Category: race
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Faulkner at his Knottiest(The Faulkner Project) Go Down, Moses from Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 Library of America pp. 1-281 ***** I had an odd thought when I began this novel, the thirteenth in my survey of Faulkner’s work: This is the real Faulkner. It’s a strange thing to say about a man who had already written four or five masterpieces, ...Read more
- They’d Even Cheat Another Snopes(The Faulkner Project) The Hamlet from Faulkner Novels 1936-1940. Library of America pp.727-1075 ***** The most surprising thing about Faulkner’s Snopes novels is that he took so long to get around to them. He was apparently writing sketches about the Snopes in his twenties, before his career really began, and wrote several versions of the story ...Read more
- Faulkner to the Nth Degree(The Faulkner Project) Absalom, Absalom! from Faulkner Novels 1936-1940. Library of America. ***** I have a long-ago memory of a PBS documentary that I watched about Faulkner—I guess it was an American Masters—in which he supposedly said to someone, after completing Absalom, Absalom!, “This is the greatest novel ever written by an American.” An oddly revealing ...Read more
- Caught Between Two Worlds(The Faulkner Project) Light in August from Faulkner Novels 1930-1935. Library of America. pp. 399-774. ***** Of Faulkner’s great novels, this is the one I like the least. I don’t believe I’d previously read it more than once, though I was shocked at how much of it I remembered, including whole paragraphs and sentences that stuck ...Read more
- Signifying Everything(The Faulkner Project) The Sound and the Fury from Faulkner Novels 1926-1929 Library of America pp. 877-1141. ***** I think of this as Faulkner’s greatest novel, which means that no one in America has written a better one. If there is a Great American Novel (there isn’t), this is it. This is my fifth or sixth reading ...Read more
- The World Opens Like a Flower (The Faulkner Project) Flags in the Dust from William Faulkner Novels 1926-1929. Library of America. pp. 541-875. ***** In October of 1927, in the rush and enthusiasm of finishing his third novel, his longest and most ambitious by far, William Faulkner sent this note to his publisher, Horace Liveright. “At last and certainly, * * * I ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artists Through a Boozy HazeEarly Novels and Stories by James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country. Library of America. 970 pp. In the midst of the endless current theorizing about race and sexuality and gender identity, and talk of all the books we must read (I hate to be told I must read a book), ...Read more
- Getting Roped InTed Lasso a series by Brendan Hunt et al. On Apple TV. With Jason Sudekis, Hannah Waddington, Nick Mohammed, Juno Temple. **** A suitable subtitle: Portrait of a Doofus. It’s hard to believe that my wife and I spent three or four evenings (once a week, on our Friday movie night) being somewhat exasperated but often entertained ...Read more
- She Never MellowedThe Last of Her Kind a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 375 pp. $25.00. In one of her novels—I think it was What Are You Going Through—Sigrid Nunez quoted the famous first line of The Good Soldier, though I don’t think she identified the book by name: “This is the saddest story I ...Read more
- Born WriterWhat Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young. Harper Collins. 320 pp. $15.99 Damon Young is famous as a blogger, co-founder of the website Very Smart Brothas, and in What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker has done something deceptively difficult: pulled together a collection of essays all of which stand perfectly well on ...Read more
- Man of IntegrityWashington: A Life by Ron Chernow. Penguin. 904 pp. $21.00. I brought this massive volume with me to our cabin in Asheville because I wanted to be occupied in our self-isolation, and occupied I have been. It is not, I would say, quite the masterpiece that Grant is, but that may be because Grant was a ...Read more
- You Think You Got ProblemsThe Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars by Meghan Daum. Gallery Books. 224 pp. $27.00. **** I’ve been thinking a lot about my college days lately, perhaps because I’m coming up on my 50th reunion. If I could name one overwhelming sentiment that characterized my generation’s arrival at college, it was: don’t ...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)