American literature, American fiction, American novel, contemporary fiction, Classic fiction
Novel Review Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep begins: Standing before the kitchen sink and regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away, each with a bead of water at its nose, slowly swelling, falling, David again become aware that this world had been created without thought of him. And for the next...
Novel Review One day in Bridger’s Wells, two cowboys came to relieve themselves of the tension of managing a herd of cattle. One of them, Art Croft, the narrator, passed the time of the ride by watching chipmunks and jays play or noticing how blue the sky is. Once they reached town, the other,...
Best known for The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, both about high society, in Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton broke script by writing about poor, rural farmers. The unnamed narrator is visiting Starkfield on a sojourn; he is an engineer planning a nearby power plant. Years after the events of the novel,...
Say you live in San Francisco. You get up one day and decide to play with your binoculars. You went to the window and aimed them at Corona Heights, and there you saw a man on the summit waving at you. Curious, you decided to meet him and find what his deal was. You...
I read The Girl of the Sea of Cortez as a comprise. I have always been fascinated with Peter Benchley’s novel The Deep; at least, I think I will like reading it. I haven’t read it, but I saw the Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset movie, about a couple vacation in Bermuda. Being scuba...
Though I know there are several wonderful stories with animal protagonists, I tend not to read them. I guess I suffer from a homo sapiens prejudice when it comes to literature. I want the stories I read to be about people. I confess this is a narrow, distorted view of the world, one that...
Since I had read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) before reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), I first met Tom Sawyer in that novel. It wasn’t a welcome meeting. Towards the end of the story, Tom played a game that almost cost Jim, the runaway slave, his life. Tom considered it great...
I had high hopes for Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Theses hopes rested in part on There Will Be Blood (2007), a movie based on the novel, a movie I loved. But the film, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, shares the “idea” of Sinclair’s novel, but not its plot....
We all love a good spy novel. At least, I know I love espionage thrillers. I have already reviewed several on this blog, including Red Sparrow, The Rhythm Section, and Leaving Berlin. The spy has always been part of Western literature. In Homer’s Iliad, there is a book dedicated to Odysseus and Diomedes as...
Something is broken in Kenny Becker’s life, but he doesn’t know what it is or how to fix it. At thirty, he’s stuck in a dead-end job, and he has mixed feelings about his relationship with La Donna. Maybe he loves her. Maybe he enjoys having a woman around for sexual reasons. He wonders...
