'Potential'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Wow, I can't even imagine grasping how great Elizabeth Bishop was when only 9 or 10. JZ = of the smart.
I'm ashamed to say that I've never read any Perelman. And I don't even know who many of the other favorites being mentioned are, so I've got to make some additions to my library list.
Funny, there's something by each of those writers (that I've read) that I really dislike or am at least meh enough on to wonder that the same person wrote the meh thing and the thing I loved. Probably goes with that whole taking chances and evolving and whatnot that I hear writers do.
Oh, hey, not Virginia Woolf! I've got one, can I come up with two more?
Elizabeth Bishop - absolutely amazing. Only person I've ever seen successfully make a villanelle blow up on purpose (One Art). and the dentist poem. And the poem to Marianne Moore ('come flying, come flying...'). Oh.
David Quammen and Elizabeth Bishop today. And Eudora Welty ('cause JZ has Flannery.) I've never read Mark Helprin... what is he? and Lydia Davis. I need to re-set the rules of this game.
I've never read Mark Helprin... what is he?
He's unfortunately a particularly pernicious neocon speechwriter, but he's also the creator of largely apolitical fiction with the voices of angels. Probably his best collection of short stories is Ellis Island, and IMO his greatest novels are Winter's Tale and A Soldier Of The Great War (YGreatestHelprinNovelMV). At its best, his writing is incredibly rich, dense, Dickensian magical realism (the novels, anyway -- the short stories tend to be leaner and more grounded in sturdy sullen fact, but still breathtaking). If you have occasion to go to upstate New York in the winter after reading Winter's Tale, you'll do it with your breath held, just... waiting.
I really really wish that in his non-literary life he were at least an old-school Republican whom I could respect, but when he closes that door and opens the fiction part of his brain what comes flooding out is astonishing.
Corwood, you hifalutin' cocksucker...love you lots, don't ever change. Even if you leave me feeling like a hoople that commuted to a state college(just because I am one is no damn excuse) Second JZ's O'Connor love and not because she's one of ours, but that was a Big Deal to me when I found out about it. Pelecanos, because "Hard Revolution" changed my life by showing me that mystery writing could be about Real things. Which, if I'd read back into the history of the form, I'd know, but I'd started on cozies and "The Cat Who..." whatever, not Chandler or Hammett or some of the social heavy hitters. And I'm totally jealous of his record collection, too.
What JZ said about Helprin. Winter's Tale is one of my favorite books, ever, and one of the ones I tend to re-read on a regular basis.
Someone loaned me a bookseller's advance copy of Marylinne Robinson's new novel 'Shadowcatcher' - I'm only 10 pages in. It's great. I liked Housekeeping as well.
Someone loaned me a bookseller's advance copy of Marylinne Robinson's new novel 'Shadowcatcher' - I'm only 10 pages in. It's great. I liked Housekeeping as well.
I call dibs! (can I do that on books that aren't yours?) I loved Gilead.
It's about a writer in LA who has a novel about Edward Curtis, the photographer. So there are two stories. But the first few pages invoke this birds' eye view thing and it is gorgeous. Helps her navigate the reader around LA too.
Sparky - if you can't call dibs (this person, I need to ask permission), then you can borrow my hardcopy. And/or you'll find one under your pillow. If it bears out.
do you want to borrow Housekeeping?