Tag: Literature

Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century

Over the last hundred years African writers have written of their lives, experiences, culture, history and myth; they have written in diverse forms, styles and in many languages. They have been published widely on the African continent, in Europe, the Americas and Asia. They have written in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Swahili, and in many other indigenous languages. And they have written with extraordinary originality, flair and great integrity. Nonetheless their work as a corpus deriving from the African continent remains largely unknown and uncelebrated.

To mark the beginning of the 21st century, and encouraged by Professor Ali Mazrui, the Zimbabwe International Book Fair launched the international compilation of “Africa’s 100 Best Books.” This project was organized in collaboration with the African Publishers Network (APNET), the Pan-African Booksellers Association (PABA), African writers’ associations, book development councils, and library associations.

Nominations were sought throughout the African continent and internationally. A comprehensive list of all nominations was published at the ZIBF in August 2001 and during the course of the following year regional panels compiled their own short lists of 100 best books. Closing date for nominations was 30 September 2001.

A jury made the final decision from the short list and the final list of “Africa’s 100 Best Books” was announced on February 18, 2002.
…
In the table below, ** indicates a top twelve title.

Columbia.edu

LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

Asare, Meshack	Ghana	**Sosu’s Call	Sub-Saharan Publishers
Al-Homi, Hayam Abbas	Egypt	Adventures of a Breath	Atfalna
Mungoshi, Charles	Zimbabwe	Stories from a Shona Childhood	Baobab Books
Tadjo, Veronique	Côte d’Ivoire	Mamy Wata et le monstre	Nouvelles éditions ivoriennes

CREATIVE WRITING

Continue reading “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century” →

Reading War and Peace in Leningrad, 1942

Spring, Leningrad, 1942 – “though the word ‘spring,”‘ writes Russian literary critic Lidiya Ginsburg in her memoir, Blockade Diary, “had an odd ring to it. The bread ration had been increased, trams made their diffident way along frozen streets. The Germans had halted the bombing raids, but were shelling the city several times each day. The strongest and most vital people had already died – or had survived. The feeble went on belatedly dying. The word ‘spring’ had an odd ring to it.”

As she tells us in this slender but powerful volume, though “the thirst for information was fearful,” with people crowding around street-corner loudspeakers several times a day, the besieged Russians of Leningrad longed for other sorts of “information.” Ginsburg writes:

During the war years, people used to read War and Peace avidly, comparing their own behaviour with it (not the other way round – no one doubted the adequacy of Tolstoy’s response to life). The reader would say to himself… so then, this is how it should be. Whoever had the energy enough to read, used to read war and Peace avidly in besieged Leningrad….

Tolstoy had said the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people’s war. He also spoke of how those caught up in this common round continued playing their part involuntarily, while ostensibly busy solving problems affecting their own lives. The people of besieged Leningrad worked (while they could) and saved (if they could) both themselves and their loved ones from dying of hunger.

And in the final reckoning that was also essential to the war effort, because a living city barred the path of an enemy who wanted to kill it.

Molloy by Samuel Beckett – Review, Summary

“Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school,” says Martin Amis. “On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible, and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes.” This isn’t entirely fair – Beckett was capable of sentences, even paragraphs. Even a 90-page paragraph that comprises the entire first half of this fuckin’ book here, which is about some knucklehead who farts. “One day I counted them,” Molloy says. “Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes.” Have you, friend, ever counted your farts?

The second half features Moran, the world’s worst dad, as he forces an enema up his kid. They wander through the countryside; he’s looking for Molloy, perhaps to interrogate him for some murky reason. He’s a detective? An assassin? Along the way he murders a guy for no real reason. Molloy killed a guy too. Their voices are similar(ly unhinged). The theory goes that perhaps we’ve skipped backwards, Moran is young Molloy, he’s hunting down his future. That is of course a very college seminar thing to say, a very Lit Major theory, and “It is not at this late stage of my relation,” Moran tells us, “that I intend to give way to literature.” But have we? Given way to literature? If so, how many farts did it take?

Good Reads
Alex
4 Stars

Finnegans Wake Enthusiasts

The Most Challenging Book You’ve Ever Read
byu/MadMaxine666 inbooks

tomchaps
I met a guy in 1992 in St. Petersburg (Russia), who had taught himself English by reading the liner notes to old rock-n-roll records. He had a Elvis-style pompadour, but was more of a Carl Perkins fan.

