A man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a figleaf. |
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Yusuf Hamied | World AIDS Day
FRI: My Book World | Sarah Moore Wagner's Swan Wife
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THURS: A Writer's Wit | Yusuf Hamied | World AIDS Day FRI: My Book World | Sarah Moore Wagner's Swan Wife
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Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Mark Twain THURS: A Writer's Wit | Yusuf Hamied, World AIDS Day FRI: My Book World | Susan Moore Wagner's Swan Wife
Coming Next:
FRI: My Book World | My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy TUES: A Writer's Wit | Georgia O'Keeffe WEDS: A Writer's Wit | George S. Kaufman THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lee Strasberg
Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Carroll Quigley THURS: A Writer's Wit | John P. Marquand FRI: My Book World | My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy
My Book WorldByrd, Bobby, and Johnny Byrd, editors. Lone Star Noir. New York: Akashic, 2010. These fourteen stories, though set in the singular locale of Texas, are about the same things that noir is about in the other forty-nine states: avarice, greed, murder. Thus, making the collection rather universal. Divided into three parts—rural Texas, urban Texas, and Gulf-Coast Texas—each story brings to life those three qualities. Noir allows readers to experience this thrilling but illicit word vicariously so that we never ever have to commit such crimes ourselves. Title is part of the Akashic Noir Series. Peery, William, Editor. 21 Texas Short Stories. Austin: U of Texas P, 1954. These twenty-one stories written by Texans (either by birth or by successful transplantation) were published between the early 1940s and the mid-1950s. But many of them chronicle earlier times, calling to mind rural-agrarian, nineteenth century Texas, calling to mind Texas’s involvement in the Civil War and slavery. Editor Peery features some famous names: O. Henry, Katherine Anne Porter, J. Frank Dobie, and Fred Gipson. But he also includes many fine writers who do not possess that kind of fame. Margaret Cousins, for example, may write the best, non-sentimental Christmas story I’ve ever read. “Uncle Edgar and the Reluctant Saint” tells the tale of a little girl who almost doesn’t get to celebrate Christmas with her family due to her train getting stuck in a freakish Texas snow storm. Her curmudgeon of an uncle happens to be on the train, a man who detests marriage, Christmas, and almost everything else that is part of civilization. He manages to come through for her and everyone else on the train without changing his character too much. All the stories reveal diction and dialog that are no longer used (probably), sort of Huck Finn meets the Texas State Fair. Worth the time, especially if you are interested in Texas folklore. Coming Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Marianne Wiggins WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Carroll Quigley THURS: A Writer's Wit | John P. Marquand FRI: My Book World | Elizabeth Clark's Biography: My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy
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THURS: A Writer's Wit | Fran Lebowitz FRI: My Book World | Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Pat Conroy THURS: A Writer's Wit | Fran Lebowitz FRI: My Book World | Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Coming Next:
TOMORROW: My Book World | Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo TUES: AWW | Ted Hughes WEDS: AWW | Herta Müller THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss
My Book WorldTan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate. London: HarperCollins, 2003. The Opposite of Fate is a joy to read, I would venture, whether you’re a Tan fan or not. The celebrated author modestly shares her wisdom with readers. Wisdom derived from her childhood, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Wisdom derived from a life marred with tragedy (family deaths, physical violence, and murder of a friend). Wisdom derived from her relationships, family and friends alike. Wisdom derived from her courage to try new things (from joining a rock band made up of other famous writers to escaping from a dangerous flood while camping near Lake Tahoe to traveling to China with her mother). Wisdom derived from her trial-and-error career in writing (as most writing careers may be). Wisdom about medicine as she suffers through a long (and undiagnosed) bout of Lyme disease. The book is composed of essays arranged in thematic sections, and some anecdotes or fragments tinkle like little bells of remembrance from one essay to the next, but you don’t mind the repetition because it demonstrates how interrelated all the parts of her singular life are. I wish I’d read it when it was published, but it is still a valuable document in understanding one of our most important American authors. Coming Next: TUES: AWW | Rose Tremain WEDS: AWW | Steven Millhauser THURS: AWW | Helen Thomas FRI: My Book World | Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest
TOMORROW: My Book World | Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate
TUES: AWW | Aldous Huxley WEDS: AWW | Elizabeth Hardwick THURS: AWW | Malcom Lowry
COMING NEXT:
WEDS: AWW | Elizabeth Hardwick THURS: AWW | Malcom Lowry FRIDAY: My Book World | Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate
TOMORROW: My Book World | Zadie Smith's Swing Time
TOMORROW: My Book World | Nancy Turner's These Is My Words
FRIDAY: My Book World | J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip
TOMORROW: My Book World | Nishant Batsha's Novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation
My Book WorldSchumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life. New York: Crown, 1999. If readers are fans of both film and director Coppola, this book is an embarrassment of riches—at least as far as it takes us, through 1998 when the book comes out. One may not realize, for example, how easy the 1970s seem for Coppola, succeeding beyond his wildest dreams with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. The next twenty years are more arduous, and Coppola loses his credibility at times. He wishes to be more of an artiste, making films that appeal to him but perhaps not the public at large—or the studios. Even when he makes a big-budget, mass-appeal film, he is almost always at loggerheads with studio execs over scripts and, of course, money. He is a creative man, who also finances, for a time, his own studio, and even publishes a literary magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, which still exists today—not to mention a number of other enterprises including a winery. He ends the nineties having made enough money to dig himself out of debt and establish an independent life. Although he continues to make film, it is at his own pleasure. One has to admire that. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Herman Wouk's Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author
My Book WorldHosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, limns this portrait of two Afghanistan women that is both tragic and uplifting. Enemies at first, because they are married to the same abusive man, Mariam and Laila slowly realize their only way through life is to join together as friends. Both women are abused, one as a child, and both after their marriages. All this occurs over decades through the Soviet occupation and then the Taliban. The story ends just as the Americans enter the scene. Surprises? The landscape. One is tempted to think that the entire country of Afghanistan is as dusty and dry as the movies and news videos that emerge, but Hosseini makes clear to readers that there are wet cycles, that there exist beautiful, mountainous vistas, as well. Another surprise: how misogynistic and cruel some Afghani men are, the women’s husband being a prime example. As the women toil to raise their children (a childless Mariam becomes a grandmother figure), they form a family structure of their own. After both suffering great losses, the story does end on a truly bright note: “But mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns” (366). Hosseini possesses a strong understanding of the human condition. NEXT FRIDAY: John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
FRIDAY: My Book World | John Sedwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
FRIDAY: My Book World | Perry & Winfrey's What Happened to You?
My Book WorldShute, Nevil. On the Beach. New York: Morrow, 1957. This novel, which could have worked as a cautionary tale in its publication year, 1957, can still bring shivers to one’s spine. In this narrative, the worst has already happened, a vague war begun, on accident, between Russia and China, in which nuclear warfare destroys most of the northern hemisphere. Only the Australians and other South Pacific cultures survive . . . for a while. As we know, such high amounts of radiation kill immediately and keep on killing over weeks and months as its fine particles continue to float to earth. The main characters realize intellectually what will happen but continue to live as if death won’t come, racing in a local grand prix, planting a garden one won’t benefit from, collecting presents for one’s children when one “returns” to his family in America. Shute is deft in creating what looks like denial and yet is a way for characters to cope, until the very end. At that time, little red pills of barbiturates have been distributed like penny candy, and we see each one take his or her dosage and end their lives peacefully. We are made to consider, however, what will happen to the earth itself. After a number of years, so Shute believes, the radiation will clear, the earth will be ready for inhabitation again. It shall repopulate itself with some kind of creatures. The novel has one final lesson for those living today. Nuclear war is the ultimate global warming, the ultimate in climate change. Forever. The thought should still give us pause. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
My Book WorldAmburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. I got what I deserved for reading this book: perpetual arousal. My God, maybe one of the most sex-laden books of literary biography I’ve ever read: all about one man and his friends and lovers. According to Amburn, Kerouac keeps a sex list of not only his partners but how many times they engage. It amounts to a sexual track meet of stupendous proportions (if self-reporting is accurate): sex with men, sex with women. Maybe the man had a third testicle? Enough of that. Because Amburn turns out to be Kerouac’s final editor, a young man attempting to make his mark in publishing, he stands to have one of the most tolerant and understanding viewpoints of the controversial author of On the Road and at least a dozen other novels. Like a number of important American authors before him, Kerouac is ahead of his time, ahead of what critics are capable of understanding. Like many writers, he must scramble for money nearly his entire life, never experiencing the adulation that is to come after his premature death, when he dies at forty-seven of alcoholism. But if anything, he remains a hero of young writers of all ages, writers who are willing to put everything on the line, to write novels the way they want to, not kowtowing to editors, publishers, or even the public. For that, yes, he is a true hero. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire
My Book WorldGarcía, Rodrigo. A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez. New York: HarperVia, 2021. The son of Gabriel García Márquez writes a brief but compelling remembrance of his famous father and formidable mother. Each of the five parts begins with a brief epigraph from one of Márquez’s works. North American culture has so much to learn from our friends in South America whose profound sense of family—in spite of its many complexities—outshines our own. I found myself envying the relationship that Rodrigo has with his parents, his brother, his own children and his nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandparents long gone but whose influence seems eternal—no wonder Márquez could write a book as profound as One Hundred Years of Solitude. He needed only comb his own ancestry for his complete cast of characters. I envision myself reading this book again and again. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Amburn Ellis's Subterranean Kerouac.
Tomorrow: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I
FRIDAY: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I
TOMORROW: My Book World | Tales Told in Holland
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
April 2024
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