I'm giving this a 4 out of 5 stars because of the amazing writing. There are a lot of folks who think that is all that a book should be. They just give it a pass. But I will always be a reader who needs a plot. This has a plot but it goes along at a plodding pace, and I don’t care how beautiful t...
My students selected this book for one of their lit circle books and I hadn't read it (based on a librarian's recommendation who I am friends with) so I had to read it fast! I am not familiar with Hansen's work and found myself underlining sentences and phrases as applicable to this old person'...
The verbs in this thing! The magnificent and effortless similes! My god! Congratulations, Ron Hansen--with Nebraska, you've earned your place among my favorite short story writers, alongside Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, and Jim Shepard."Wickedness" comes blazing out of the gate, a swirling (no pun ...
just received this from Paul Bryant - thanks. It's massive (600 big p) - I can see this taking up most of February. Looks tasty, but the Biblical style of the book (Awe), the weight, puts me off reading it in public. a bunch of fantastic stories on the whole. Will do a proper review soon. (Tomorr...
“Oh Hitler!”“Oh Geli – meine kleine gehaltenmitgemütlichemkirchenkunsterschwartzeweldekirschtorte, is that a hard or a soft G?”“It’s hard. But the rest of me is soft, so soft, mein Fuhrer. You know my name rhymes with gaily, which is an English word meaning happily.”“Mine rhymes with whittler wh...
Watching McSween glumly from the front of the Wortley Hotel next door, Dolan seemed to be trying to slaughter him with his stare.Alex shouted, “We have been out in the hills long enough. I have now returned and your ruffians shall not drive me away so long as I live.”Dolan said, “Duly noted.”The ...
The storyteller bears enormous responsibility. In every line of "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," we feel the narrative's consciousness of such power and responsibility. As Silko showed us in Ceremony, a story is more than artifice; each story is a ceremony, and every ceremony changes the world. T h...
It was June 1925 and inside the hosiery shop there was a faint chemical smell and a gray tin fleur-de-lis ceiling and giant fan blades shoving hot air around as a pretty hairdresser friend named Kitty Kaufman flirted with a stocking salesman named Harry Folsom and Harry joined the flirtation with...
August 1906. Half-moon and a wrack of gray clouds. Church windows and thirty nuns singing the Night Office in Gregorian chant. Matins. Lauds. And then silence. Wind, and a nighthawk teetering on it and yawing away into woods. Wallowing beetles in green pond water. Toads. Cattails sw...
Genevieve; with robbing a train in Iowa, and killing an engineer, with robbing two or three banks in Kentucky and killing two or three men there, but for every charge we are willing to be tried if Governor Woodson will promise us protection until we can prove before any fair jury in the State tha...
17 Shambling through the first floor of the rooming house and clapping off lamps, Mrs. Christiansen encountered a pensive Natalie at the kitchen table, one hand supporting her head as the other fetched popcorn from a salad bowl. The girl wore red satin pajamas that did not do enough, Marvyl thoug...