Like many of us, Richard Bausch is a worrier. In an interview he said, “In every
circumstance, all my life, my mind shows me the possible bad outcome: someone walks down steps, and before I can do anything to head the image off, I see a fall, a catastrophe.” Many … Read More
Category: fiction
“No one was coming toward the house yet, but things wouldn’t stay the way they were much longer.”
When Ann Beattie met John Updike, he said “You figured out how to write an entirely different kind of story.” Her stories were “the” stories my English department discussed in the 1980s because they were so revolutionary. T. Coraghessan Boyle wrote in the New York Times, “Her stories are … Read More
“His strong point [was] his odd ability to fall feetfirst into the little pocket of someone else’s world for those few seconds.”
My favorite book of 2013 is about three grown-up siblings and their families, all of whom have one important thing in common: they aren’t where they wanted to be. They don’t feel at home in the choices that they’ve made. What’s remarkable about this novel is the way we see … Read More
“Even then I sensed this . . . would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.”
This novel is a collection of beautiful sentences about self-discovery. For example: “It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure.” (52) When … Read More
“They could tell it was Jun Do who’d picked which orphans ate first and which were left with watery spoonfuls.”
When Jun Do was a child living in an orphanage in North Korea, one of his responsibilities was to decide which of his peers would be punished. That was just the beginning. As an adult, he was often in the impossible position of trying to let the most innocent suffer … Read More
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“Only the past interests me now.”
Albert Einstein wrote that the separation between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. This idea is at play in Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. The narrator is an old woman who looks back and concludes that she has waged a … Read More