The first actual book he read was Finnegans Wake. He just got a dictionary, went at it word-by-word, and just let it wash over him. Very, very slowly. He claimed to have loved it.

ej_21
one of my favorite recent stories was the book club that spent almost three decades reading finnegans wake: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

flibadab
I took both an undergraduate and a graduate course on Finnegans Wake (different universities), and I loved it. Both professors emphasized that you can’t possible get everything in the Wake, but you can definitely enjoy it.

Death of Ivan Ilyich – Some Quotes from

Apart from the reflections this death called up in each of them about the transfers and possible changes at work that might result from it, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance called up in all those who heard of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who was dead and not I.

In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there were damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes – all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class.

It was all just as it was in the law courts. The doctor put on just the same air towards him as he himself put on towards an accused person.
The doctor said that so-and-so indicated that there was so-and-so inside the patient, but if the investigation of so-and-so did not confirm this, then he must assume that and that. If he assumed that and that, then…and so on. To Iván Ilých only one question was important: was his case serious or not? But the doctor ignored that inappropriate question.

And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed – none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.

And what was worst of all was that It drew his attention to itself not in order to make him take some action but only that he should look at It, look it straight in the face: look at it and without doing anything, suffer inexpressibly.

‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?’ he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.

Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy

Love after Love – Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Found in:
Poems of Gratitude (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series)

Burning Down the Waffle House – The Alchemist – Review of, Summary

What book do you WANT to like but just can’t?
byu/tinuvi3l inliterature

ProudTacoman
Hear me out here…The Alchemist can be the best book you could possibly read…BUT it’s all about timing. At just the right time in your life, in just the right circumstances, with the wind blowing softly toward the southeast, and Capricorn in Venus or whatever…The Alchemist has the potential to be exactly what you need to read at that moment. No, as a book, it’s not elegant, subtle, wise, or necessarily “well written,” but it is a quick hit of affirmation without requiring much time or any thought. In fact, the less thought you give it, the better it works for this. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature!

That magical and rare confluence of circumstances that makes The Alchemist a good book for you is this: You’re thinking about making a major change or decision in your life that you know in your bones is the right one, despite what your research, your smarter friends, the criminal justice system, the people who care about you, and the latest consensus of the scientific community might say. Maybe these folks started talking about pros and cons lists, cost/benefit analysis, and “critical thinking,” but you need none of that. Nine times out of ten, these are the guys to listen to, and you should abandon whatever self-destructive course you’re on, like, yesterday. But you’ve already searched your soul and you’ve decided: You’re going to step out on your marriage. You’re ready to sell all your worldly possessions, give the proceeds to Scientology, and move to Lhasa. You’re going to propose to your ex. You’re gonna burn down a Waffle House. You don’t need the wisdom of the masses. What do you need? You need to talk to the tenth dentist. The one who recommends never flossing and isn’t afraid to call out Big Toothpaste on their “after every meal” conspiracy.

These are the times you call up your old buddy from the shit-kicking days who barely graduated middle school and lives life a quarter ounce at a time. Why him? Because he positively exudes that “hell yeah brother!” pothead wisdom that only holds up for the brief time you’re talking to him, and absolutely crumples under any kind of scrutiny. He doesn’t ask questions. In fact, big questions confuse him and make him kind of aggressive. But he fully and vocally supports anything that doesn’t require him to keep a schedule or figure out the ring inside his toilet bowl. In this tipping-point moment, you need that kind of pseudo-wisdom, just to hear some kind – any kind – of support for your hare-brained scheme. However wound up you are to do what you’re going to do, he’ll wind you up tighter with a bug-eyed rant about putting aside your inhibitions to embrace your destiny. Your personal legend.

Paulo Coelho is your loser buddy, and The Alchemist is his pep talk. Pick up the phone. Burn down that Waffle House. Maktub, bitches.

A Way in the World – Amazon Review of

2.0 out of 5 stars Mythologizing his Existence
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2021
As I said in other reviews, I’m reading through Naipaul. I’m disappointed in the book, yet another attempt by Naipaul to mythologize his own existence, to identify who he is, what he is. I say it is an attempt because the line of thought he pursues to locate himself in his historical context is doomed to failure. His attempt at self-realization goes nowhere, as it does for everybody. It is a common mistake to look backward for some sense of self because there really is no sense of self, in the sense of self-realization, to begin with. It is mythology that we hold on to for dear life, for the abyss awaits those that fail in this endeavor. But the mythology is fiction, and thus we are always sitting on the edge of the abyss.

