Julia Margaret Cameron

    I had one of my days in New York Yesterday, met some former students at a bar and enjoyed that a lot, stopped in at the Metropolitan Museum and wandered around, enjoyed some seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings: Caravaggio rocks, and it was so nice by the early nineteenth when they weren't wearing the stupid powdered wigs anymore. There was a small but very choice Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit: several of her most famous images including, of course, the one of her beautiful favorite niece and namesake, Julia,who was the mother of Virginia and Vanessa Stephens. Tennyson, Herschel-- everybody knew everybody back in the day. And her women, such great beauties, had real noses and chins, as opposed to all the women in the drawings and paintings in the nineteenth c.

Shakespeare Back at the Mount

Lots of fun last evening:  Shakespeare & Company back to the Mount! for a shortened, young actors’, directed by Jonathan Croy version of Midsummer Night’s Dream which was just so much fun.  It was David and Ann and Andy and me, and we were worried about predicted storms, but they went on, not behind the Mount house in the old place, but in a place called the Dell, much closer to the parking.  We got to say hi to Jonathan Croy himself. We had folding chairs, a tarp, blankets, mosquito spray, cheese sandwiches on Our Daily Bread sourdough-- like the old days except no kids  (although Nathan saw this last week and recommended it).  Also, it was not quite the old space.  Still, the players appeared from among white pines and were in spite of a cast of only seven, so energetic and attractive they filled the space, even if they didn’t  get the lines all the way out to my deaf ears.   I couldn’t hear a lot of the lines, and it turned out Andy and David missed a lot too, but it so didn’t matter because (a) we all know the play, (b) it was a completely physical and mimed version, and (c) a lot of the lines were cut.   Then the really funny part:  Clear overhead, but thunder in the distance during the last act, and a little lightning during curtain calls (and some old folks left early), but as we all walked to the cars-- a tremendous sky-emptying downpour!  So funny how it waited for the play to be over.  We were wet, but full of hilarity, and we went to Barrington brewery where some got beer, some got salads, and some got a slice of coconut custard pie taking her back to growing up in West Virginia.

Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 163

August 7, 2013

 

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In this Issue:
Things to read online;
Special Project for Rural Women
This Gone Place: Poems by Lisa J. Parker
Audiobook of Screaming With the Cannibals
The Wedding Gift by Marlen Suyapa Bodden
The Virgins by Pamela Erens
Romantic History by Michael Harris
The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
Cat Pleska Reviews The Silver Tattoo
Announcements
The E-Reader Report with John Birch

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I'm excited to be writing this month about three brand new novels and one recent one: a historical drama centered on American slavery; a prep school story of doomed love; another love story that spans decades; and a story set at a forward base of the American army in Afghanistan that is structured by a Greek tragedy. That's what I love about fiction: you fly over centuries and continents to burrow deep into the lives of others through the power of the writer's imagination-- and yours, the reader's.

Marlen Bodden's novel The Wedding Gift is the story of several interlinked families enmeshed in the American institution of slavery shortly before the Civil War. The two main characters, Sarah Campbell and Theodora Allen, show us that world from the view of a young enslaved woman and from a white plantation owner's wife.
Sarah is the heroine: she is vital and brave and brilliant, and engineers her own escape from slavery– as well as her awful revenge. Theodora, a generation older, faces secret horrors: the discovery that her daughter Clarissa has an enslaved half sister; the realization that her brutish husband, if he loves anyone, loves his enslaved concubine. Later, Theodora's daughter Clarissa is the cause of a shattering scandal among the slave owners.
Carefully researched, the novel has appealing characters, complex situations, and powerful story momentum. It also offers a stunning portrait of a well-run Alabama cotton plantation of the 1850's. Bodden sets up the Allen Plantation as a relatively benign place. The Master, Mr. Allen, finds it economically favorable to provide decent housing, food, gifts, and even holidays for his property. Of course, he treats his wife and legitimate daughter as well-dressed chattels as well. Slavery is shown to be, even in relatively humane conditions, a corrupting abomination both to the enslaved and the enslavers.
Early in her marriage, Theodora is jealous of her husband's concubine, but this changes to a certain kind of camaraderie as they try to do the best for both of their daughters. It is Theodora who teaches Sarah to read, and Sarah uses her knowledge to read poetry– and also to write passes and manumission papers.
Another pleasure of the book is the legal machinations over Mr. Allen's inheritance. Ms. Bodden is herself a lawyer and knows not only how the law works, but how to make it an interesting part of the story. What finally drives the novel is the questions: What is in the will? Exactly how badly will Mr. Allen treat his legitimate wife and children? Who is the black father of a white woman's child? Who will run and who will be caught? Who will live and who will die? And above all, will Sarah's skills and courage–and the support of her family and community–be enough to get her to freedom?
The novel satisfyingly combines a hopeful future for many of the people we like best along with a real shock at the end. It is an exciting, informative, and deeply entertaining novel.


