Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons is a marvelous send up of brooding romantic literature in the vein of the Bronte sisters. In addition to a crazy woman upstairs, a dark and hunky cad, crazy gibberish talking locals, and a plucky dauntless heroine, Gibbons gives her reader some hilarious dialogue and overall goofiness that is difficult to resist. Gibbons represents the best of British humor a la Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome and of women writers of the 1930s such as Dawn Powell and […]
Being of Two Minds
Patricia Highsmith might be best known for her Ripley novels and their film adaptations, but Strangers on a Train, her first novel, set the path for her career and has likewise been adapted several times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. It is an unsettling, suspenseful psychological thriller that features brutal crime and some deep philosophical pondering. Guy Haines, an up and coming architect, is on his way home to Metcalf, TX, with the expectation that his philandering wife Miriam is going to finally […]
Clueless
I had a lot of good reasons for not wanting to read this book. Even before all the pearl-clutching reviews came out bemoaning the racism of a beloved character, before the stories that pointed out how we’ve always misunderstood the race component of To Kill a Mockingbird [TKAM] anyway, I suspected that a sequel to a classic novel was bound to disappoint. And the strange circumstances of its publication, after decades of the author and her sister saying it never would be, further dampened any […]
Not every unhappy family is interesting
Reviews of this novel from NPR and The New York Times were effusive. The NPR reviewer called Among the Ten Thousand Things suspenseful and compared it favorably to Gone Girl. The NYT reviewer was impressed with Pierpont’s writing style and the way she structured her novel, as well as with her mature character development given that Pierpont is only 28 and this is her first novel. While I can see why the NYT reviewer feels this way, my overall impression of this story was … […]
My Hero
If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Fran Ross’ Oreo was a brand new hip novel from a humorist with a brilliant future ahead of her. It’s intellectual and witty and funny as hell. Yet Fran Ross (1935-1985) wrote and published this gem in 1974, her one and only novel newly reissued by New Directions Publishing. Her views on race and women’s rights are timeless; setting up her story as a modern day version of the myth of Theseus (and the Minotaur […]
The Iran We Didn’t Know as Told by a Damn Smart Woman
Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel is both an autobiography and an historical/political education. Her simple yet bold black and white drawings beautifully illustrate the story of her childhood in Teheran in the early 1980s, her teen years in Vienna and her return to Iran in 1989. As an observer of and participant in Iran’s revolutionary upheaval, Satrapi gives a personal view of events and their effect on her family’s welfare while neatly outlining the complicated and complex national story that serves as their context. This is […]
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