www.richardjespers.com
  • Home
  • Books
  • Journals
  • Blog

NITTY GRITTY OF FLORIDA

6/13/2025

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
​Mark Van Doren
Author of ​Liberal Education 
​Born June 13, 1894
Picture
M. Van Doren

MY BOOK WORLD

Picture
Groff, Lauren. Florida. New York: Random, 2018.

As I begin reading this collection of stories, I am doubtful that the author can convince me to like Florida any more than I already do (which isn’t much). Most of my life it has been a way station—to the Bahamas, to Europe, but not a destination of its own—except for two different trips to Key West which actually were delightful. Ms. Groff, however, takes readers into a Florida of gators, snakes, insects, and heat, relentless heat and humidity. But also a place of wild human animals.
 
There is Jude, “born in a Cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of reptiles” (15). There is an older sister who thinks “an island is never really quiet. Even without the storm, there were waves and wind and air conditioners and generators and animals moving out there in the dark” (44). On a stormy night, a woman’s young sons “told me about the World Pool, in which one current goes one way, another goes another way, and where they meet they make a tornado of air, which stretches, said my little one, from the midnight zone, where the fish are blind, all the way up up up to the birds” (77). One narrative titled “Snake Stories” reads like this: “Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: snakes in mulch, snakes in scrub, snakes waiting from the lawn for you to leave the pool so they can drown themselves in it, snakes gazing at your mousy ankle and wondering what it would feel like to sink their fangs in deep” (204).
 
Groff is unafraid to tell readers about human snakes, as well: ne’er do well fathers, skanky women, mean children, perhaps all made malicious by the climate: hot and humid twenty-four/seven. Yet, as Florida’s large population must attest to, there has to be something wonderful about the place: tempting seafood, cool breezes off the water, mild winters, and empathic people here and there who stop to help someone in trouble.

Up Next:
​TUES: A Writer's Wit | Carol Anderson

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Sylvia Field Porter
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Salman Rushdie
FRI: My Book World | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance 

0 Comments

A WRITER'S WIT: RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

5/7/2025

0 Comments

 
The older books were quite light-hearted. But I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn’t that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.
​Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Author of ​A Lovesong for India
​Born May 7, 1927
Picture
R. Prawer Jhabvala
Up Next: 
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Edward Gibbon

FRI: My Book World | Julia Alvarez
, ​Afterlife: A Novel
0 Comments

A WRITER'S WIT: THOMAS MCGUANE

12/11/2024

0 Comments

 
One of the reasons I'm reluctant to start a novel is it's such an obsessive activity. You get in there, you don't know anything else while you're in there. And that's quite a sacrifice to make, especially for us old guys where time is kind of short. You don't want to disappear for a year; you want to be outdoors.
​Thomas McGuane
Author of Gallatin Canyon
Born December 11, 1939
Picture
T. McGuane
Up Next: 
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Gustave Flaubert
FRI: My Book World | Katherine Bucknell, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out 
0 Comments

A WRITER'S WIT: ALICE MUNRO

7/10/2024

0 Comments

 
For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn't happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.
​Alice Munro
Author of Too Much Happiness
Born July 10, 1931
Picture
A. Munro
Up Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Frederick Beuchner
FRI: My Book World | Charles 
Kenney, ​JFK: The Presidential Portfolio
0 Comments

SIX NEW YORK STORIES & A HOLLYWOOD NOVELLA

5/17/2024

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
The only infallible rule we know is, that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one.
Dennis Potter, Screenwriter
Author of Lipstick on Your Collar
​Born May 17, 1935
Picture
D. Potter

MY BOOK WORLD

Picture
Towles, Amor. Table for Two: Fictions. New York: Viking, 2024.

These six lengthy stories and one novella stand as jewels in Towles’s already glittering list of works: A Gentleman in Moscow being my favorite. These works exhibit the same inventiveness and wit. My favorite story, perhaps, is “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett.” Touchett is a young writer who moves to NYC at the turn of this century. He finds work, toiling for a Mr. Pennybrook, a “purveyor of used and rare editions.” Pennybrook is much more, as Touchett soon finds out. Because of Timothy’s ability to mimic handwritings, he is lured into “signing” editions, which Pennybrook then pawns off as the real thing, providing Timothy with what seems like a hefty bonus to a young man attempting to live in the city ($50 per signature). Of course, readers can imagine where this sort of behavior leads, but it’s how they arrive at that point: what Touchett must experience before experiencing his comeuppance. The author’s approach seems a bit Dickensian but also somewhat like metafiction, in which he turns to his readership and reveals perhaps his own points of view.
 