Pamela Erens' new novel The Virgins is a beautifully written story in the long line of prep school novels going back at least to A Separate Peace -- distinctly adolescent worlds, in which adults are on the periphery. Here, the adults check dorm rooms for sexual and drug activity or offer occasional bumbling support, which the young people promptly turn down. Adolescents are always, of course, about making their own social circles– making themselves, actually– but here, in spite of some visits home to families in varying stages of dysfunction, divorce, drunkenness, coldness, and high-pressure expectation, there is no other reality at all.
The three main characters in The Virgins are Seung, an attractive and appealing Korean-American boy; Aviva, who is Jewish American from Chicago; and Bennet-Jones, the WASP narrator and reconstructor of the story, who appears at first to be a peripheral narrator, but becomes increasingly less dependable and more involved.
He is the only principal character who is a traditional prep school type: that is, he is from a line of fathers and sons of the old American upper class. The other two, Aviva and Seung, are the children of immigrants, so there is an interesting culture and class clash going on– this theme is not central, but Erens is such a subtle writer that many not-so-obvious things are always at play.
The story line, culminating in a break-up and betrayal, is that Aviva decides to remake herself and talks her parents into sending her to the prep school where she causes a stir and begins a year long relationship with Seung. Their relationship is disturbing to the school because it consists of long hours of physical passion as they two explore one another's bodies in great detail, but never have coitus. The whole school sees them kissing and touching and knows she visits his room, and everyone admires and envies their free and presumably complete sexual relationship. It's a fascinating premise to explore, and Erens does a wonderful job.
Both young people in the end feel they are failing-- failing to reach each other, to penetrate, as it were. In the end, their failure ends in catastrophe. The sexual activity is described in painstaking detail (and keep in mind that the narrator is always Bennet-Jones, who is a kind of undependable, creative voyeur.) It's a wonderfully told story, excruciatingly painful. Erens is harder on Aviva than on Seung, even though he is eager to try drugs, dependent on other people, and heroic in his determination to please Aviva.


Michael Harris's new novel is Romantic History has a strong young woman character, Maggie, a rebel, talented and smart, who thinks she can handle herself after a life with a drunken Private Investigator dad. She ends up raped horrifically, then working in a massage parlor, marrying a career criminal she meets there-- and going with him on a robbery spree. She is wonderfully messed up and feisty, and I like her better young than old. Older she is still interesting, but too involved in New Age theorizing for my taste.
The other main character, Paul, a newsman, loves Maggie over many decades, and their relationship is the romantic history of the title. Along with the love story is a lot of interesting material about the failing newspaper business on the west Coast. There are colorful newspaper characters and a little labor unrest that doesn't go well.
The strength of this book is how many ways it opens, unpeels, rebuilds, and re-envisions its damaged characters. It circles around its events nicely, giving us a look at Paul and then the youthful Paul, and then some young Maggie and some old Maggie.
It also has a surprisingly satisfying triplet ending. That is, we are given three possible endings, a probable one; a violent one, and a freeze frame. This works extremely well-- far better than I would have guessed, and does not feel like a cop out, but a continuation of the exploration of the people's lives.


Finally, in my fiction round-up, is The Watch , a highly praised, commercially- published Afghanistan War novel. Joydeep Roy-Battacharya did deep research for this: he acknowledges many soldiers he interviewed. He builds his world with the right music, the right vulgarities, knowledge of the rules of engagement, of weapons, and even the various backgrounds of the characters including flashbacks to Baton Rouge and a small town in Vermont.
He structures the story around Sophocles' Antigone: a Pashtun woman arrives outside a US base in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. She has no lower legs or feet, and has dragged herself for many miles in a cart. She wants to bury her brother, who probably led an attack on the base after a drone strike killed most of their family and gravely wounded her.
The book follows several points of views– the sister first, then various Americans, including one articulate and educated first Lieutenant who wants to be a warrior out of an ideal of honor. In his diary he writes, "I'm at the epicenter of the place where the forces of fascism– of religious fundamentalism, societal repression, and violent hatred– must be contained. When I'm challenged about the consequences of my actions, I ask the person to look me in the eye and ask if he or she truly believes that peace would return and the condition of the women and children, especially, would improve if we decided to leave this place."
Another character, the medic (who I wish had had a full point-of-view section) sees things differently. He says, "The Pashtuns are in this thing as a people. And that legless girl in her cart is part of that. They know what they're fighting for– they're fighting for their survival, their homes, their beliefs. Okay, fine, those beliefs are fucked up, what are we fighting for? We got kids here whose only option in life is either the army or methlands. Sure, we also got the high-tech ordnance and every damn textbook strategy under the sun. It doesn't matter. Their slings and stones are more powerful than our M-203's. Their nation's more powerful than our army."
Roy-Battacharya puts in everything: all the viewpoints, all the smells and sensations of war, all the richly realized backgrounds of his characters. It is not a huge book, but it is thick with detail, sometimes almost too much for a story with its reminders of the spare staging of classical Greek theater.
What is best here, aside from the heavy beat of the story's momentum, is how the Americans gradually develop a more nuanced (and thus more painful) view of their role in Afghanistan. This happens over days of watching the brave young woman in her cart in the desert waiting to bury her brother. Her presence and her demand for a particular kind of righteousness brings out an answering yearning for righteousness in many of the soldiers.
In this sad tale, even the "old man," the commander-captain, is not yet thirty. This is, in the end, like so many war stories, about boys facing the incoherence and immediacy of our wars.



