So Marilyn Monroe has been dead for more than 50 years, and so the uncomfortable attention in this novel is long past the subject’s personal pain. And while Joyce Carol Oates’s novel can feel a little ghoulish at times (for example, Arthur Miller was still alive when this came out–although he comes across perfectly nice in this book…not so much for Joe Dimaggio), she is not the first, the last, or the worst to do so. In fact, implicit in this novel is the awareness […]
If there are things you don’t know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it in with a wholly emotional answer
I am bummed because there’s apparently only one picture of Paul Scotte available online. I keep finding a lot of pictures associated with him…especially a picture of Galway Kinnell…but also like Paul Ryan. Anyway, this is the second novel in the Raj Quartet. And I am curious to know how far ahead he planned these novels, because this is both the continuation of the story, but also not. And in some ways it’s a deconstruction of how novels continue on stories. So the first novel […]
This shit about being fearless before death ain’t got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir—even franks and rice taste good when you’re hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep.
This novel is about a prison called “Falconer” and not about a falconer. So it’s not about a boy and his hawk, which I thought was possible, or a metaphor for a loss of center or control in the world ala an allusion to “The Second Coming” by Yeats, which I also thought. Nor does it remind me much of John Cheever’s short fiction, of which I have read a fair amount. Also, I had a student years ago who really liked a John Cheever […]
They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.
Mary Beard describes the opening of this novel, and because of that I decided to read it. Phew…first off, beware the audiobooks of this one. It’s a public domain book and even though it wasn’t presented as a Librivox production, my edition had like five different narrators, and it was rough going. Anyway, this is a funny book. It’s presented as an adventure novel ala Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, or even the parodied films in UP. It’s about three […]
We have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.
This would be a fan favorite here I feel. Mary Beard’s book is slim by its very nature because it’s a transcription of two speeches given before and after Brexit/Trump. And you can feel that difference when you read them. Mary Beard is apparently a public intellectual and fixture in British television. Being American, I didn’t know this, but I did know her as a prominent historian. I read SPQR and I maybe reviewed it here (I forget what year I read it), and thought it […]
Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire
Somehow I never read this one as a kid. I think I recall my brother reading it and being super scared by it. Which is strange, because it IS terrifying, but I don’t think kids would be particularly vulnerable to it, as opposed to like It or The Stand. And then as an adult, I avoided it because I figured it would be outdated or cheesy (blaming the outdated and cheesy movie for that), but since they are thinking about remaking the movie, I figured why not. Oh! […]
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