Tuesday, May 19, 2015

A Birthday Party!





Left to right:  Joan Liebowitz, Carole Rosenthal, NancyKay Shapiro, Edith Konecky, Suzanne McConnell, MSW


A great time Saturday 5-16 at Arte on the Upper West Side:  many parts of Joan's life:  her family, us, her work friends, her travel companions, and even her dancing partners!

Saturday, May 09, 2015

Anniversary visit to Monclair Art Museum...

 ... plus dinner at Montclair's Las Noches de Colombia Colombian Restaurant in Montclair.  Heavy on meats, plantains tostones y maduros both.  Wonderful cheese bread rolls.  Lots of fun.  But it was incredibly crowded, and we had to sit in the front, in the so-called "bakery."
      Art of the nineteen-nineties at the Montclair Art museum.  The selfie below is of us on the grounds of MAM:



Friday, May 01, 2015

Books for Readers Newsletter # 177

Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 177

May 1, 2015

When possible, read this newsletter online in its permanent location .

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In Books for Readers # 177:

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If You're Going to San Francisco...

Short Takes

Patricia Harman     Ken Champion

Recommendation from Danimaris Fonseca

E-Reader Report with John Birch

Things to Read & Hear Online

Announcements and News

 


New Online Class!

The Summer Starter

Meredith Sue Willis's New Online  Class to
Start or Re-start  Your Writing Project


Monday, June  8, 2015; Monday, June 15, 2015;
Monday, June 22, 2015: Monday, June 29, 2015

For more information,
click here.


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From friends, from students in my classes, from these newsletters, from other books and publications-- I discover books to read. My latest are an old American novel Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson, a 2014 novel called Hyde by Daniel Levine (spun off the old Stevenson novella "The Strange History of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"), plus a book of poems, Driving with the Dead by Jane Hicks.

Jane Hicks's poems, published as part of the Kentucky Voices series of Kentucky Press, are described as having the "idiom and flavor (and humor) of the mountains," by Richard Taylor, a former Kentucky poet laureate. They also have wonderful black and white photographic images from Hicks' own family–a graveyard, men in World War I uniforms or snappy fedoras and cigarettes, women in sandals and dresses or "lunch lady" outfits. The images don't always refer directly to the poems, but add texture to them.
The poems often take off from places like her great uncle's store and people like a teacher who loved Gerald Manley Hopkins. There is a demented grandmother who runs away in her slip but carries a Styrofoam pitcher for a purse. It all works together create a powerful sense of a world that is sometimes in the past and sometimes in the present, but always in the poet's heart and soul-- and always conveyed to the reader's as well.
For example, the poet goes out in early spring to find creecy greens to use, as her grandmother did, for cleansing the blood:

The wind cuts, my nose drips,
my fingers burn then numb
gloves left behind in the almost April...

My grandmother's habit urges me
out toward spring
that lies in fat buds at field's
edge, redbuds and dogwood wait
for the call of sunlight...

The first poem in the book, "Summer Rain," sets up a lot of the themes to come: funeral traditions and the past of great-greats long gone as well as the poet's own youthful past. There is always also the sharp perception of the present moment: "a row of ancient oaks that whisper and jostle in the breeze." I've been looking for years for the word for what tree leaves do when in full leaf and the air moves through. Jostle, of course. So obvious, so fresh and new.
There are poems with Elvis and a poem about the Carter Family, a draft lottery poem, and a stunning poem about the collapse of a mined mountain that killed a little boy:

Your room marked with yellow tape, your crib
where you breathed easy as mama put you down to rest,
driven into the floor by strip-mine spoil...

It's a wide-ranging beautiful book that may or may not be about the world you live in or grew up in, but feels just as real.