                                                                               --Meredith Sue Willis

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WE READ POETRY TOO!

I just finished Lisa J. Parker's lovely first collection of poems. It's a wonderful mix of sensual memories of growing up with Southern Appalachian roots and an extended mountain family and the pain of leaving home, even if you want to. There are many wonderful pieces, including one about snapping beans with her grandmother and one about her father dying from black lung. This latter poem, "Sounding," is a real knock-out, juxtaposing the man's agonal breathing and the coal miners' technique for knocking on the mine's ceiling to see if it's about to collapse. She writes extremely well of Appalachians, herself and others, going out into the world, and there is a special section about her time in New York City which coincided with the attacks on the World Trade Center.
It is a highly sophisticated collection that is also highly readable.
It's published by the invaluable Motes Books.

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Cat Pleska Reviews Laura Treacy Bentley’s The Silver Tattoo

Here’s what I love: a page-turning mystery written in beautiful language! And that’s not the only pairing that Laura Bentley provides in her thriller, The Silver Tattoo: a stalker following a lovely, intelligent woman across the stunning landscape of Ireland; lost love and the desire to move beyond sorrow; friendships forming amidst terror.
As a poet, Bentley has finely tuned language to her command as she expertly builds fear throughout the story. Beginning with an ominous event—a beautiful butterfly is trapped on sticky tape and affixed to her bathroom mirror—Leah, a student at Ireland’s famous Trinity College, flees from Dublin to the beautiful and dangerous Cliffs of Moher, on the west side of Ireland. Here, rather than tranquility Leah hopes to find, danger and fear escalate. A strange woman who calls herself Rowan (the rowan is a meaningful tree in Ireland, which is supposed to protect you from witchcraft and enchantment) tries to push Leah off the Cliffs (a 700 foot drop!). From that point, Leah intensifies her search for clues as to why she was a target of this strange woman and who on earth is stalking her and why.
Bentley moves the story along with not only mystery and intrigue, but also the challenge of thought-provoking life issues and emotions. Readers learn that Leah is fleeing more than danger; she’s also fleeing her husband, Conor, a bedridden victim of a car accident. Leah tries to rebuild her life and begins with continuing her studies at Trinity. Close friend Ferdy back in America, seems to be the one who is loyal to Conor and visits him faithfully, reporting to Leah Conor’s condition. Leah is grateful, but Ferdy also provides a reminder of how she is not the wife Connor deserves. How can someone live with guilt, move on, and flourish despite it?
In thinking about other West Virginia writers who wrote in the thriller genre, this story reminds me of the chilling ride created by Davis Grubb in Night of the Hunter. A knuckle-biter that builds continual fear, The Silver Tattoo creates the same kind of “look over your shoulder as you never know who’s going to be gaining on you,” feeling.
This passage gives a glimpse of the poetic language Bentley is known for:
“They walked down a dirt road that paralleled a rushing stream where bright green watercress skimmed its shimmering surface. After about a half mile, they stopped to listen to a croaking bullfrog and surveyed a large man-made pond thick with cattails; metallic dragonflies hovered overhead, darting to and fro in the now hot morning sun. Spring had gone directly to summer this year—no transition. In a far meadow, they spotted two young deer. As Leah and Conor approached, the deer raised their heads and froze, starting straight into the intruders’ eyes. After a couple of minutes, the deer cautiously moved back toward a salt lick.
‘Is that the Eighth Wonder?’ she whispered.
‘No, that’s an everyday wonder.’”
As readers, that’s what we all need: wonder. Bentley delivers with her fabulous combination: a thrilling, intelligent, and beautifully written story and leads us along with frightened Leah as she discovers the dark secret as to why she’s being stalked.
Oh, and the meaning of “the silver tattoo”? You’ll find out!

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NEW ONLINE

Interview with Marlen Bodden, author of The Wedding Gift reviewed above: http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/books/the-wedding-gift-293312.html

Phyllis Moore points us to some Political Poetry online: at The WebTheater: http://thewebtheater.com/2013/07/videopoetry-boom-boom-and-those-blasted-mountains/ -- "Boom Boom" the video, poetry by Crystal Good.

Are you interested in an online in-the-cloud word processor that sounds simple and intuitive (and free)? Read about Yarny: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2039649/review-get-your-writing-done-with-yarny-a-cloud-based-distraction-free-writing-environment.html#tk.nl_down

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THE E-READER REPORT WITH JOHN BIRCH: Don't Sneeze at Graphic Novels, Says Barnes & Noble!

