Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind Doubleday-Random House, 2000 Worthlessness. Disappointment. Boredom. Hellishness. Despair. The eleven stories in Lynn Coady’s debut collection (which followed her astonishingly successful debut novel Strange Heaven) are not for the faint-of-heart. Worthlessness, from “A Great Man’s Passing” “It was her fault because she had done
“Oh, I just don’t have time for fiction.” “I want to read about the Real World.” “Novels are a waste when you could be learning something.” Sentiments like these have infuriated me countless times because my reader’s heart belongs to fiction. I collect quotes like these that I imagine tossing out
Back at the beginning of December, the idea of reading Alice Munro’s stories from the beginning, through her most recent collection, Too Much Happiness, just seemed like a good idea. But now that I’ve actually begun. Now that it’s moved from the sphere of the possible to the sphere of
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 2004 In Anne of Green Gables, Anne muses: "How do you know but that it hurts a geranium's feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else?” The act of naming is one of primary importance -- from PEI to India
Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me Freehand Books, 2010 It’s not just a problem for the curly-headed folks: even with straight hair, there are tangles, knots, and snarls. Everybody can relate to the struggle to make a course smooth once more. And these days, increasingly