In the novella, Eve in Hollywood, set in 1938, one Evelyn Ross takes a train to Chicago, but instead of meeting her parents who have driven in from Indiana, she boards one to Los Angeles. Ross is beautiful save for one thing: she bears a long scar across her face, which turns some away. Perhaps because of the scar, she has learned to bear rejection and doesn’t worry about such behavior. She marches to her own drum. Towles has lifted this character from his first novel, a curious idea but one I admire (sometimes writers are just not finished with a character), and takes her on this noir-like voyage of mayhem and murder. Enough said. If you’re a fan at all of Towles’s work, you will enjoy this delightful collection of “Fictions,” as he forms his book’s subtitle.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Miriam Toews
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Susan Dodd 
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Fuller
FRI: My Book World | 
Sharot & Sunstein, ​Look Again

0 Comments

A WRITER'S WIT: BOBBIE ANN MASON

5/1/2024

0 Comments

 
I've always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that's being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere.
Bobbie Ann Mason
Author of Love Life: Stories
Born May 1, 1940
Picture
B. A. Mason
Up Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Galt
FRI: My Book World | Barbara McQuade, Attack from Within
0 Comments

JOHNNY TOO BAD: GREAT STORIES

4/26/2024

0 Comments

 
Picture
 A WRITER'S WIT
A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud
Author of The Fixer
Born April 26, 1914
Picture
B. Malamud

MY BOOK WORLD 

Picture
Dufresne, John. Johnny Too Bad: Stories. New York: Norton, 2005.
        
Of the nineteen stories, I particularly enjoyed reading “Based on a True Story,” “Epithalamion,” “Talk Talk Talk,” the title story, and “Squeeze the Feeling.” The latter may be the “best.” In a way, it “links” together a number of other stories in the same collection (such a popular editorial choice) by reprising several characters featured earlier. In “Squeeze” a writer lives with his female friend and Spot, his dog. Girlfriend gets pregnant and loses baby, but Spot, a supersensitive creature, comforts her (he possesses other powers). Dufresne displays his superb talents when in the space of  just more than a page he takes readers on an emotional roller coaster climax. The man and woman are drinking in their car, and an officer detains them. When he learns of the miscarriage, he drops the citation. The officer then returns and shares a similar event which has occurred in his own life and has not been able to speak with anyone about it (including his wife). Dufresne creates an emotional turn of events in such a short distance, yet readers may weep because the exchange is so honest, so real—as are all the stories in this collection. 

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Annie Dillard
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Bobbie Ann Mason
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Jon Galt
FRI: My Book World | Barbara McQuade, Attack from Within:
 How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America

0 Comments

A WRITER'S WIT: PAM HOUSTON

1/9/2024

0 Comments

 
I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.
​Pam Houston
Author of Deep Creek
​Born January 9, 1962
Picture
P. Houston
Coming Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | David Wong

THURS: A Writer's Wit | Diana Gabaldon
FRI: My Book World | Rachel 
Maddow, ​Prequel
0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Eudora Welty

4/13/2023

0 Comments

 
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever rally lost. 
​Eudora Welty
Author of 
One Writer’s Beginnings 
Born April 13, 1909
Picture
E. Welty
Coming Next:
FRI: My Book World | Scott Heim: 
Mysterious Skin
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Susan Faludi
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Hughes
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Aubrey de Grey
0 Comments

Lahiri: Among the Best

3/3/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
I was raised in Catholic school where we were given a lot of heavy literature and a dense, weighty lyric wasn't strange to me.
​​Jennifer Warnes,  Songwriter
Author of "Right Time of the Night"
Born March 3, 1947
Picture
J. Warnes

My Book World

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. New York: Knopf, 2008.

These are eight long stories that are reminiscent of Alice Munro’s long stories in that Lahiri seems to tell an entire lifetime in one. She neither leaves much out, nor does she include too much. Each word, each sentence, fits into each paragraph, each section, to make a complete and satisfying story. Her characters have depth, sometimes taking readers in surprising directions—in the same way that actual human beings can surprise us in our own lives. I tried to read each story in one sitting because quitting before it is done is like leaving a banquet after one or two courses. I admire her work for its craft and its deeply conveyed emotions.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Moon

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jeffrey Eugenides
THURS: A Writer's Wit |Vita Sackville-West
FRI: My Book World | Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On

0 Comments

Basement Living

2/24/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.
​​Jane Hirshfield
Author of ​Nine Gates
​Born February 24, 1953
Picture

My Book World

Picture
​Mosley, Walter. The Man in My Basement: A Novel. New York: Little, 2004.
 