Graphic novels are "not to be sneezed at," a lady behind an information desk at Barnes & Noble told me. She's right. Just take a look at the rapidly expanding shelves in their stores. There's an absolute boom in sales of these often brilliantly illustrated storybooks, and they're not just for kids. The e-bookstore Kobo has just partnered with Viz Media, the Japanese publisher of the popular manga and anime graphic books, adding 500 "volumes" to their collection, and they expect to add 1500 more over time. Check out Kobobooks.com who, as competitors of Amazon, also claim to offer "millions of free books."

In his July blog post, John Birch recalls the night when the first "doodle bugs," the Nazi's pilotless flying bombs, came crashing into Southeast England. Go to JohnBirchLive.blogspot.com -- a growing collection of nearly 30 short stories, articles and essays.

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NEW PUBLICATION AND PROJECT FOR RURAL WOMEN!! TIME SENSITIVE!

See http://www.grassrootswomenproject.org/ for general information, and an August 2013 only call for submissions to The Notebook: http://www.grassrootswomenproject.org/the-notebook.html

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IF YOU'RE IN NORTHERN NEW JERSEY....

There are regular, excellent, free programs and peer workshops, many at the Montclair Library and environs. To get the monthly announcements, send an e-mail request to Carl Selinger at selinger99@aol.com .

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RECOMMENDED BY BACKCHANNEL:

Backchannel says "Wow, this review sent me for a loop:" http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/17/son-philipp-meyer-review  -- "What a great-sounding new novel!!!" ...and also recommends Ben Fountain's stories http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/29/brief-encounters-che-guevara-review and a novel by Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/29/tomorrow-be-twenty-mabanckou-review

And finally: " If this ain't Politerature... I don't know what is: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/27/vida-doble-arturo-fontaine-review --- "an intense sounding book!"

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ANNOUNCEMENTS, NEWS, CONTESTS, WORKSHOPS, READINGS ETC.

Y.A. and Middle Grade Intensive Writers' Workshop Saturday, October 12 in Brooklyn. Take a look here, and also at the sponsoring business, Paper Lantern Lit Story Architects. They have an interesting alternative to writing young adult and middle grade novels on spec.

On June 20, 2013, the Poet Laureate of West Virginia, Marc Harshman, read excerpts from his wonderful long poem "A Song for West Virginia" to celebrate the Sesquicentennial Celebration of the state.

New book by Mary Akers: BONES OF AN INLAND SEA: STORIES available from http://www.press53.com/biomaryakers.html . Says National Book Award winner Andrea Barrett, "In Mary Akers' stories, as complexly intertwined as the branches of a coral reef, her passionate characters engage both each other and a richly detailed, vital physical world. An impressive achievement."

Phyllis Moore draws our attention to a reprint of original reporting on the Hatfield-McCoy feud, writing that probably was very important in creating the Appalachian stereotype of the fight' and feudin' .

Barbara Crooker has a new poem online at http://www.voicesdelaluna.com/selectpoems.html. Her website is www.barbaracrooker.com.

MountainWhispers.com Audiobooks and Ross Ballard present their 15th audio book project, an adaptation of Lee Maynard's cult classic SCREAMING WITH CANNIBALS, which will officially be released July 4th. They say, "Make sure the kiddies are in bed before you crank up the escapades of Crum's very own Jessie Stone. (Contains some Adult language and graphic scenes.)!"

 

Don't forget to get on this list for regular notices about open submissions at various literary journals and presses: CRWROPPS-B@yahoogroups.com

Normandi Ellis is teaching the following workshop (go to listed website for more information): JOURNAL TO THE SELF SEPT 9 - NOV 11 $200 Register with the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning .

Beach Writers Talk Law at Jessie Creek Winery: Sunday, Oct. 27, the First Annual Beach Writers Autumn Retreat will take place at the picturesque Jessie Creek Winery, 1 N. Delsea Drive in Cape May Court House, NJ. This one-day seminar is a satellite of North Wildwood Beach Writers Conference held in June every year. The Retreat complements the Conference's focus on writing and publishing with the next step—protecting your rights as an author. Register by Sept. 30 and pay only $125 for the entire day. After Sept. 30 the registration fee is $150 Visit nwbwc.com for all the details and registration form. You can also e-mail questions to nwbwc12@gmail.com.

Naomi Replansky's Collected Poems, published by Godine/Black Sparrow in 2012, has just won the William Carlos Williams award of the Poetry Society of America!

 

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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 via http://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 buy books online, I often go first to Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder tells you the book price WITH shipping and handling, so you can compare what you’re really going to have to pay.

A lot of people whose political instincts I respect prefer the unionized bricks-and-mortar bookstore Powells (see "About Amazon.com" above) that sells online at http://powellsbooks.com.  

Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a low cost (postage only) way to get rid of your old books and get new ones by trading 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, but other things as well. Kobobooks.com sells books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.And libraries now lend e-books too!

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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.

 

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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 at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.

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BACK ISSUES:

#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

 

Haiku for Nice Weather!