Then there was Anne by Constance Fenimore Woolson. I first heard of Woolson in Colm Toibin's novel of Henry James. Woolson, a close friend of James (and a relative of James Fenimore Cooper) was a reasonably successful American writer who work seems today sometimes melodramatic, as her audience expected, but always interesting.
The first part of this novel is set in a bucolic, idealized Mackinac Island in Michigan, where lovely, intensely good Anne cares for her nearly-destitute father and siblings. The rest of the book takes place in the East-- with loyal Anne going away after her father dies to try and make a living to support her half-siblings.
Before leaving, Anne gets engaged to her childhood friend and would marry him, even though later on she loves another--but he runs off with her little sister! This little sister-- actually, all of Anne's half-siblings-- demonstrate a lot of common prejudices of the time. Apparently closely related to the fact that little sister Tita is dark and part French and part Indian, her personality is passionate and selfish and untrustworthy-- although she ends not as a villain but as a somewhat frivolous but happy wife.
Meanwhile, Anne struggles in New York Society's faddish summer places and later in border cities during the civil war. One thing that is remarkable about this book is how widely its Victorian era heroine travels. The story line includes novel-of-manners parts when the girl is taken up by a sadistic great aunt and lives among people who look down on her.
She falls in love with probably the best character in the novel, Ward Heathcote, a languid, spoiled, self-absorbed figure who is wildly attractive to women. He goes through many changes in the course of the novel, largely through his soldiering as he leads a regiment in the Civil War. He also, in his lackadaisical way, loves Anne. Ward is a lady killer finally captured by a strong woman, but only when he learns how weak he is.  It seems that men's imperious natures improve immensely when they learn something about suffering (viz. Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre).
Anne becomes a volunteer nurse for a while, near the battlefront, and experiences a full-scale melodramatic coincidence when Heathcote is wounded near where Anne is serving. He pretends he is free rather than married to her best friend, and thus elicits her declaration of love for him. Then, in a turn that is what makes Heathcote such an interesting man, he confesses the truth.
Righteous Anne, of course, walks off and returns to her lonely suffering. There are scenes of our heroine poor and walking through New york in the snow while she sees her wealthy former-friends nearby. There is-- in the final section-- a murder and a murder mystery that is solved ostensibly by the "intuition" of Anne and some other women characters, but, in fact, they reason just as well as the men, only working from a different starting point.
Woolson is well worth reading, as long as you're willing to set aside some melodrama and coincidences and casual prejudices of the time. You can get most of her work free as e-books:https://constancefenimorewoolson.wordpress.com/list-of-works-available-online/ .


Finally, Daniel Levine's Hyde is a thick, rich spin-off of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange History of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," the late nineteenth century novella about vaguely scientific chemical experiments on personality  splitting.  Daniel Levine's version takes the form of Mr. Hyde's confession in which Mr. Hyde, who embodies evil in Stevenson's story, is in Levine's book the victim of the upper middle class Dr. Jekyll and his machinations.
Victorian London is beautifully recreated, especially in the small bits of material culture. The cloaks and the vials and foggy streets pull you in, but the thing that makes the book really work isn't the complexities of Levine's version of plots and twists but rather the pathos of Hyde's hunger for life.
He has been powerfully repressed, and his world view is sadly limited. He spent "their" childhood and youth three-quarters asleep, with limited experience, limited hopes and dreams-- yet he was a full sufferer with Jekyll in the grim abuse they were subject to as a boy.
This plausible backstory gives a solid basis for the increasingly dark events and the dreamy horror that infuses Hyde's new freedom. I found myself feeling terribly sad for this unfinished man who knows suffering and the beginnings of pleasure, but can't hold on to them because of the "body" and because of the personality he shares it with.

 

IF YOU'RE GOING TO SAN FRANCISO....


Check out the wonderful Glen Park San Francisco Bookstore and Jazz club, Bird and Beckett athttp://www.birdbeckett.com/ .  It's located at 653 Chenery Street-- almost any Saturday has something terrific happening in music or literature. I happened to pass by when I was visiting last fall, and Diane Di Prima was reading.

READERS RESPOND

From Donna Meredith:  "I was disappointed in [Gilead].  I kept waiting for something to happen, the big reveal, and it never came. I felt sorry for the 'bad' kid named after the minister. And the minister came across as so righteous he got on my nerves. When I have a reaction like this, so different from the rest of the world's, I start to wonder what's wrong with me! "


SHORT TAKES

In doing some research for writing a possible mystery novel, I did a fast read of Nancy Drew: The Secret of the Hidden Staircase by Carolyn Keene. This was really badly written ("Nancy Drew, a tall blonde girl of eighteen..") more than a little class-ist (the bad guy is crude and an immigrant) and sexist. Although in reference to the latter, I have to say that I get it: Nancy was beloved of girls in the 1930's because of her perky sleuthing and how, while staying a lady, out-thinks and out-heros all the male characters. In this one she even saves her father from a kidnapping.



DON'T FORGET

Newest Books from Hamilton Stone Editions and Irene Weinberger Books:
.

