might be if they sounded more mature.

 

 

Rules of Prey by John Sandford

Looking for a new Harry Bosch, but Lucas Davenport isn't the guy. I liked the serial killer "maddog" better for his clarity of purpose: to play the game against respectable foes, to fullfil his need to kill--his "Chosen ones," versions of his mom.

Hero Lucas Davenport has to get more interesting for me to stick with this series, though--more than a handful of quirks and preferences and skills. This was okay reading for a distracted week and a half of family, child care, cooking and cleaning. I'll try another and then see. It never pulled me in.

But honestly, Lucas had less inner life thant the maddog.

 

Right: Mark Harmon as Lucas Davenport in t.v. series.

 

 

TWO NERO WOLFE BOOKS

Fer-de-lance by Rex Stout

This was the very first Nero Wolfe mystery novel, published in1934! It was at the end of prohibition, no second world war yet. So long ago, and full of details of an older New York. Sullivan Street is a rough neighborhood with noisy Italian kids. There are the usual rich people on estates up in Westchester County, There are two murders for our super-size P.I. to solve, one on the golf course, one a murder of a working class person. The two murders merge by the end.

The amazing thing to me is how everything has sprung full grown and full blown as it were from the novelist's forehead: the sedentary genius Wolfe, Archie who has only been with him for 7 years. Fritz the cook and occasional butler, Horstmann in the orchid rooms, even Saul Panzer and Orrie Cather and Fred Durkin. The cops are up in White Plains, though, no Cramer, although Purley Stebbins makes a brief appearance.

Another difference is that there is no final revelation in the office, and there is a little material at the end from Stout's files: brief descriptions of Wolfe and Archie who are supposedly 56 and 32 respectively.

It is, like the other early ones, somehow gayer, with more elaborate language, Wolfe explains his reasoning a little more, his dramatic side and his feelings about things are more pronounced. He presents himself as someone who works from hunches. I don't' think this is quite as obvious in later books. He also stages an elaborate prank-robbery with masks and empty guns.

Oh, and in this one, Wolfe moves from pitchers of beer from barrels in the basement to bottles!

The perp is revealed maybe four fifths of the way in, and is respected for intelligence and care in his crime. Catching him, using the dramas and ruses, is done pretty much on stage.

It is more elaborate, with higher spirits, probably longer than later books, but oh-so-familiar. Old snapshots in a family album.

 

Black Orchids by Rex Stout

 Two Nero Wolfe novellas, published in 1941 and '42, very energetic. It's as if Stout is still excited about the whole premise--even thought all the pieces are already in place: the orchid room, Fritz Brenner the cook, the apoplectic Inspector Cramer, all Wolfe's extra operatives. and above all Nero Wolfe himself and his wise cracking Boswell, Archie Goodwin.

I had a lot of fun. The novellas are quite light, even though number two has some pretty gory descriptions of death by tetanus. Archie's language explorations are more elaborate than I remember. In the first one, Wolfe leaves his house to go to a flower show and see the black orchids, and of course there's a murder that endangers his routine.

In the second one, Wolfe sends flowers to a funeral and Archie still doesn't know why. I wonder if there's any reference to that in later books.

 

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 WHERE TO START READING ABOUT AFRICA, A SHORT LIST FROM Tinashe Chiura

"How to Write about Africa" (essay from Granta by Binyavanga Wainaina.)

Black is the Journey, Africana the Name by Maboula Soumahoro

Zenzele: A Letter For My Daughter by J. Nozipo Maraire

Nervous Conditions: A Novel by Tsitsi Dangarembga (First of a trilogy)

 

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INTERVIEW

An Interview with Charles Foran by John P. Loonam

This interview was first published in The Independent on July 18, 2023

 

 

 

Just Once, No More opens before you were born with a story of your father facing down and killing a bear. Why start there?

 

A defining characteristic of our species is that we look for meanings to our lives while we are living them. Individual ego narratives born of roads not taken, existential "aha" moments, tragedies foretold and unfolding. We do this as though we are, what, exceptions to the planetary rules of impersonality? Mini gods? I think we are storytelling animals because we are thinking about ourselves being ourselves all the time. We are hopelessly, helplessly self-aware and — because we are engaged in this grinding metacognition — under the impression we steer the ships of our lives.

 

To keep up this sweet fiction involves imagination and exaggeration; in other words, telling stories that portray us in heroic mode. My father withheld most of the key details that defined his experience of being in his own skin until his final months on earth. Or he did so with me, at least. But the killing-the-bear tale was one he was happy to share with his son over and over, starting when I was a boy. A man alone in the bush, solitary and defiant, confronting a fearsome creature on a moonlit path. That is the story my father wanted me to appreciate and to remember. As I was embarking on a meditation, via a father-son relationship, on who we are until we are no longer, I decided to open the book with his heroic narrative largely to honor it and him.

 

While the memoir focuses on your father's death, you also discuss the death of your friend, the painter David Bierk. Is he acting as a companion to your father? A counterpoint?