8-4-13


Piebald skies above,
White light then tree shadow pools–
A breeze lifts my smile.


After those murderous weeks of HHH in mid-July when your skin seemed to stick to the air, this is just beautiful.

Three Days of Theater in the Berkshires!

What a three days of theater:  last night it was None But the Lonely Heart: The Strange Story of Tchaikovsky and Madame von Meck which we went to see for Jonny Epstein and Ariel Bock, but was really a lovely genre of mixed music, dance, singing and letters and other personal stuff from the main people it was about.  

It was written by Eve Wolf who has an organization called the Ensemble for the Romantic Century. She’s a pianist, and performed a lot of Tchaikovsky’s work, mostly with a cellist and violinist, sometimes with songs by Tchaikovsky, sung by an expressive young tenor, also with a couple of passages of ballet by a handsome male dancer in white and gold, maybe Swan Lake regalia?  Both the tenor and the dancer were also used as objects of Tchaikovsky’s yearning, and the text was the passionate strange letters  between him and Mme. von Meck’s.  

She supported him financially, and they agreed never to meet, but would sometimes spy on one another from a distance.  She bore eleven children, a story in itself, but not this one.  The strange climax is that she dropped him suddenly-- and this production gave intimations that she was being blackmailed: either break off with him or else his homosexuality would be revealed-- anyhow, it was just a super mix of music and text, with perhaps an emphasis on the music, lots of beautiful and fascinating people and costumes to look at.  Wolf has done other pieces like this:  has anyone else?  

We saw Shakespeare & Company’s Love’s Labour’s Lost last night, first of three!  Mucho dinero, much pleasure.  Anyhow, early play, contemp with Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer’s Night Dream, probably performed first in front of the Queen herself, with a lot of typical Elizabethan things that aren’t as hilarious nowadays, such as making fun of a Spanish character for his elaborate English and having the main men disguise themselves as “Muskovites” and speak with stupid Russian accents.  And there is a pageant/play-within-a-play-- how many times does Shakespeare do that?  And how must audiences  have loved those things.  All of this, of course, gives the Company lots of room for hijinks, but there’s not much they can do with latinate word play and elaborate figures of speech, extended metaphors, etc. And I still don’t get why they did it just post WWII, except for the neat women’s frocks and some good forties songs.

But-- in spite of all that, they once again did a terrific delightful play.  I continue to wonder how they do it-- and our audience last night included two bus loads of Upward Bound students from Boston who seemed occasionally bored but also often caught up in the fun, giggling over a character being called a “dick,” which may or may not have had quite the same connotation four hundred plus years ago as today.  And we all loved the runs through the audience and the appeals to audience members, and all the hamming it up.  But still Shakespeare & Company spoke the speeches, or at least most of them.

You can miss a lot of details in Shakespeare and still get the story.  And the story in Shakespeare can be pretty bad, and you still root for the good guys-- in this case, praise good Queen Bess!-- the women who give the men their comeuppance and promise to marry them in a year if they are good.

Heat Wave Broken?

    I just found (via Google) a Scientific American article on My Brain on Hot Weather that describes studies indicating that complex thinking is harder in hot weather, possibly because it takes more energy, specifically glucose, to cool us down than heat us up. 

On the other hand, the article states, if you read to the end, which I did for once, that this is mostly true on vacation/in a strange place/during unusual weather patterns. 

Good Old Adaptable Human beings think just fine when they grew up in the tropics.  For once a scientific article that makes perfectly good common sense.

Heat wave continues; I find I can write with a fan turned directly on me, and do other very focused tasks-- final papers for my summer class, for example.  I can take my walk.

What I've had trouble doing in the heat is anything of a scanning-planning nature, such as, making appointments, making plans.  And above all-- anything that requires make-up!!

I've been doing summer work on my career, namely, giving away a free ebook and setting up a Facebook Page for my books.  I already am on regular Facebook, and find the cacophony gives me headaches. So last night, I was checking how things looked on the new page, and I saw my first indication of the outcome of the George Zimmerman trial, which gave me a real twist in the gut.

Meanwhile, in quick succession, messages from friends who are crying or already out demonstrating or-- lawyers! -- commenting that given established law, there was no way the jury could have decided otherwise. WTF, you know???

Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 162

June 28, 2013

Etel Adnan                                          Ann Patchett                                          Laura Treacy Bentley

It looks better online! -- Read latest changes and corrections online -- MSW Home

In this Issue:

Sitt Marie Rose; Team of Rivals; The Cove; Ann Patchett

The E-Reader Report with John Birch

Laura Treacy Bentley's First Novel

Announcements: Including Naomi Replansky's
award for her Collected Poems!

Free e-mail subscription to this newsletter.

To create a link to this newsletter, use this permanent link .

For Back Issues, click here.