A short but expansive novel with this premise: An odd little White man seeks out a Black man, Charles Blakey, because he has a large basement that is also windowless and contains only one door. Anniston Bennet’s proposition is this: that Charles will lock Anniston up in his basement for a certain amount of time. In return Charles will receive a large sum of money. Charles says no at first, but he reconsiders. Charles has inherited his two-hundred-year-old home, but it is his only asset. He’s never worked hard or steadily, in fact, has been fired from a bank for embezzling a small sum of money—thus being blackballed by the rest of the town. So Charles does agree to house the little man in his basement, basically serving as Bennet’s master. What follows is a much deeper story than what may think in the beginning. To say more would indeed spoil the read about how these two men come to terms with their pasts.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Tessa Hadley

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Robert Lowell
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Matt Taibbi
FRI: My Book World | Jhumpa Lahiri's ​Unaccustomed Earth

0 Comments

Swim | Pond | Rain

2/3/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
The greatest mistake is the trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
​Walter Bagehot
Author of ​The English Constitution
​Born February 3, 1826
Picture
W. Bagehot

My Book World

Picture
Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York: Random, 2021.
 
Saunders, if this book is any representation, is a talented teacher of writing. His brilliance as a writer always intimidates me a bit; I’m not sure I understand his own fiction all that well. However, here, as he examines seven stories of Russian writers Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, Saunders makes very clear through illustration and fine contemplation what it means to construct a solid story. And I use that word deliberately because for Saunders writing a short story is about constructing a work of art.
 
I can’t reveal everything he covers, but I can mention several concepts that struck me as being essential. If the reader is a novice writer, you can learn much (bring your pencil). If you’ve written lots of stories, perhaps Saunders’s ideas will be a refresher course for you or bring to light elements you’ve not considered before now.
 
One, Saunders is concerned with cause and effect. Each action in a story should be the result of some other action. Why is this character doing this or that? Second, Saunders contends that escalation is paramount—what may cause one to keep reading is that the stakes go up. Each major event should, in a cause-and-effect manner, escalate the story, fire it up, move it along. Third, he makes a simple list of major events for each story, demonstrating to himself how each may lead to the next. Of course, his ideas are not all about plotting; he’s ultimately concerned with the characters and why they act the way they do so that readers may get to the human heart of the story. A must-read for fiction writers.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Peter Carey

WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Bishop
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Brendan Behan
FRI: My Book World | 
Willa Cather's The Professor’s House

0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Steven Millhauser

8/3/2022

0 Comments

 
So imagine a fire going—wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green—the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains—and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys—and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning. And so you dare to be happy. You do that thing. You dare.
​Steven Millhauser
Author of ​Voices in the Night: Stories
​Born August 3, 1943
Coming Next:
THURS: AWW | Helen Thomas
FRIDAY: My Book World | Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest
Picture
S. Millhauser
0 Comments

Latinos Love Kissing Stories: Bésame Mucho

5/6/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment . . . . Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.
Martha C. Nussbaum
Author of Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach
​Born May 6, 1947
Picture
M. C. Nussbaum

My Book World 

Picture
Manrique, Jaime, ed. With Jesse Dorris. Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction. New York: Painted Leaf, 1999.

On my shelf for a long time, I finally took this collection down and enjoyed most of the stories very much. Among the best, I believe, are Manrique’s “Señoritas in Love,” “What’s Up, Father Infante?”, a gripping story by Miguel Falquez-Certain, and “Ruby Díaz” by Al Luján. The entire collection blends together a beautiful chorus of gay Latino voices, from South America to New York to California. So much that the non-Latino community has to learn what gay Latino men face with regard to their families, their communities, and their relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. They face immense pressures to conform to cultural norms, even more so than the Anglo population, I would dare say. Kudos to these men for sharing their stories by way of lively and enlightening fiction. It never dates.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anna Van Planta, Ed. of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995

0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Rick DeMarinis

5/3/2022

0 Comments

 
Kings and cabbages go back to compost, but good deeds stay green forever.
​Rick DeMarinis
Author of The Art and Craft of the Short Story
​Born May 3, 1934
Picture
R. DeMarinis
FRIDAY: My Book World | Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction
0 Comments

Stories of Madness Everywhere

2/4/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
​Betty Friedan
Author of The Feminine Mystique
​Born February 4, 1921
Picture
B. Friedan

My Book World

Picture
Wolitzer, Hilma. Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories. With a foreword by Elizabeth Strout. New York, Bloomsbury, 2021.