 

For sure, I wanted to eulogize David Bierk in the book — as I wanted to eulogize Dave Foran. During the short time I knew David Bierk, he was in [the] late stages [of] leukemia. For every minute of every day, he radiated only optimism and excitement about the future. Yet the late paintings of his I found most arresting were these landscapes that tilted clearly into the post-human. This devotion to painting himself out of the picture, in effect, was very moving — why we make art in the twilight of our lives. Twenty years later, I am even more astonished by how David managed his leave-taking, as both an artist and a man.

 

You organize the memoir through juxtaposition rather than chronology. What did that offer you?

 

The book wants to show a mind in motion. It wants to capture how we circle our preoccupations, the sadness and joy that keep us awake at night. The structure, designed to regulate the mayhem of metacognition, is of a bicycle wheel: 12 chapters, or spokes, before my father's death, and 12 chapters/spokes afterwards. In the middle lies the hub of his final days. The reader should enjoy the motion, the movement, more than the destination. Around and around we go, right? Especially, I think, as we age.

 

'The book contrasts your father's refusal to look at his past with your own stories of things that didn't actually happen — like the disastrous hike with your daughter. How is your fiction related to your father's silence?

 

I sometimes wonder if deep trauma inhibits the healthy flow of fancy, of conjecture, of looking up ahead — or looking back — without instinctive anxiety and dread. My father, who experienced trauma as a boy, kept largely silent about both past and future, almost as though he was perpetually playing a bad hand of cards and needed to keep them close to his chest. Lucky me, I am largely trauma-free and almost too willing to show my cards. (See below.) At a guess, traumatized people make better card players.

 

How does your own health affect your relationship to the book?

 

Just Once, No More unfolds between 2015 and 2018. Towards the end of the narrative, I am diagnosed with coronary disease and have five stents put in my heart. I write about this upset and meditate on how I am changed by it. Then, in February of 2023, while the book was being printed, the stents collapsed, and I underwent a triple bypass. Bypasses are startling bodily intrusions. They tend to occlude all light around them. For the first few weeks after the operation, I couldn't remember much about what I had written. Life had, in turn, occluded art, showed it who casts the BIG shadow. Now, with health returned and time passed, I am seeing more balance. Life just goes on. Art just stops. Or is it the other way around?

 

 

The anecdotes in Just Once, No More frequently involve places with great views — the Dun Aengus, the mountain trail with your daughter, the windows of your office. Why is great height important?

 

Apparently, most people aren't afraid of being dead. It's the dying that triggers the terrors. From atop a cliff, a mountain, a high floor in an office building, you sense how astonishing and beautiful the world is. Also, how impersonal: It really isn't about you, about us. Anyway, then you take a wrong step, lean out too far, have a heart attack, and you plunge downwards. The fall is about you and is terrifying.

 

Your physical memory of your father centers on the freckles of his forearm — not more conventional choices like his face or his eyes. Why are those freckles so vivid?

 

As a kid, I sat in my father's lap imagining I was a ship navigating the islands of freckles along his forearms. As an adult, I had those same freckle archipelagos available for my daughters to navigate. In the book, I write about "the movement of blood and memory through bodies and time." I call this movement a "seam" and note how it keeps opening and closing. Jump in, jump out. Appear, disappear, reappear. Everyone is under the impression that faces and eyes are defining. No one thinks this about skin. But skin is what we are all in. And boy, are we all in it.

 

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Charles Foran is the author of 12 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling biography of Mordecai Richler, Mordecai: The Life & Times, and the novel Planet Lolita. His work has won major literary awards, including the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, the Taylor Prize, a Canadian Jewish Book Award, and two QSPELL prizes. His new work is Just Once, No More : On Fathers, Sons, and Who We Are Until We Are No Foran lives in Toronto.

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John P. Loonam has a Ph.D. in American literature from the City University of New York and taught English in New York City public schools for over 35 years. He has published fiction in various journals and anthologies, and his short plays have been featured by the Mottola Theater Project several times. He is married and the father of two sons; the four have lived in Brooklyn long enough to be considered natives by anyone but his neighbors.

 

 

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MORE RECOMMENDATIONS & READER RESPONSES

 Troy Hill writes: "I just finished Faulkner's novella/story collection Knight's Gambit. I'm not even sure why it's been on my shelf for a few years. Maybe it was in a giveaway pile. It's Faulkner doing the detective story format, but instead of a detective, it's his Yoknapatawpha county lawyer Gavin Stevens getting to the bottom of things. I thought it was delightful. Plotty, but that's the format. And still so Faulkner."

 

 

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GOOD READING & LISTENING & &N LOOKING ONLINE AND OFF!

 

Thanks to Tinashe Chiura for sending us to this hilarious and grim article (originally in Granta 92) called "How to Write About Africa" by Binyavanga Wainaina. See above for her list of books about Africa.