                                                                                  

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I haven't done a Books for Readers Newsletter in more than a month. I've been travelling-- as far as Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee where I taught a master class in fiction and enjoyed the Appalachian mountains around that part of the world where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee converge. My dad was born in that region, and I used to spend summers with my grandmother in Wise County Virginia, and visit my aunt in Scott County Tennessee. I'm always struck by the love of story in Appalachia, whether read, spoken or sung. This enriches Appalachian writers' conferences, where you also find deep and abiding respect for literature and the belief in finding meaning from the path of the story. I had a lovely week-end, and recommend that everyone go to Mountain Heritage Literary Festival .
In the interstices between traveling and teaching and writing, I've been reading. I have some books you may not have heard of, and some that are doing quite well for themselves, thank you very much! Among the latter is Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which was the main source for the recent block buster movie, Lincoln. The book was on its own merits a best seller for a few weeks in 2005.
I especially enjoyed the story of Lincoln's road to the nomination for president. Kearns Goodwin emphasizes his political talent and his ability to bring the best out of men with very large egos, and she also, like so many before her, falls under the spell of Lincoln's personality and integrity. I heard people praising him my whole life, except for when they were complaining that he wasn't anti-slavery soon enough. In this book, I finally got it: his charm, and his enormous abilities and also the terrible trade offs required for dealing in a multi-party system with people whose values are corrupt.
It was a nasty, nasty war: the sheer number of deaths in battle was extraordinary. One of the excellent elements in this book is the personalization of the struggle through he use of letters and journals voices of many people, especially women like Frances (Mrs. William) Seward and Mary Lincoln and young men like Lincoln's secretaries (and future biographers) Hays and Nicolay. They tell Lincoln stories, of course, but also what it was like to have family members dying in war or coming home terribly mangled.
Other striking things: How short the war was in years; how intractable was the hatred of black people and injustice to them, not only in the south. The horrors of Mississippi in summer 1964 was, after all, only three generations after the war. The terrorism during the Civil Rights movement was in many ways a continuation of the war.
Finally, it was a book about about writing: a lot of time is spent on how Lincoln's speeches were revised, and how he-- a sharp logician and rhetorician--turned so often to storytelling to reach an understanding himself and to communicate to others.

More nonfiction: I also read the enormous doorstopper of a biography of Joseph Kennedy, THE PATRIARCH: THE REMARKABLE LIFE AND TURBULENT TIMES OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY by David Nasaw. I was at Bucknell University for a while when he was there, so I have some interest in Nasaw's career.
It took me a long time to decide I wanted to read this 800 pager about a man and family I never quite understood what was so terrific about: that is to say, I never got the romanticizing of the Kennedies, and reading about the patriarch of the family didn't make me like them or respect their politics much-- but I did get fascinated.
Even after I'd dipped into the book, I kept laying it aside. Usually, I am drawn into biographies by the childhood stories, but for some reason, I don't know if it was Nasaw or Kennedy, this one didn't really get going till Kennedy started acting in government. You'd think his years in Hollywood and his affair with Gloria Swanson would be fun, but through the first couple of hundred pages I just didn't care enough about Kennedy. What kept me reading was wanting to out about the lobotomy of the oldest Kennedy daughter, who appeared to be slow but not all that damaged until they opened up her head.
When Kennedy became ambassador to England and his kids got older, I began to get really interested. His opposition to the war– for conservative reasons– gave me a look at the Roosevelt administration I'd never had. I always vaguely thought everything was rah-rah go FDR-- well, maybe not the New Deal, but surely the Second World War was popular, yes?
Kennedy thought the Second World War had the potential to destroy capitalism,and thus should be opposed! Still, he played as best he could the part of a good soldier, representing the Roosevelt administration, at least most of the time.
Then the Kennedy boys went to war, and the familiar family catastrophes began: within ten years he lost his oldest son, lost his oldest daughter to lobotomy and his next daughter to an airplane crash. This was all long before the famous assassinations. The decimation of a family brings up feelings, no matter how much you don't like most of what Kennedy stood for.
The political parts are excellent: in the second half, Kennedy's efforts to support his sons' political careers offers a real lesson in how those things are done in the real world, with lots of money and the calling in of favors and building relationships.

Another of the books that doesn't need my praise is William Styron's Sophie's Choice, which I re-read (again?). I admire this book a lot and this time I was particularly impressed by the novel's elegant shape, although the narrator maybe makes it a little too explicit: how it begins with the noisy lovemaking bed and ends with death in the bed.
My favorites are all the parts that Sophie narrates; charmer-schizo Nathan is a superb character; Styron creates some good Nazi characters; and I adore the post-war New York City setting. It is a good book, probably (IMHO) Styron's best. I even like, up to a point, Stingo as a narrator and the writer-as-a- young artist theme, but this is also where I see the novel's flaws. There is just too much of Stingo's sex life (or lack of it). Some of it is funny, some of it is painful, but I get it much sooner than Styron gives up on writing about it! A nice boy in the late nineteen forties has a hard row to hoe with the nice girls determined to be modern but virginal. Fine, let's get on with Sophie and Nathan.
Finally, the whole theme of the young writer wanting to be "great" is painful to read, maybe too close to home for me, but his suffering reminds me that the Age of the Great-Man American Novelist seems to have petered out in depression and alcohol and buffoonery (in the case of Norman Mailer). Happily, we've still got great novels being written, without all the posturing.

