Fiction
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That Hideous Strength
The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes. But for their one mistake, there would be no hope left. If of their own evil will they…
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Revisiting ‘Wise Blood’
My task, which I am trying to achieve, is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.…
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A narrative of twin urban centers
There: an awkward retitling of a classic. That’s about all that can be said about A Tale of Two Citiesthat hasn’t already been said. I missed this one, even though it’s apparently the most…
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America America
My favorite English teacher gave me a copy of Ethan Canin’s Emperor of the Air[1988] when it first came out. Certain details from those short stories have stayed in my mind for years: the…
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Never Let Me Go
I’m a big fan of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. I saw the movie first, then read the book. When I found Never Let Me Go on the library shelf, I…
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The Red Castle Women
As a matter of curiosity, I requested this book through interlibrary loan back in the fall. It was one that I’d read and reread as an eighth grader after the school librarian recommended…
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Certain Women
Sometimes I like books without any idea why. Madeleine L’Engle’s Certain Women is about an actress who returns to attend to her dying father, a stage actor who reviews his life through the…
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The Optimist’s Daughter
There are many books I read and enjoy, but few that I swoon over. This one, at least in parts, was swoonworthy for the lyrical beauty of its writing and its unmasking of truthful moments. That’s the…
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Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is a book of short stories that created a stir when it was first published in 1919. My library copy included an introduction by Malcolm Cowley which suggested Anderson’s…
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The Martian Chronicles
I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles for the Decades challenge. It’s a collection of short stories about a colonization of Mars that spans about 30 years. In the introduction, Bradbury cites Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as his literary inspiration,…