These thirteen delightful stories date from 1966 to 2020, from mid-sixties angst over the “woman’s place” to the best story I’ve yet read about the early days of the Covid pandemic. And yet, in terms of tone (humorous and sardonic) and theme (woman on the verge, but not, because the narrator must keep herself together), the stories all feel as if they could have been written at the same time—so unified is the writing. Wolitzer’s stories are a prose analogue to the perfect poem: they are compressed, metaphors are subtle, and each one brings pleasure that lasts.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Oprah Winfrey's What Happened to You?

0 Comments

Lincoln: From Coast to Coast

1/28/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
​Colette
Author of Claudine in Paris
​Born January 28, 1873
Picture
Colette

My Book World

Picture
Towles, Amor. The Lincoln Highway: a Novel. New York: Viking, 2021.

​This charming novel tells of the ten-day adventure of two brothers who head out from Kansas to California to build a new life, following the death of their father and one brother’s release from jail. Yet their plans are thwarted when two fellow inmates hide in the trunk of the warden’s car (and hop out when the warden isn’t looking). Well, from there the adventure heads east instead of west. Perhaps the most captivating character is Billy, the eight-year-old brother who is smarter than any other character in the book but also the most disarming. It is his idea to travel coast to coast from New York to California on the “historical” Lincoln Highway. And without revealing any spoilers, the two brothers do eventually get to do just that—even if that journey doesn’t begin until the very last sentence. 
 
The Lincoln Highway is just as fascinating, though in different ways, as Towles’s previous book, A Gentleman in Moscow. Towles is a master at several things, all adding up to great writing. One, is characterization. Even characters with the smallest parts are developed so that readers know who they are. Second is structure. Towles’s intricate scaffolding keeps readers informed of where they are at all times in the novel’s unraveling, without making it too simple. By using multiple points of view, by way of a character per chapter, he, at times, overlaps the portrayal of certain scenes, from two different points of view—providing readers an interesting “truth.” By the way, the ten parts begin with Part Ten and work toward Part One. All POVs are written in the third person with the exception of one, Duchess’s, which may make him the main narrator though not the central character. And third, Towles’s dialog—represented by way of em dashes instead of quotation marks—harks back to the fiction of an earlier period. I’m not sure why Towles does it, perhaps to do just that, make the early 1950s seem farther back than they really are. Are we to expect Lincoln Highway II? It wouldn’t trouble me at all.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilma Wolitzer's  Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories

0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Edna O'Brien

12/15/2021

0 Comments

 
The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
​Edna O’Brien
Author of Saints and Sinners
Born December 15, 1930
Picture
E. O'Brien
FRIDAY: My Book World | James Clear's Atomic Habits
0 Comments

Capote's Stories Still Vibrant

7/30/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.
​Patrick Modiano
Author of Un Pedigree
Born July 30, 1945
Picture
P. Modiano

My Book World

Picture
Capote, Truman. The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. With an introduction by Reynolds Price. New York: Random, 2004.

Sad to say that Capote published only twenty stories (as this edition seems to indicate) in his lifetime. The “weakest” stories, if there are any, seem to be his early ones when he is barely twenty and the two written during the last decade of his life. The ones in the middle are for the most part knock-outs. Especially, I’m a sucker for his “orphan” stories: “A Christmas Memory,” “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” and “One Christmas.” In all three he develops the character Sook, an old woman, “a cousin,” who cares for the boy narrating the stories. Apparently based on one of the relatives Capote lived with as a child when his parents abandoned him for a time, Sook can tear your heart out with her generosity and illiterate wisdom. 

