Tag: Book Review
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OUT OF FAVOR
Back in 2005, I discovered Irish author John Banville and his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea. His protagonist Max Morden is recently widowed and dealing with earlier losses in his life. Personally, I found Morden to be insufferably self-absorbed—which is a cruel thought, really—the man is in mourning! And yet that is the drum-beat of…
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MUSCULAR FICTION
We writers are a chummy group. We often attend the same university classes, study under the same mentors, cheer each other on, and cry in our beer together. It doesn’t much matter whether we write poetry or prose–the challenges and defeats are the same. And the job does not get any easier as publishers go…
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FROM CAIRO TO TEXAS
As a former journalist, I am interested in the career of others in the profession—and that of Lawrence Wright has confounded me for some time. Why does the author of the internationally acclaimed book, The Looming Tower, choose to write two politically charged books on Texas in later years? That strikes me as a strange…
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HARDING: THIS OTHER EDEN
Paul Harding roared onto the literary scene in 2010 by winning the Pulitzer for his first novel, Tinkers—a beautiful work of art marked by its rhythmic prose reflective of his musical background. Harding’s third novel, This Other Eden, certainly maintains his reputation for lyrical, complex writing that forces you past the surface plot into deeper…
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ROSSETTI’S GOBLIN MEN
Almost 30 years ago I came upon a tiny “gift book” containing Christina Rossetti’s 567-line ballad Goblin Market, illustrated by the art of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Back then I was a businesswoman, years removed from my early college classes in English literature, so I did not tend to “analyze” my reads quite so…
My Writerly Life 