I hadn't the least suspicion that this was the perfect book to read right after I’d completed a long Virginia Woolf season but my reading life has a way of finding connections in spite of me. Having finally finished with Woolf last week, I searched my book pile for something I thought would be co...
The National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow offers an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, as he retraces, branch by branch, the history of his family, taking readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, examining the way they saw t...
I have never been much of a reader of Literature. My tastes tend to run toward simpler fare that I can enjoy on a level that doesn’t require a great deal of thought on my part. In short, I typically read to be entertained, not moved. So, when I heard an interview with William Maxwell on NPR in ’9...
If this 1945 novel were published today it would be marketed as YA. Two fifteen year old boys, one solidly middle class, athletic, and good looking (Spud), the other lower middle class, half-orphaned, small, skinny, and ridiculously unathletic (Lymie), become best friends on the north side of Ch...
This is a rare gem of a book. It is so perfect in its depiction of traveling and falling in love with another country that, not only would I not change a word, I found section after section I wanted to absorb into my skin. Although written sixty years ago and set just after World War II, the int...
Leaning over the railing of her second story porch, Miss Ewing looked up and then down the alley. Though she called and called, the big yellow tomcat did not come. “I can’t wait any longer,” she said to herself out loud. “I’m late enough as it is,” and went back into the kitchen, locked and bolte...
The two women friends THE two women were well along in years, and one lived in a castle and one lived in the largest house in the village that was at the foot of the castle rock. Though picturesque, the castle had bathrooms and central heating, and it would not for very long have withstood a sieg...
Every trace of them disappears, through the simple erosion of human forgetfulness. They were in movement in a new country. The women were committed to drudgery and died young. The men had no proper tools to farm with, and weren’t good farmers anyway. They used up the land by improper practices. W...