NEXT FRI: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I

0 Comments

A Writer's Wit: Ambrose Bierce

6/24/2021

0 Comments

 
In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale; diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
​Ambrose Bierce
Author of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek"
Born June 24, 1842
Picture
A. Bierce
TOMORROW: My Book World | The Letters of John Cheever
0 Comments

'The Prophets' More Than Slavery

4/16/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
Wicked gave us a story that The Wizard of Oz did not. Two sides to every story.
​Abbi Glines
Author of The Vincent Boys
​Born April 16, 1977
Picture
A. Glines

My Book World

Picture
​Jones, Robert Jr. The Prophets. New York: Putnam’s, 2021.

This tremendous first novel seems at once both realistic and impressionistic in its articulation. The former because Jones’s portrayal of slave life in the nineteenth-century American South stinks with human toil and sweat, both black and white: “Mississippi only knew how to be hot and sticky” (27). The only relief may be the Biblical-like Yazoo River’s coolness. The novel is impressionistic in large part because it is as nonlinear as a novel can get: there are slave ancestors, the lives of a female king, whose descendants populate this hot and sweaty setting. If readers think this is only a novel about two young male slaves who have “grown up” together on the Halifax plantation (slaves call it “Empty” or “That Fucking Place”) and become lovers at a young age, may they soon discover their mistake. Single chapters are devoted to various characters within this “kingdom” of depraved corruption of Capitalism. Slaves tell their own truth. Owners live out their own truths: their indifference to pain (except their own), their greed, their ultimate unhappiness brought on by the shame and disgust they must feel (deep inside and unrecognized) at the mistreatment of fellow human beings.
 
In this book, sex between Samuel and Isiah isn’t sex but a stunning line of poetry that indicates what has happened: their red-and-white barn is an Edenic setting for their love. You sense the act has taken place but it is communicated with ease and subtlety. Neither is the sex graphic, nor is it quotidian, like, say, John Cheever’s Then they rolled over and went to sleep.
 
I believe I shall read this novel again and again. More than ever, white people need to wake up and see what a terrible blight slavery has been on our country’s history, how its stories cripple our present and our future if we fail to deal with slavery's legacy. Jones’s novel opens wide a window into our history by way of a beautiful and savage piece of art that will only unfold more as time passes.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

0 Comments

Forster: His Fiction Comes to Fruition

9/25/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That’s how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
​Dmitri Shostakovich
"Leningrad" Symphony, No. 7
Born September 25, 1906
Picture
D. Shostakovich

My Book World

Picture
Forster, E. M. The Life to Come: And Other Stories. New York: Norton, 1987 (1972).
​
Oliver Stallybrass offers in his introduction a bit of background concerning these stories. “On his death in June 1970, E. M. Forster left behind, at King’s College, Cambridge, England, a considerable corpus of unpublished literary work, complete and incomplete, and in a wide range of genres: novels (Maurice, published in 1971, and two substantial fragments), stories, plays, poems, essays, talks—to say nothing of letters, diaries and notebooks” (vii). A number of these stories—because Forster creates gay characters and situations that cannot be published at the time he writes them—are instructive for gay writers alive today. One, he is courageous, given his prodigious talent, to write them anyway, not to edit his mind, his heart, his soul. Even if he stashes them away or editors reject them, he senses perhaps that subsequent generations might read and appreciate them. The language and imagery are tame, of course, compared with any so-called gay fiction written since the early 1970s. But the fact that he is willing to portray two men together sexually, employing words like “member” for “penis,” is quite remarkable. Second, he provides a foundation for writers to come, people such as Paul Monette, who, in his book of essays, Last Watch of the Night, pays quick homage to Forster as a mentor. Forster is a formidable and lyrical writer whose work transcends all and deserves to be read by anyone, even fifty years following his death.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Marilynne Robinson's Novel Gilead

0 Comments

Fabulous Indeed

7/31/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
Addiction isn't about substance—you aren't addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.
​Susan Cheever
​Author of Drinking in America
Born July 31, 1943
Picture
S. Cheever

My Book World

Picture
Epstein, Joseph. Fabulous Small Jews. Boston: Houghton, 2003.
​
There is so much to like about these eighteen stories mostly featuring characters over the age of sixty. As the title suggests, each protagonist is short, yet Epstein never makes a to-do about it, and indeed it is a point of irony because many of them, though short in stature, are not small people. In fact, Epstein pulls readers into every narrative about poor Jews, poor Jews who become comfortable or well-off, or Jews who have always had money. Most everyone in these Chicago-based stories attends good schools, earns good money. But money alone cannot in any way make up for the heartache they suffer: marriages ending in divorce; fathers who die in war; widows looking (or not) for a man to fill their lives.

