Category: american-literature
- It’s All Freddie’s FaultHarlem Shuffle a novel by Colson Whitehead. Anchor Books. 318 pp. $17.00. ***** Colson Whitehead, it seems, can do anything as a writer. The Underground Railroad—which first brought the writer to my attention—was a wild fantasy about life under slavery and about the African American experience. It won the National Book Award and was made into ...Read more
- It Ain’t WorkThis Is How I Spend My Holidays My family and I just spent a week in Pittsburgh. The purpose of the visit for me was to see my brother and his wife, to re-engage in the conversation that he and I have been having for the last sixty years or so, taking up where we left ...Read more
- Far Out, ManTripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book from Maxine Hong Kingston Library of America. Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor. pp 479-864. **** This novel, published in 1989, is the quintessential Sixties novel (and seems to be the only novel that Maxine Hong Kingston has published, though she was a famous writer by the time it came out, having published ...Read more
- Inventing the BookThe Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. From Kingston Library of America. Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor. pp. 1-180. ***** China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston. From Kingston. Library of America. Viet Thanh Nguyen, editor. pp. 181-477. ***** I’ve heard this said about other writers but was never sure what it meant: Maxine Hong Kingston writes as if ...Read more
- All VoiceTrain Whistle Guitar from Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems Library of America pp. 1-141. The Spyglass Tree from Albert Murray: Collected Novels & Poems Library of America pp. 141-309. Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray. Random House. 399 pp. I haven’t posted in some time for a variety of reasons: ...Read more
- Devastating But ImportantThe Nickel Boys a novel by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 213 pp. $24.95 ***** I got this book as a gift many months ago, and it has sat on my shelf ever since. The problem wasn’t anything about Colson Whitehead; I loved The Underground Railroad and actually heard him read from it in Durham. He’s a person ...Read more
- He Got a D in English at Ole MissThe Life of William Faulkner, Volume One: The Past Is Never Dead 1897-1934. By Carl Rollyson. University of Virginia Press. 476 pp. $34.95 ***1/2 This is the third biography of William Faulkner I’ve read, and I should mention right off the bat—something I don’t remember ever saying before—that I didn’t read every word. I read Joseph ...Read more
- Voices of New YorkLush Life a novel by Richard Price. Picador. 455 pp. $15.00 **** Two guys from the projects in New York, Little Dap and Tristan, have a scheme to make money. They’ll go out late and mug some bar hoppers in the East Village to get cash, go uptown and buy cocaine in quantity, come back, divide ...Read more
- Me EitherI Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel By Percival Everett. Graywolf Press. 234 pp. $16.00 **** There is a kind of writer who plans out his books in great detail. No less a literary eminence than P.G. Wodehouse, for instance, spent weeks planning and taking notes and writing outlines in order to write one of his ...Read more
- Pass the BottleAll My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers a novel by Larry McMurtry. Liveright. 277pp. $15.95 **** Everybody loves a story about a fuck-up. When you read about a guy who is as likely to spend the night on a couch in the university library as he is in his bed at home (he has a ...Read more
- Daily Life, Sans EthnographyThe Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle. Penguin Press. 348 pp. $28.00. **** I’m having an odd experience with The Empathy Diaries. I absolutely loved reading the book night after night, but as I look back find it difficult to put into words what I liked so much. Not normally my problem. Sherry Turkle is ...Read more
- The Mario Puzo SolutionErasure by Percival Everett. Graywolf Press. 265pp. $16.00 ***** For much of my reading of Erasure, I thought it was a sad novel at the heart of which—as a novel within a novel—was a wicked satire. By the end, really just the last couple of pages, I realized the whole thing was a wicked satire. Yet ...Read more
- You Can Too Go Home Again(The Faulkner Project) William Faulkner Novels 1926-1962 Library of America. Five volumes. 5454 pp. $157.00 ***** I began this project on a whim last June with a nagging question: why did my father, dying of leukemia at the age of 47, read almost nothing but Faulkner in his final years? I had the second volume of ...Read more
- Old Master(The Faulkner Project) The Reivers, a Reminiscence from William Faulkner Novels 1957-1962. Library of America pp. 723-921. ***** In the summer of 1961, though he had recently written a friend that he was ready to give up writing, William Faulkner sat down to write a story he’d had in mind for some time. He wrote the ...Read more
- U R a Snopes(The Faulkner Project) The Mansion from William Faulkner Novels 1957-1962 Library of America pp. 327-723 ***** Somewhat to my surprise, this time around I enjoyed The Mansion the most of all three Snopes novels. Part of the reason is that I had just read the others; I suspect that when I read this novel the first ...Read more
- Ratliff Was a Zen MasterVladimir Kyrilytch, That Is Though pedantry denies It’s plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens I don’t know who was Faulkner’s favorite among his narrators, in the Snopes novels and elsewhere. Sometimes I think it’s (for me the rather tiresome) Gavin Stevens, a lawyer who likes to elaborate endlessly, or maybe Charles Mallison, Stevens’ ...Read more
- Flem Makes His Move(The Faulkner Project) The Town from William Faulkner Novels 1957-1962 Library of America pp. 1-326 **** It’s an irony of William Faulkner’s career that he finally became financially solvent—and began to receive kudos in his own country—for work that is far inferior to his best. Intruder in the Dust put him over the top financially, primarily ...Read more
- Fable Attraction(The Faulkner Project) A Fable by William Faulkner. Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 Library of America pp. 665-1072. *** A Fable is an odd book in the Faulkner universe. It’s the longest of his novels; it’s always sat there on the shelf looking imposing beside such shorter masterpieces as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. ...Read more
- For a What?(The Faulkner Project) Requiem for a Nun from Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 pp. 471-665 Library of America $40.00 **** I’ve always loved the title Requiem for a Nun. Haven’t loved it enough to read the book, but it had a certain ring to it. I once saw, in the Duke library, a French translation, which I liked ...Read more
- Faulkner’s Breakthrough(The Faulkner Project) Intruder in the Dust from Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 Library of America pp. 284-471 $40.00 ***1/2 In 1940 William Faulkner wrote his publisher seeking an advance on what he called a “blood and thunder mystery novel,” one in which a black man was arrested for murder, put in a jail cell, and solved the ...Read more
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)