A Way in the World

Amazon blurb/summary:

The Nobel Prize-winning author—and “one of literature’s great travelers” (Los Angeles Times)—spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism.

“Dickensian … a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul’s) life and work.”—The New York Times

“Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.”

So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in The Enigma of Arrival, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention.

It is the story of a writer’s lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance — language, character, family history — and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: “things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.” What he writes — and what his release of memory enables us to see — is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh’s final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda’s disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator’s own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling.

Best Books I Read in 2023 that Weren’t Published in 2023

No order. Selections mine, blurbs via Amazon.

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
Robert D. Richardson
Often cited as the “father of American psychology,” William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant contributions to at least five fields: psychology, philosophy, religious studies, teaching, and literature.

A member of one of the most unusual and notable of American families, James struggled to achieve greatness amid the brilliance of his theologian father; his brother, the novelist Henry James; and his sister, Alice James. After studying medicine, he ultimately realized that his true interests lay in philosophy and psychology, a choice that guided his storied career at Harvard, where he taught some of America’s greatest minds. But it is James’s contributions to intellectual study that reveal the true complexity of man.

Blood and Thunder
Hampdon Sides
In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.

At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.

Off the Rails: Aboard the Crazy Train in the Blizzard of Ozz
Rudy Sarzo
A fellow musician’s interesting insight into the beginning of Ozzy Osbourne s solo career and his relationship with Sharon Osbourne. This exciting biography also clears a lot of misinformation and bogus theories circulating around the late, great, guitar virtuoso Randy Rhoads’ life and death. Written by journeyman rock bassist Rudy Sarzo, this is a first hand account of Rudy’s experience on the road with Ozzy and his Blizzard of Ozz band.

Acid for the Children
Flea
In Acid for the Children, Flea takes readers on a deeply personal and revealing tour of his formative years, spanning from Australia to the New York City suburbs to, finally, Los Angeles. Through hilarious anecdotes, poetical meditations, and occasional flights of fantasy, Flea deftly chronicles the experiences that forged him as an artist, a musician, and a young man. His dreamy, jazz-inflected prose makes the Los Angeles of the 1970s and 80s come to gritty, glorious life, including the potential for fun, danger, mayhem, or inspiration that lurked around every corner. It is here that young Flea, looking to escape a turbulent home, found family in a community of musicians, artists, and junkies who also lived on the fringe. He spent most of his time partying and committing petty crimes. But it was in music where he found a higher meaning, a place to channel his frustration, loneliness, and love. This left him open to the life-changing moment when he and his best friends, soul brothers, and partners-in-mischief came up with the idea to start their own band, which became the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

How the Word is Passed
Clint Smith
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
Rutger Bregman
If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It’s a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we’re taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest.

But what if it isn’t true? International bestseller Rutger Bregman provides new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another. In fact this instinct has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.

From the real-life Lord of the Flies to the solidarity in the aftermath of the Blitz, the hidden flaws in the Stanford prison experiment to the true story of twin brothers on opposite sides who helped Mandela end apartheid, Bregman shows us that believing in human generosity and collaboration isn’t merely optimistic—it’s realistic. Moreover, it has huge implications for how society functions. When we think the worst of people, it brings out the worst in our politics and economics. But if we believe in the reality of humanity’s kindness and altruism, it will form the foundation for achieving true change in society, a case that Bregman makes convincingly with his signature wit, refreshing frankness, and memorable storytelling.

5 Best Books of 2023

No order. Selections mine, blurbs via Amazon.

Rikers
Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

What happens when you pack almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society’s cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill purposefully hidden from public view? Prize-winning journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people comprising a broad cross section of lives touched by New York City’s Rikers Island prison complex—from incarcerated people and their relatives, to officers, lawyers, and commissioners, with stories spanning the 1970s to the present day. The portrait that emerges calls into question the very nature of justice in America.

Rough Sleepers
Tracy Kidder

After Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General, the hospital’s chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens? That year turned into O’Connell’s life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they work with thousands of homeless patients, some of whom we meet in this illuminating book. We travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city streets at night, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most endangered citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.”

The Best Minds
Jonathan Rosen

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.

Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn’t as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the call: Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Black AF History
Michael Harriot

In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history. Combining unapologetically provocative storytelling with meticulous research based on primary sources as well as the work of pioneering Black historians, scholars, and journalists, Harriot removes the white sugarcoating from the American story, placing Black people squarely at the center. With incisive wit, Harriot speaks hilarious truth to oppressive power, subverting conventional historical narratives with little-known stories about the experiences of Black Americans. From the African Americans who arrived before 1619 to the unenslavable bandit who inspired America’s first police force, this long overdue corrective provides a revealing look into our past that is as urgent as it is necessary. For too long, we have refused to acknowledge that Americanhistory is white history. Not this one. This history is Black AF.

Bartelby and Me
Gay Talese

“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” a young reporter named Gay Talese wrote sixty years ago. He would spend the rest of his legendary career defying that statement by celebrating the people most reporters overlooked, understanding that it was through these minor characters that the epic story of New York and America unfolded. Inspired by Herman Melville’s great short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Talese now revisits the unforgettable “nobodies” he has profiled in his celebrated career—from the New York Times’s anonymous obituary writer to Frank Sinatra’s entourage. In the book’s final act, a remarkable piece of original reporting titled “Dr. Bartha’s Brownstone,” Talese presents a new “Bartleby,” an unknown doctor who made his mark on the city one summer day in 2006.

PREVIOUS YEAR’S SELECTIONS
5 Best Books of 2022
The 5 Best Books of 2021
Best Books of 2020

Desultory Notes – Week of November 17, 2023

At the 9:15 mark, in answer to a direct question posed by interviewer Woodrow Wyatt about the “practical use of your sort of philosophy to a man who wants to know how to conduct himself,” Russell replies:

I think nobody should be certain of anything. If you’re certain, you’re certainly wrong because nothing deserves certainty. So one ought to hold all one’s beliefs with a certain element of doubt, and one ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt…. One has in practical life to act upon probabilities, and what I should look to philosophy to do is to encourage people to act with vigor without complete certainty.

Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncertainty

Dmitry Portnoy
Studio City
It’s only after seeing this production that I felt I understood anything about a play I’d thought about for more than three decades. Turns out when a brilliant director and cast perform it with the commitment and humility it demands, it sheds its clown nose and begins to speak.

AWS
philadelphia, pa
I was completely captivated by this production – wonderfully directed and a master class in acting by the whole cast. This is probably the best thing happening in NY theater at the moment (if not for the entire season). I feel very privileged to have seen it.

Chip
Greenville, North Carolina
My all-time favorite graffito:

“Back in a second.” — Godot

‘Waiting for Godot’ Review: Old Friends Falling in and Out of Sync
Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks star in Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
(From the comments)

“Competition happens at the bottom, people at the top are collaborating ” – via twitter and instagram.

I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore – often blindly – the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.

Jonathan Coe
from introduction to:
A Heart So White
Javier Marias

Me and My Friend(s) – 5 Memoir, Biography Hybrid Books

Selections mine, blurbs via Amazon

Three Girls from Bronzeville
Dawn Turner Trice
They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded—fervently and intensely in that unique way of little girls—as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South.

Remembering Denny
Calvin Trillin
Remembering Denny is perhaps Calvin Trillin’s most inspired and powerful book: a memoir of a friendship, a work of investigative reporting, and an exploration of a country and a time that captures something essential about how America has changed since Trillin–and Denny Hansen–were graduated from Yale in 1957. Roger “Denny” Hansen had seemed then a college hero for the ages: a charmer with a dazzling smile, the subject of a feature in Life magazine, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a varsity swimmer, a Rhodes scholar…perhaps a future president, as his friends only half-joked. But after early jobs in government and journalism, Hansen’s life increasingly took a downward turn and he gradually lost touch with family and old friends before eventually committing suicide–an obscure, embittered, pain-racked professor–in 1991.

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
Jeff Hobbs
To read The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, a meticulous and heartfelt account of a brilliant black student from the poverty-stricken streets of Newark, is to see the best of the American dream lived and ultimately, tragically, lost. Peace’s mother endured great sacrifices to ensure that her gifted son would meet his full potential. His father, until his arrest for murder when Rob was seven, dedicated himself to helping his son learn and mature. Rob was a popular, straight-A student who played on the water polo team (his mother scraped up enough money to send him to parochial school), and upon graduating he was rewarded with a scholarship to Yale. Although he continued to thrive academically in college, growing up in the second largest concentration of African-Americans living under the poverty line created barriers that even one as gifted as Robert Peace could not fully surmount. This is a riveting and heartbreaking read, as Rob Peace seems always to have been on the outside—the resented geek in the hood, and the inner city black man in the Ivy League

Best Minds
Jonathan Rosen
When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.