Fabulous small Jews have their own stores, their own banks, their own restaurants and delis, their own you-name-its. Epstein very quietly limns the lives of Jews almost anywhere in the world: because of prejudices held against them for thousands of years they must band together to protect, coddle, nurture, and love one another. And yet, readers can’t help but love these characters, too: an old man belatedly gets to know his grandson (I cried); a man secretly writes poems about a woman and the executor of his will, to preserve the woman’s reputation, instead of burning the manuscript, spreads it to the four winds from his car window on the freeway; a man quietly helps another man to end his life. Is the act one of suicide, euthanasia, or murder? Epstein does not answer that question but leaves it to each reader to decide, and I admire his courage in taking such a stance.
 
A must-read for Gentiles (like me) and Jews alike.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hervé Guibert's To the friend who did not save my life

0 Comments

Thinking in Twelves

9/14/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
​Geraldine Brooks
Born September 14, 1955
Picture
G. Brooks

My Book World

Picture
Houston, Pam. Contents May Have
    Shifted: A Novel
. New York: Norton,
    2012.

PicturePam H., R. Jespers, K. Dixon, 2005, Taos
​I first heard Pam Houston speak in 2000 when she gave a reading for her new book, Waltzing the Cat. As she addressed a sizeable audience, and, as I met her afterward at a reception I told myself if I ever got a chance to take one of her workshops I would. I managed three: Taos, 2004 and 2005; I even journeyed to Mallorca, Spain to study with her. I didn’t do so as a groupie necessarily (though I am); it took me three different week-longers to digest her method for creating fiction—a method that resonated with me, using one’s own life and one’s own observations to create narrative.
 
I’ve always admired Houston’s ability to transform intensely autobiographical information into strong fiction. Some writers refuse to touch such material; others wallow in their biographies like dogs in the dust, trying but failing to rid themselves of their demon fleas. Pam has been the most influential contemporary writer, in that respect, on my thinking about writing. She taught me how to transform my autobiographical material, or perhaps she taught me to give myself permission to do so because by being that honest writers can hurt someone they love or even people they don’t. And you have to balance your honesty against how much you value the relationship, and honesty doesn’t always lose out.
 
Anyway . . . I feel that I was in on the inception of Contents, as well as several of its chapters because during class or at a meal, Pam would share an anecdote that eventually wound up in this novel. In 2008, at a Point Reyes bookstore, I heard her read one of the book’s short chapters-in-progress. At the time, she planned, I think, to write 144 of those chapters giving voice to the many hundreds of trips she had taken around the world, the hundreds of places she had visited in the States, the myriad human beings who had influenced her life. Why 144? “I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves” (308), Pam declares in the very last section of her book, the “Reading Group Guide.” She ends up with 132 chapters and 12 airplane stories, but still, I think she delivers on her original plan. The novel feels very global, in its fast-paced, jet-flight episodes knitted together like bones on the mend. How else could she portray a trip around the world, one which may never end as long as she lives?
 
Both Pam-the-person and Pam-the-author nearly lose their lives as four-year-olds when their fathers seriously abuse them, and their mothers cover up the story, amuse themselves through retelling it over cocktails, falsehoods about her pulling large pieces of furniture over on top of herself. Nearly losing their lives gives both Pams permission to push their lives to the limits because otherwise they might not be worth living. Planes that almost fall out of the sky. Boyfriends who don’t work out. Bedeviled by chronic pain since the childhood accident. . . neither Pam is comfortable unless her contents have shifted a bit since her last outing. She must be on the move, searching for that next glimmering glimpse of life, whether it is of a Tibetan monk or the life of a child whom she helping to raise. She must move.
 