                                                                               --Meredith Sue Willis

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Short Notes

Etel Adnan's small novel SITT MARIE ROSE is an amazing hundred pages set during the (last) Lebanese Civil War. An ethnically Christian woman lives with Palestinians, loves a Palestinian man, and works for their cause. An old boyfriend in the Christian militia is part of a small group who captures, interrogates, and murders her in the school where she woks with deaf children. The brief story is told in many voices: the children speak as a group, the militia men have their turn. There is hunting imagery, there is Sitt Marie Rose's feminist sensibility. The only real Christian, she says, is one who stands up for the Stranger. It is a poet's novel, searing and beautiful. Worth seeking out-- I found it as a used book on the Internet.



I admired and enjoyed reading Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant, except for the ending. Patchett is an very inventive and moving writer, and I'm a big fan of her Bel Canto. This one is good too: it is just what is says, the story of a woman who has made her life as the assistant to a charismatic magician. She is in love with him, even marries him, and he is loving towards her, but sexually attracted to men. He dies, and she discovers the secrets of his birth family.
It's all about Los Angeles and Nebraska, with well-drawn mid western characters who are firmly of their place but not condescended to. I was, however, disappointed by the ending which has what I think of as a short story ending: that is, it is clever and surprising with a dollop of "real" magic. I think this kind of thing works best in something short. It seemed too slight for the solid weight of realism that preceded it. I felt like Patchett was dodging a lot of human character-driven questions she had raised and hinted at.
Well, I always say I read novels for the journey, not for the final five pages.

My first Ron Rash novel was a short work called The Cove, with clean strong writing and a good story. Something in it seemed, however, manipulative to me. It wasn't the sentences-- he's clearly a superb craftsman-- but it was as if he planned his plot and stuck to it, whether or not it worked. The story sets up a mystery in the first pages: whose skull is in the old well? Then we go back in time to a family living in a hollow that doesn't really get enough sun for farming, where the parents are dead, the daughter shunned as a witch, the son back from the war short a hand. A stranger arrives, and we're off to the races: a lot of energy and a lot of momentum, but the deaths at the end seem to me to fit a plan rather than rise from the story.
There is an interesting author's note in the e-book version I read saying that Rash revised the book, de-emphasized one of the point-of-view characters, a one-dimensional bigoted sleazebag.


I also want to make a short mention of Chinua Achebe's Hopes and Impediments:Selected Essays by Chinua Achebe. I intend to re-read many of the essays here, especially the ones on the uses of fiction and of course the seminal "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." For now, I just want to quote from "The Truth of Fiction:"
"How often do we hear people say, 'Oh, I don't have the time to read novels,' implying that fiction is frivolous? They would generally add– lest you consider them illiterate– that they read histories or biographies, which they presume to be more appropriate to serious-minded adults. Such people are to be pitied; they are like a six-cylinder car which says: Oh, I can manage all right on three sparking-plugs, thank you very much. Well, it can manage somehow but it will sound like an asthmatic motorcycle! The life of the imagination is a vital element of our total nature. If we starve it or pollute it the quality of our life is depressed or soiled.
"For just as man is a tool-making animal and has recreated his natural world with his tools, so is he a fiction-making animal and refashions his imaginative landscape with his fictions."

I also read MONTECORE: THE SILENCE OF THE TIGER by Jonas Hassen Khemiri-- an excellent book, truly political. See Shelley Ettinger's review on POLITERATURE at:
http://politerature2012.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/montecore-the-silence-of-the-tiger/
and my response .

 

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FIRST NOVEL FROM LAURA TREACY BENTLEY

Laura Treacy Bentley's first novel THE SILVER TATTOO moves from West Virginia to Ireland where protagonist Leah Howland must face not only the terrible thing that happened to her husband, but also her own guilt and fears– and a very real and very mysterious threat to her life.
This dark literary thriller is an interesting mixture of the dark fears that pursue us when we are isolated in strange places and real life horrors that require courage and determination to face. Bentley easily combines these these with suspense and literary and folk references in a powerful combination of psychological thriller and paen to Ireland.
Bentley is a poet whose work has been praised by Ray Bradbury. For more commentary on The Silver Tattoo, see the review in the Herald-Dispatch .

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RESPONSES TO LAST ISSUE

Naomi Replansky says, "Thank you, as always, for the newsletter. And for sending me now to Willkie Collins. I've been re-reading George Gissing with great admiration, in particular for his NEW GRUB STREET."

Phyllis Moore liked Joel Weinberger's review of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES and recommends Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces by Cory MacLauchlin.

