Fiction is the wildest form of writing. It attracts explorers, artists, and fighters. Their goals might be to punch a hole in the wall between the writer and the reader (Knausgaard), or tell us how the idea of equality fell short (Whitehead), or show us how … Read More
Author: Kate Stover
Ten Years of Writing about Poetry Has Taught Me This
Poetry is the most textured form of writing. It attracts artists who weave sounds and images with mystery. They may be cranky (T. S. Eliot) or homesick (Heaney) or humorous (Billy Collins). They may believe that poetry is an instrument of investigation (Jane … Read More
Ten Years of Writing about Memoir Has Taught Me This
Memoir is the most entrepreneurial form of writing. It attracts inventors who are willing to take risks and use nontraditional skills and interests. Though their goal might be as simple as recording history, or telling stories, or finding meaning, their materials are original. They may use stand-up … Read More
“We get the Dialectic fairly well.”
Why would a poem written in 1940 be included in The Best American Poetry 2023? W. H. Auden’s brilliant poem about contradictions wasn’t published during his lifetime because he questioned its value. Auden was a great poet who doubted his greatness. Even when he won awards, such as the … Read More
“I’ve spent my whole life studying her . . . because I always want to do whatever I can in any given moment to make or keep Mom happy.”
What happens when a stand-up comedy routine becomes a memoir? In this case, it becomes a best-seller. This book started as a one-woman show about growing up trying to please a mother who was her best friend and controller of everything from showers to diet to wiping after using … Read More
“Memories are then replaced by different joys and sorrows, and unbelievably . . . you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”
This novel makes us ask: which versions of our memories are to be believed? Is it really true that the protagonist has all that she’s ever wanted? Is she hiding something? From whom? I disagree with the reviewer who described this novel as “bucolically simple.” What about the reference to … Read More
“Where does the road to ruin start?”
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is written as a recovery journal by a young man in Appalachia who was born to a single mother experiencing addiction. It’s the story that author Barbara Kingsolver wanted to write for years because every family she knows in her part of Appalachia has lost … Read More
“…I see in the flashlight beam, a world of dust . . . massing, revolving back, splitting into twos and threes and lonely ones—”
The poet Rasma Haidri continues, “and I know I orchestrated this fugue of spheres.” I love the way hope infuses this poem – and many of the poems – in this collection. We see stories about people who are looking for greater happiness, and who are finally able to change … Read More
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
Because we all make questionable decisions from time to time, it’s only natural to wonder if we are our own worst enemy, or if we are the hero in our life, or something in between. Many memoirs begin with this question. However, this book is not a memoir: it’s a … Read More
“I live on the boundary of the outside and the inside.”
I’ve always believed that the best way to take the pulse of a bookstore is to check out the display on the front table. Instead of best-sellers, this bookstore featured Czech poets – a treat for someone like me who knows virtually nothing about the literary traditions of this country. … Read More
“I had lost my self-confidence where you were concerned, had traded it for a boundless sense of guilt
I’ve been thinking about Kafka’s story about turning into an insect this week, and why he would write a story about a young man who shamed his family by turning into a useless cockroach. A Czech bookstore had a book-length letter that Kafka wrote to his father, which was … Read More
“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”
This story about a man who turned into a type of insect has been called surreal, humorous. a horror story, neurotic, and “the greatest short story in the history of literary fiction.” I visited a museum devoted t0 Kafka in Prague. It was the weirdest, most unpleasant museum I’ve ever … Read More
“Then she leaned over and bit him hard on the cheek.”
Even though this biography of novelist Barbara Pym was picked as a “Best Book of the Year 2021” by the London Times, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph, I was initially reluctant to read it. I didn’t want to learn things that would make me think less of … Read More
“I expect you to beat the odds. That’s my gift to you, in fact, that gift of expectations.”
At the end of this novel, Peter Sullivan tells the hard-scrabble students in his English class that he believes in them and expects them to succeed, even if no one else has ever had faith in them before. What a wonderful gift! In fact, in the closing pages, we … Read More
“I have learned,” said the Philosopher, “that the head does not hear anything until the heart has listened, and that what the heart knows to-day, the head will understand to-morrow.”
Interesting ideas sparkle throughout this novel. Here are two examples: “Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will” and “…for life may not be consecutive, but explosive and variable, else it is a shackled and timorous slave.” It was written a hundred years ago by an Irish poet … Read More