I don’t have a strong affiliation for or with Peter Taylor, the way I do with several other Southern writers (Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston etc). Instead, he was one of those figures talked about in the periphery of a few literature classes I took in college that were labeled as Southern Fiction or Southern Literature, as well as author classes. But yet, we never read any of his work. He is kind of exalted in a lot of ways, and moderately famous–having […]
My, my. A body does get around.
This is yet another Faulkner reread for me. I took a Faulkner class my junior year of college and did my best, but it turns out being 15 years older just makes these things easier. I also took my time more with this one, so there’s that. A Light in August is a more thematically challenging novel than say As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, and it’s somewhere in between in terms of difficulty in reading. This novel is “straightforward” in a sense, in […]
He believed himself thus at the centre of life
Every dipshit grad student boy you’ve ever met has fancied himself a kind of Thomas Wolfe in his own way…at least when they’re 23 and studying literature (and were me), even if they don’t know this novel or his story. It’s the story of leaving home, reckoning with it in a large experimental novel, and not exactly being welcomed back home….until you are, and it’s ruined for you because now they love you again. This is an incredibly audacious novel. My copy comes in at […]
When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
I don’t want to tell you what this book does, as a piece of fiction, but I will tell you what it’s about. This is a kind of sequel, kind of companion piece to the other Kate Atkinson novel Life after Life, which I listened on a long hike. At first in that one it was frustrating to keep up with the premise, which involves the same character starting and restarting life as she keeps hitting the same fatal snags, and sort of nudging her choices […]
A wry self-awareness missing from so many takedowns of generations of youth.
The Group Here’s a line from the Wikipedia about this book: “Notably, Norman Mailer for The New York Review of Books wrote that, “her book fails as a novel by being good but not nearly good enough…she is simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel.” [6]“ While many of you likely know Norman Mailer as the grump who won’t stop drinking iced tea at the Dragon Fly Inn in Stars Hollow, you might not know he was once a notable piece of shit. That’s […]
“I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason.”
The Country Girls Trilogy The Country Girls Book one of three. This book exudes charm. It’s about two friends growing up in rural Ireland and sort of waiting on the cusp of their lives to start. Caithleen is rambunctious and energetic and sexually charged, even in her teens, and dreams of running off to the “big city” for her education and her adventures. Whereas Bridget is more staid and safe. They both end up in school, have some minor misadventures, and come home in their […]
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