The Known World by Edward P. Jones landed on my TBR when I heard him interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on “Writers & Company”. More than twenty years ago. But Jones was recently named for The Paris Review’s Hadada Award (nominated, received), and I determined this spring would see it
Just when my thoughts were etching a loop as I struggled to describe Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I came across this Joy Williams quotation*: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” That is, indeed,
Whenever I see someone working on their Classics Spin projects, I wonder whether I would be more dedicated to this kind of reading if I approached it with a plan: of course I would be. But this isn’t much different than knowing it would be better to walk around
Louise Erdrich and Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan and Elizabeth Strout: these are some of the writers whose stories about parenting, and being parented, stand out in my mind. Claudia Dey’s fiction could be included here, too, although her stories spiral around alienation and abandonment—the ways in which those who
Poetry is a place into which we can disappear from pain. In these collections, there are many other themes explored, but these passages intertwined like threads through my reading. In “A Toothless Crackhead Was the Mascot” from Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015): “This begins the concept