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THE E-READER REPORT WITH JOHN BIRCH: THE BOOKSCOUT WILL TELL YOU WHAT TO READ NEXT

Publishers Random House have launched a mobile Facebook app called BookScout, which it describes as an "e-book discovering engine." It goes to great lengths to learn about your reading likes and dislikes, and then recommends books you'll probably enjoy but probably wouldn't have discovered on your own. Book Scout recommends Random House's books, of course, but also pretty much every book in the listings of major distributors, such as Ingram. The app will offer you a list of retailers that have your book of choice, and with a few more mouse clicks you'll have bought.
To see how it works, just type "BookScout" into Facebook.

About John Birch: The great Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock once wrote a piece called "Men Who Have Shaved Me," and John's decided to do his version of it. Read "Clip Joints" in his blog: www.JohnBirchLive.blogspot.com -- a growing collection of nearly 30 of his short stories, articles and essays.

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READERS RECOMMEND

Phyllis Moore reviewed Jackson Versus Witchy Wanda by Belinda Anderson on Amazon.


Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya recommends that we "try anything by the remarkable Etel Adnan (http://www.eteladnan.com/about.html), whose sensibility I've always found lapidary."
I was sold. See my short review of Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose above.

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GOOD READING AND MORE ONLINE

Don't miss Marc Kaminsky's wonderful piece in Tikkun about the fate of the Palestinian village of Lifta near Jerusalem: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/in-the-midst-of-the-ruins-activists-struggle-to-save-the-palestinian-village-of-lifta

There's an excellent story about a shift in relationship between two school boys by John Birch at http://www.johnbirchlive.blogspot.com/#!http://johnbirchlive.blogspot.com/2013/04/rite-of-passage.html

Learn about Jane Austen's use of latinate words to distinguish the class of her characters: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/publish/comtxt/ct18-19/24deforest-johnson.pdf

If you want more on spying, see this Guardian piece on the FBI and Carlos Fuentes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/fbi-monitored-carlos-fuentest-communist

There's a lovely, short, online documentary about McDowell County, West Virginia.

 

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BACKCHANNEL RECOMMENDS:

Our friend Backchannel sends the following notes:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/31/aftermath-rhidian-brook-review . "Read the first sentence of the last paragraph. I love what it says about how 'politics and history penetrate even the most intimate moments of its characters' emotional lives.'"

• "A book about life on a kibbutz that explores what can go wrong when people try to create a Utopia: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/08/between-friends-amos-oz-review . Other bits address wider political issues. "

• "Politerature, Soviet-style: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/10/banner-passing-clouds-nicholson-review Reminds me of this funny movie, Children of the Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1qvkQopoAI Trailer doesn't really do it justice."

• About a dystopian "world that capitalism has failed":
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/10/after-tomorrow-gillian-cross-review

• "This novel, taking on the "shortcomings of the women's movement," incites controversy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/08/wrecked-charlotte-roche-review ."

• "A YA book of a deep nature: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/05/noble-conflict-malorie-blackman-review."

• "This one looks humorous: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/07/the-trade-secret-newman-review "

 

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ANNOUNCEMENTS, NEWS, CONTESTS, WORKSHOPS, READINGS ETC.

Great news: Naomi Replansky's Collected Poems, published by Godine/Black Sparrow in 2012, has just won the William Carlos Williams award of the Poetry Society of America!

 

The Ice Mountain Writers in the Hampshire County area of West Virginia will be meeting in Romney, West Virginia July 18, 3013, at 2pm at the library in Romney.

Alice Boatwright's book COLLATERAL DAMAGE (reviewed http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/bfrarchive156-160.html#issue157) won the Bronze Medal for Literary Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Alice says it feels just like the Olympics.

 

Halvard Johnson's book of poems Remains to Be Seen has been published by Spuyten Duyvil Press. http://www.amazon.com/Remains-To-Be-Seen-Works/dp/1933132787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367618323&sr=8-1&keywords=Halvard+Johnson REMAINS TO BE SEEN ]

 

June 29, 2013: The Literary Image and Impact of Breece D'J Pancake: Native Son Symposium. 1140 Smith Street, Milton, WV 304-743-6711 Speakers: Dr. Grace Toney Edwards 10:00 a.m. An Overview of Pancake's Life and Career Dr. Rob McDonald 11:00 a.m. Native Ground, the Role of Place In Shaping Literary Imagination Marie Manilla 1:30 p.m. An Analysis of Pancake's Writing Panel of Peers 2:30 p.m. Breece As We Knew Him Phyllis Wilson Moore 3:30 p.m. The Impact of Pancake's Work

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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 via http://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 buy books online, I often go first to Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder tells you the book price WITH shipping and handling, so you can compare what you’re really going to have to pay.

A lot of people whose political instincts I respect prefer the unionized bricks-and-mortar bookstore Powells (see "About Amazon.com" above) that sells online at http://powellsbooks.com.  

Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a low cost (postage only) way to get rid of your old books and get new ones by trading 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, but other things as well. And libraries now lend e-books too!

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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.

 

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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 at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.

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"I hereby release my Goodreads review under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License." -- Joel Weinberger

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BACK ISSUES:

#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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