In August, I’ll be participating in the John Steinbeck Classics Circuit, so this week I decided to revisit The Grapes of Wrath, one of three Steinbeck works I have read and hated (the other two are The Pearl and Of Mice and Men). I often wonder, in the case of the other two, whether [...]
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There’s no question I’ve had trouble keeping to five posts a week around here (a goal so often missed that probably no one actively expects it at this point). It’s been particularly bad lately, but Friday posts have always been a bit of an issue. I’ve tried in the past to set a Friday [...] Shann Ray’s debut short story collection American Masculine, recently published by Graywolf Press and winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize, has a number of similarities to The Lives of Rocks, at least on the surface. The stories in both books take place in the American West and have a decidedly American [...] The title story of Rick Bass’s 2006 six short story collection The Lives of Rocks is long, almost a novella, and tells the story of Jyl, a woman stricken with cancer. Someplace in Montana or Wyoming or similar, a single woman in a lone valley cabin must pump her own water and keep up [...] I have thought more than once in my lifetime, and certainly several times in the past few months, about the real woman and real history behind the Little House books, and about seeking out some measure of it somewhere out there in De Smet or one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s other childhood homes. I [...] Anyone who read the Little House books as a child and made it all the way through probably has a similar memory of things starting to get a little bit weird in The First Four Years, and then of kind of losing interest in the journals that come after. I never read the journals, [...] Porn star. Bandleader’s girlfriend. Deliverywoman. Cat owner. Alcoholic. Dancing rat. Magician. These are a random selection of the Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls in Alissa Nutting’s collection of short stories. Don’t be fooled—even the ones that sound normal aren’t. Take “Deliverywoman.” The narrator of this story would have a fairly normal day job, [...] This post is my contribution to the Lost Generation Classics Circuit, organized by Rebecca of Rebecca Reads. Lucy Church Amiably, written in 1927 and published for the first time in Paris in 1930 (according to the back of my Dalkey Archive edition), belongs to the “hermetic” group of Gertrude Stein’s works. That is to [...] In his review of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, Matt Rowan wrote: This latter tale is the kind of story I wish I’d written (but didn’t / can’t), because it so perfectly encapsulates all those ideas of contemporary pluralism and social equity of modern liberalism, and the realistic challenges of actually understanding someone [...] Matt Rowan of Bob Einstein’s Literary Equations broke my rules when he challenged me to read some contemporary literature, but with a local hook I decided to go with it. Good move: Chicago writer Patrick Somerville’s collection of short stories, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, couldn’t have impressed me more. The writing is [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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