 

and Trampoline by Robert Gipe from Ohio Universty Press





RECOMMENDATION FROM DANIMARIS FONSECA

THE WAR OF ART by Steven Pressfield is a must read for any artist struggling to complete a piece of work. Too many people are crashing into their graves with their gifts still inside them. I am a firm believer that our main purpose on earth is to leave the world better than we found it. That painting, novel, or song you cannot stop thinking about– that is your purpose, create it now!
Steven Pressfield is harsh, he nudges you along with tough love, he unveils and exposes all of the ways we sabotage or delay our progress as artists. He builds up the grandness and necessity of your work of art and then he introduces us to 'Resistance' an opposing and equally grand force that looms over you every step of the way.
He states that "Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on this earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business."
I feel that by naming this force and describing its qualities with such detail he personifies it and in doing so he takes away its ethereal power, making it something we can overcome. Steven Pressfield gives you the courage to act on your visions, he makes you forget about all of the reasons why it won't work and highlights the one reason why it must, because your life (and sanity) depends on it.



JOHN BIRCH E-READER REPORT: AMAZON NAMES THE YEAR'S TOP-SELLING BOOKS SO FAR.

Amazon has named what it describes as "The year's 20 top-selling books so far," and here are the first dozen, seven of which are novels , marked (*). All 12 are available as e-books.
1. UPDIKE, by Adam Begley.
2. THE BOOK OF UNKNOWN AMERICANS* ,by Christine Henriquez.
3. REDEPLOYMENT, by Phil Klay.
4 EUPHORIA*, by Lily King.
5. NO PLACE TO HIDE: EDWARD SNOWDEN, by Glenn Greenwald.
6. IN PARADISE*, by Pete Matthiessen.
7. THE INVENTION OF WINGS*, by Sue Monk Kidd.
8. RED RISING*, by Pierce Brown.
9. SAVAGE HARVEST, A TALE OF CANNABIS, by Carl Hoffman.
10. HOLLOW CITY*, by Ransom Riggs.
11. TO RISE AGAIN AT A DECENT HOUR*, by Joshua Ferris.
12. THE EMPATHY EXAMS, (essays) by Leslie Jamison.
For the remaining eight titles, Google: "Amazon.com best books of the year so far".

 

READ AND LISTEN ONLINE

Interview with Barbara Crooker: http://delphiquarterly.com/current-issue/interview-with-barbara-crooker/
Listen to an interview of Laura Treacy Bentley at Voices of Appalachiahttp://voicesofappalachia.com/writers-block-with-laura-treacy-bently/

 

BOOK CHANNEL RECOMMENDS...


 

RECENTLY PUBLISHED OR COMING SOON FROM FOREVERLAND PRESS!

  • Spider Woman's Loom, a novel by Lorie Adair
  • It's Not About the Dog and The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci by Susan Taylor Chehak
  • A Mother's Time Capsule, stories by Beth Havey
  • Smoke Street, a novel by Mark Smith
  • County Seat by Paul Corey (and we'll be creating an omnibus of the three books in his Mantz Trilogy this spring)
  • Zen and The Art of Knitting by Bernadette Murphy

 

COMING SOON....


.... from Penniless Press PublicationsKeefie by Ken Champion.



 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS, BOOKS RECEIVED, CONTESTS, WORKSHOPS, READINGS ETC.

Two announcements from Deborah Clearman: First the publication by NY Writers Coalition of THESE ARE HARD TIMES FOR DREAMERS: WRITING FROM RIKERS ISLAND. This is a beautiful and moving collection of poetry and prose written in Clearman's creative writing workshops for women in jail on Rikers Island.
Second, as part of PEN's World Voices Festival, she's participating on a panel called Writing on the Inside, Reading on the Outside. With her on the panel are Sean Dalpiaz, Rita Hickey, Randall Horton, Hettie Jones, and Linda Perez, moderated by Michael Keck. The discussion takes place: Thursday, May 7, at 9:00pm, Nuyorican Poets Café, 236 East 3rd Street, New York, NY Tickets: $12 at the door/$10 in advance, PEN and Nuyorican Poets Café Members and students with valid ID. For more info, see https://www.facebook.com/events/984532711557209/

Halvard Johnson's WINTER JOURNEY republished: https://www.createspace.com/5376388
Patricia Harman's The Reluctant Midwife just came out from HarperCollins. Set in the Great Depression in WV, it features Becky Myers RN and Dr. Isaac Blum who return to the Hope River Valley, impoverished and homeless. Something is really wrong with the once brilliant surgeon and Becky is stuck with him. His older brother, also a physician, has kicked him out. Dr. Blum won't speak or even eat without help. With nowhere to go, they are forced to call on their midwife friend, Patience. If you read The Midwife of Hope River, you will like this. It's a book about healing, the power of community and hope.
See a good review here.
 
