At first glance, this line from Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” suggests that history repeats itself. This view is written in stone – literally – on the base of the National Archives’ sculpture. The Harvard Gazette and the University of Chicago Magazine use this quote in articles about the ways … Read More
Category: fiction
“It was impossibly large and full of beauty and danger in equal parts – and we wanted it all.”
Paula McLain’s novel The Paris Wife describes Hemingway’s earliest years as a novelist writing in Paris after WWI from the perspective of his wife, Hadley. It’s a wonderful novel, set in one of the most dynamic literary periods, where James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway … Read More
“Can you tell a story that doesn’t begin, it’s just suddenly happening?”
In each of the six short stories in this collection, which won the 2015 National book Award, things suddenly happen on the first page: there are no descriptions of the setting, no background information. Instead, the story seems to be already happening. In an interview, author Adam Johnson said, … Read More
“Keeping secrets was the family business.”
Five Intriguing Ideas from 2016 Books
This blog focuses on one idea from one book each week, and so selecting just five from the 50 or so that I’ve published in 2016 is a challenge. But after looking through them all, I have to say that the ideas that I enjoyed the most from the books … Read More
Five Best Novels of 2016
The five novels that rose to the top of my 2016 list are:
The best word to describe Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton is exquisite. What I love about Strout is her ability to dive right in to the heat of the moment without engaging in melodrama or … Read More
“There’s work to be done, there are plots to be plotted, there are scams to be scammed, there are villains to be misled!”
This may be Margaret Atwood’s greatest masterpiece. In Hag-Seed, she retells Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by turning it inside-out and adding a layer. It’s a play within a play within a novel. This restructuring results in a hybrid form of story-telling that’s actually very funny. In her version, prisoners discuss … Read More
“The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”
I predict that this opening sentence of Ann Patchett’s new novel, Commonwealth, will become one of those classic opening sentences that creative writing instructors refer to when talking about creating tension right out of the gate. Who is Albert Cousins? Why did he bring gin to a christening party? … Read More
“You need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”
To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Hogarth commissioned “today’s best-loved novelists” to retell “the world’s favourite playwright’s” dramas. Anne Tyler’s novel Vinegar Girl is based on “The Taming of the Shrew,” a play that Tyler said she hated because it’s “totally misogynistic” and the people “behave … Read More
“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”
In a Paris Review interview, Jesse Barron observes that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work is “so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary.” What makes it revolutionary is Knausgaard’s goal to write “as close to life as possible” even if it means “breaking” the form of the traditional novel. He said, … Read More
“Felicity rubbed a bit between her fingers. It was gray, just grit.”
This is how the great-granddaughter of Iowa farmers Walter and Rosanna Langdon describes what’s left of the topsoil on the original family farm when she visits it in the closing pages of The Last Hundred Years Trilogy by Jane Smiley. We can see the how this family’s decisions played … Read More
“Rosa was a perfect example of an only child, thought Claire – she behaved herself, but it was because she was always on the stage and the lights were always up. “
If you were a novelist, what compliment would you most like to see in a review of your work? A comparison to Tolstoy, perhaps? That compliment was in fact given in the British newspaper, the Guardian, in a review of Jane Smiley’s novel Early Warnings, the second … Read More
“I have often pictured her stage-managing a fashion show of monsters.”
As unlikely as it sounds, this quote comes from a letter of recommendation for an associate dean of student affairs applicant, who also happens to be the former lover of the creative writing professor who sends all of the letters in this hilarious expostulatory novel. His comments become “more elaborately … Read More
“Why couldn’t she be more like his other teachers, who looked at him blankly the following fall when he said hello to them outside Woolworths, having in a matter of months forgotten his existence entirely?”
No contemporary writer is better at convincing the reader that a person with many faults can be a hero than Richard Russo. His mixture of empathy, honesty, warmth and wit made Sully a heroic figure in Nobody’s Fool and makes Doug Raymer the equally-unlikely hero in the sequel Everyone’s … Read More