The Forgotten Girls
Monica Potts
Growing up gifted and working-class poor in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of reading and learning, even as they navigated the challenges of their tumultuous family lives and declining town—broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their middle-school classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left Clinton for college and fulfilled her dreams, but Darci, along with many in their circle of friends, did not.

5 Short Stories – a Desultory Notes Selection, Quotes from

A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear
All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we—you and I—shall build.

John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever

The Jewbird
“I’m an old radical.”
“You’re sure you’re not some kind of a ghost or dybbuk?”
“Not a dybbuk,” answered the bird, “though one of my relatives had such an experience once. It’s all over now, thanks God. They freed her from a former lover, a crazy jealous man. She’s now the mother of two wonderful children.”
“Birds?” Cohen asked slyly.
“Why not?”
“What kind of birds?”
“Like me. Jewbirds.”
Cohen tipped back in his chair and guffawed. “That’s a big laugh. I heard of a Jewfish but not a Jewbird.”

Bernard Malamud
The Complete Stories

The Fishing-Boat Picture
I’ve been a postman for twenty-eight years. Take that first sentence: because it’s written in a simple way may make the fact of my having been a postman for so long seem important, but I realize that such a fact has no significance whatever. After all, it’s not my fault that it may seem as if it has to some people just because I wrote it down plain; I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way. If I started using long and complicated words that I’d searched for in the dictionary I’d use them too many times, the same ones over and over again, with only a few sentences—if that—between each one; so I’d rather not make what I’m going to write look foolish by using dictionary words.

Alan Sillitoe
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner: Stories

The Man in the Overstuffed Chair
He always enters the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside. That is how he always enters it except when it’s after midnight and liquor has put out the fire in his nerves. Then he enters the house in a strikingly different manner, almost guiltily, coughing a little, sighing louder than he coughs, and sometimes talking to himself as someone talks to someone after a long, fierce argument has exhausted the anger between them but not settled the problem. He takes off his shoes in the living room before he goes upstairs where he has to go past my mother’s closed door, but she never fails to let him know she hears him by clearing her throat very loudly or saying, “Ah, me, ah, me!” Sometimes I hear him say “Ah, me” in response as he goes on down the hall to where he sleeps, an alcove sunroom connected to the bedroom of my young brother, Dakin, who is at this time, the fall and winter of 1943, with the Air Force in Burma.

Tennessee Williams
Collected Stories

Rothschild’s Fiddle
The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying. And in the hospital and jail there was very little demand for coffins. In short, business was bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been a coffin-maker in the provincial capital, he would most likely have had a house of his own and been called Yakov Matveich; but in this wretched little town he was simply called Yakov, his street nickname for some reason was “Bronzy,” and he lived a poor life, like a simple peasant, in a little old cottage with only one room, and that room housed himself, Marfa, the stove, the double bed, the coffins, the workbench, and all his chattels.

Yakov made good, sturdy coffins. For peasants and tradesmen he made them his own size and was never once mistaken, because no one anywhere, not even in the jail, was taller or stronger than he, though he was now seventy years old. For gentlefolk and women he worked to measure, and for that he used an iron ruler. He accepted orders for children’s coffins very reluctantly, and made them straight off without measurements, scornfully, and, taking the money for his work, would say each time:

“I confess, I don’t like messing with trifles.”

Besides his craft, he also earned a little money playing the fiddle.

Anton Chekhov
Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

Tattered Cover Bankruptcy

Tattered Cover Book Store files for bankruptcy

Denver’s iconic indie bookstore, Tattered Cover, may be starting its final chapter.

Driving the news: The bookstore filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it said in a statement released Monday.

It will try to reorganize to remain in business during the process.

Why it matters: It’s a dark turn for a beloved shop that’s captivated Denverites since opening its first location in the city’s Cherry Creek neighborhood in 1971, becoming one of the most successful indie bookstores in the country and destination for bookworms everywhere.

What they’re saying: “Our objective is to put Tattered Cover on a smaller, more modern and financially sustainable platform that will ensure our ability to serve Colorado readers for many more decades,” Tattered Cover CEO Brad Dempsey, a bankruptcy attorney, said in a statement.

State of play: The filing means three of its seven stores will close by November. The impacted stores are inside McGregor Square near Coors Field in Denver, Colorado Springs and Westminster.

27 of the bookstore’s 103 positions will be eliminated.

Big big fan of the Tattered Cover. Can’t be easy being a brick and mortar bookstore these days.