Such a novel reflects the life that Pam lives, right? In any given year, Pam-the-author is equally at home on her ranch in Colorado, which she purchased after the phenomenal success of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, equally at home on campus, equally at home teaching scores of workshops or giving readings, equally at home traveling to remote parts of the world to test her physical or emotional strength, equally at home revealing the parental abuse she was subject to as a child, lovers who have betrayed her. In this book, in particular, she manages to transform the latter three issues into a gross of clipped chapters, in which Pam-the-character (in the manner of Christopher Isherwood naming his protagonist Herr Issywoo after himself) makes herself at home on flights to Exhuma in the Bahamas, to places as obscure as Ozona, Texas. Tibet. New Zealand. Paris. Chapters named with a flight number: UA #368. Your life, as long as you are reading this book, is as discombobulated as Pam-the-character’s. You live it with her, the flashback in which Pam-the-character is hospitalized for injuries caused by her abusive father. Pam Houston—the author—gives her all to every minute that she lives, I would suspect, even when she is lying very still, devouring the pages of a new book or romping with her Irish wolfhounds through the meadowlands of her ranch. As long as she is breathing, she is inhaling the content of her next book, itself spinning inside her brain while all she seems to do is become a vessel for it, channeling the narrative burning inside her at that moment. That is what Contents May Have Shifted is about. After having been moved and enlightened by her first four books, I can now say the same for this one.
 
And Pam Houston’s new tome, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, comes out January 29, 2019. You’d better believe I’ve already ordered it, that I can’t wait to begin feasting on her pages once more. You see, I’m still learning from Pam.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-23 Tennessee

0 Comments

Strout's Endless Possibilities

7/20/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.
​Franklin Foer
Born July 20, 1974
Picture
F. Foer

My Book World

Picture
​Strout, Elizabeth. Anything is Possible.
     New York: Random, 2017.
 
Strout is a master at creating simple stories that are riddled with complexities and nuance that are difficult to apprehend with one reading. You might think you’re finished reading about one character, and then he or she returns to another chapter. Charles Macauley, for example, has layer upon layer added to his part until we might think we understand him. In the meantime, we learn of others: Two sisters, one who marries well, one who does not. And a prodigal daughter/citizen, who becomes a famous author and returns to her humble beginnings to have more than a little abuse heaped upon her. But now Lucy Barton is ready to face it all.

NEXT TIME: Defeating A Fib at Last-3

0 Comments
<<Previous
    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

    See my profile at Author Central:
    http://amazon.com/author/rjespers


    Richard Jespers's books on Goodreads
    My Long-Playing Records My Long-Playing Records
    ratings: 1 (avg rating 5.00)


    Archives

    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011



    Categories

    All
    Acting
    Actors
    African American History
    Aging
    Alabama
    Alaska
    Aldo Leopold
    Andy Warhol
    Arizona
    Arkansas
    Art
    Atrial Fibrillation
    Authors
    Authors' Words
    Barcelona
    Biography
    Blogging About Books
    Blogs
    Books
    California
    Cancer
    Cars
    Catalonia
    Colorado
    Cooking
    Creative Nonfiction
    Culinary Arts
    Deleting Facebook
    Ecology
    Education
    Environment
    Epigraphs
    Essays
    Feminism
    Fiction
    Fifty States
    Film
    Florida
    Georgia
    Grammar
    Greece
    Gun Violence
    Hawaii
    Heart Health
    Historic Postcards
    History
    Humor
    Idaho
    Iowa
    Journalism
    LGBTQ
    Libraries
    Literary Biography
    Literary Journals
    Literary Topics
    Literature
    Maine
    Massachusetts
    Memoir
    Michigan
    Minnesota
    Mississippi
    M K Rawlings
    Musicians
    Nevada
    New Hampshire
    New Mexico
    New Yorker Stories
    Nonfiction
    North Carolina
    Novelist
    Ohio
    Pam Houston
    Parker Posey
    Photography
    Playwrights
    Poetry
    Politics
    Psychology
    Publishing
    Quotations
    Race
    Reading
    Recipes
    Seattle
    Short Story
    South Carolina
    Spain
    Susan Faludi
    Teaching
    Tennessee
    Texas
    Theater
    The Novel
    Travel
    Travel Photographs
    True Crime
    #TuesdayThoughts
    TV
    U.S.
    Vermont
    Voting
    War
    Washington
    Wisconsin
    World War II
    Writer's Wit
    Writing


    RSS Feed

    Blogroll

    alicefrench.wordpress.com
    kendixonartblog.com
    Valyakomkova.blogspot.com

    Websites

    Caprock Writers' Alliance
    kendixonart.com

    tedkincaid.com
    www.trackingwonder.com
    www.skans.edu
    www.ttu.edu
    www.newpages.com
    www.marianszczepanski.com
    William Campbell Contemporary Art, Inc.
    Barbara Brannon.com
    Artsy.net
WWW.RICHARDJESPERS.COM  ©2011-2025
                    BOOKS  PHOTOS  PODCASTS  JOURNALS  BLOG