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
Author: Kate Stover
“…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
“You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully.”
The last word of this sentence stunned me. The Annie Dillard I know is one of the boldest writers. Could she experience fear when writing? She does. She says, “In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles.” Then, she looks for parts that look … Read More
“Fiction . . . is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web . . .”
Virginia Woolf continues, “attached ever so lightly, perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves.” It’s only when the web is torn in the middle, says Woolf, that we see that … Read More
“It’s quite therapeutic going through the archives.”
Some memoirists want to record their history, others wish to tell great stories, and others, like Pamela Anderson, want to make sense of their lives. She is more interested in exploring “Who am I – when I’m alone?” than in the events that made headlines. She looks for answers in … Read More
“When I wrote my book ‘On Writing Well,’ I had a definite model in mind. . . it was Alec Wilder’s book about music.”
A veteran of WWII, William Zinsser was one of the first to give American writers advice that might be described as “touchy-feely.” In his classic On Writing Well, he says that he is most “interested in the intangibles that produce good writing – confidence, enjoyment, intention, integrity.” He … Read More
“Many years before, Abacus had come to the conclusion that the greatest of heroic stories have the shape of a diamond on its side.”
We are 500 pages into the story when this observation about the ideal structure for stories appears: “Beginning at a fine point, the life of the hero expands outward through youth as he begins to establish his strengths and fallibilities, his friendships and enmities….but at some untold moment, the two … Read More
“Twelve years after Robin’s death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.”
Even though I am not normally drawn to murder mysteries, I read this novel because Donna Tartt demonstrates how a writer can successfully break the rules. None of her characters are likeable; instead, they are suffering, or damaged, or limited, or all three. The plot does not have a satisfying … Read More