Melanie Vickers has new articles recently published about Ginny, the dog who saves coal miners: "Coal Mine Canine." BOY'S LIFE, September, 2014 and "Listen for my Bark." COAL PEOPLE MAGAZINE, May, 2014. Upcoming soon is "Go, Ginny, Go!"in HIGHLIGHTS FOR CHILDREN.

Now accepting unsolicited fiction and nonfiction: http://trainlessmagazine.com/ .
Laura Treacy Bentley's short story prequel to her novel THE SILVER TATTOO is available on Amazon for pre-order. It's called NIGHT TERRORS. Check out her blog athttp://www.lauratreacybentley.com/
Barbara Crooker's sixth collection of poetry, Small Rain, is an exploration of the wheel of the year, the seasons that roll in a continuous circle and yet move inexorably forward. Gorgeous lyric poems praise poppies, mockingbirds, nectarines, mulch and compost, yet loss (stillbirth, cancer, emphysema), with its crow-black wings, is also always present. In poems that narrow in on the particular ("a cardinal twangs his notes of cheer; he has no truck with irony and post- / modernism"), poems that focus on aging and the body ("how many springs are left on my ticket?"), poems that open out into the larger world of politics, war, global climate change, Crooker's work embodies Wendell Berry's words, "Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts," reminding us that sometimes we need to stop in wonder, look at the natural world, which we are close to ruining forever, and let "our mouths say o and o and o."

An interview with NancyKay Shapiro about her novel-in-progress, Celine Varens, as well as an excerpt from the novel at the online journal WIPs: Interview at http://www.wipsjournal.com/?p=2313and excerpt athttp://www.wipsjournal.com/?p=2300 .
Just out from Ohio University Press: Every River on Earth: Writing from Southern Appalachia, edited by Neil Carpathios with a foreword by Donald Ray Pollock.
Valerie Nieman's second poetry collection, Hotel Worthy, is now available from Press 53 and on Amazon. Joseph Bathanti says, "There abides in its pages an uncanny past wrought into poems that spring from a memory – from a vast, liturgical acumen – that unites the dead with the living, restores the abandoned, returns the missing. This is a startling book. The language – its lyric nuance, its plaintive harmonies, its ceremonial beauty – is unforgettable." Val will be touring for the book. Watch for her from Greensboro, North Carolina to the New School in New York City to Charleston, SC and Blairsville, GA.



ABOUT AMAZON.COM
The largest unionized bookstore in America has a webstore 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 viahttp://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.
For a discussion of Amazon and organized labor and small presses, see the comments of Jonathan Greene and others in Issues #97 and #98 .

WHERE TO FIND 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 a digital copy.You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. (To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left).
To buy books online, I often go first to Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can compare what you’re really going to 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.

If you are using an electronic reader like Kindle, Nook, or Kobo, don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics, and free, free, free!
Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.

RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER

Please send responses to this newsletter and suggestions directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you instruct otherwise, your responses may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.
 

BACK ISSUES click here.


LICENSE

Creative Commons 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 athttp://www.meredithsuewillis.com. 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 PressMercury HouseWest Virginia University Press, Monteymayor PressTeachers & Writers PressHamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.

 

BACK ISSUES:

#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 & KlonsLady 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 PeopleThe 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 MadonnaA 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 KnowThe ShiningThe Tiger's Wife.
#148 The MoonstoneDjibouti, 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 MinisterBlood 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 FallsThe 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 CloudsplitterFounding 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 latestIrving 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 DrownBlindness & more
#105 Everything is MiscellaneousThe UntouchableKettle 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 CareerThe 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 LavransdatterHouse Made of DawnLeaving Atlanta 
#92   Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs
#91   Richard Powers discussion
#90   William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare
#89   William Styron, Ellen Willis, DuneGerminal, 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 WorldDa 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 HomeTess 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 EvilMoon 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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