 

Jane Friedman of Electric Speed (which I recommend for writers!) suggests two newsletters for reading ideas:

The Washington Review of Books -- a round-up of book reviews, literary culture, and more.
​The Sunday Long Read -- a newsletter about longform journalism. They also publish, pay, and accept pitches.

 

Dua Lipa is an Albanian-English twenty-somethihg pop singer who is diversifying into life style recommendations a la Gwyneth Paltrow. She has an interesting and diverse list that includes My Brilliant Friend and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and even Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence-- a lot of semi-classic and indeed excellent novels. She has an interview with Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (the August 2023 book was Half Of A Yellow Sun ), and Adichie offers her own reading list. She also recommends Shuggie Bain, reviewed above.

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Heather Cox Richardson has a blog on politics at Substack that I like, especially for how her historian's studies of the Reconstruction era continue to shed light on current events. This particular entry is about a fundamental difference between two views of labor from the late 1850's that she thinks have a lot of relevance today. It starts with a Senator named James Henry Hammond who explains that “In all social systems,...there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life....Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement,” Hammond then tells his northern colleagues that they use so-called free labor, but the South had proudly perfected the system by enslavement based on race. Try to control your heaving stomach. Later in the entry, she quotes an up-and-coming Abraham Lincoln, who says that “[l]abor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed—that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor."

 

 

My favorite actor John Douglas Thompson (shown left in Satchmo at the Waldorf by Terry Teachout) reviews a book on  Shakespeare and Race..

 

Barbara Kingsolver gives a reading list of books centered on Appalachia.

 

Good podcast/transcription on Getting Old at the Hidden Brain.

 

Try to get hold of the Summer 2023 issue of Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life available from The Cultural Center, 1900 Kanawha Blvd. East, Charleston, WV 25305. Lots of good stuff as always, but don't miss Edwina Pendarvis's piece on the fascinating Phyllis Wilson Moore, "Heroine of West Virginia Literature."

 

A new Substack piece from Joe Chuman.

 

Nathan Leslie talks about his new book

The Invisible Hand.

 

If you haven't read it, you might look at Brian Doyle's essay on people jumping from the World Trade Center towers, "Leap."

 

 

 

 

 

ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS: Links and More

 

• Proper formatting for prose narrative--Getting the right spacing between paragraphs in Word

• Will Tiktok become a book publisher?

• Virtual Class via Hindman Writers with Kari Gunter-Seymour in September!

• Basic article on How to Make Your Own Website

• Book Reviews for Writers: Meredith Sue Willis's Love Palace Reviewed by Danny Williams. This piece by Danny Williams looks closely at the main character/narrator of one of my novels and does a wonderful (and flattering to me) job of explicating how the character develops and works in the novel.

 

 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

 

Dreama Wyant Frisk placed in a poetry contest "Tiny Poems" sponsored by Washington Writers. org, who said of the poem that it is "a beautiful...searing one!!"  Here's the poem:

 

In Yemen, After the Shelling

I am your father and, I will be your leg,
The laborer told his daughter,
Her leg broken and brother killed.

Also, Dreama Wyant Frisk's earlier collection, Ivory Hollyhock, which is held in reserve at the Arlington Central Library in Arlington, Virginia, won first prize for poetry, 2011.

 

 

 

 

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This looks interesting--another cheap hit of hilarity from Ayun Halliday: 

 https://www.ayunhalliday.com/

 

 

 

Porch Poems from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions by  Cheryl Denise,  Susanna Connelly Holstein, Kirk Judd and Sherrell Runnion Wigal is a collection of poems by old friend poems who gathered to laugh, cook, swing, and write in the mountains.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Éluard writes of Linda Parsons' new collection Valediction: Poems and Prose from Madville Publishing, "There is another world and it is in this one." Within these worlds, we travel outward and inward, straddling our lives' oppositions: parental/relationship struggle and loss, home and away, isolation and reconnection, the spiritual/mystical realm and physicality—always balancing grief and reemergence, hello and goodbye. The hybrid nature of Linda Parsons' sixth collection, Valediction, with poems, diptychs, and micro essays, brings those oppositions into focus and reconciliation and grounds her in the earth under her feet, especially in her gardening meditations. In this striving, we are balanced and grounded with her as she lifts the veil on what it means to live and create fully, even in the face of impermanence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just 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."

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BUYING BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER

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.

 

A new not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool for 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a postage-only way to trade books with other readers.

 

Ingrid Hughes suggests "a 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 are using an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927), and free, free, free!

 

Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.

 

More and more public libraries are now offering electronic books for borrowing as well.

 

 

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.

 

 

BACK ISSUES click here.

 

 

LICENSE

Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Meredith Sue Willis.  Some individual contributors may have other licenses.

 

 

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     Meredith Sue Willis, the producer of this occasional newsletter, is a writer and teacher and enthusiastic reader. Her books have been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, HarperCollins, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, West Virginia University Press, Monteymayor Press, Teachers & Writers Press, Mountain State Press, Hamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.

 

BACK ISSUES:

#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 and more.
#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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