Meredith Sue Willis's

Books for Readers # 233

April 29, 2024

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BOOK REVIEWS

This list is alphabetical by book author (not reviewer). They are written by MSW unless otherwise noted.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

The Angels of Sinkhole County by Deborah Clearman

The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford

Warnings:  The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy by Leondard Grob and John K. Roth Reviewed by Joe Chuman

Elizabeth the Great by Elizabeth Jenkins

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin

Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

Valediction, poems and prose by Linda Parsons reviewed by Felicia Mitchell

The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

Three by Lisa Scottoline:  Lady Killer
Everywhere that Mary Went
Legal Tender

Tally-Ho by Oscar Silver

 

New and Interesting Links:

Los Angeles Review of Books

The Washington Review of Books

Are you looking for an agent?  Try  Query Track!

 

 

This issue has a couple of rediscovered books  (see announcements) plus two pieces under Especially for Writers  about the very individual process of getting published.  As my mother used to say, "It's a long row to hoe."

I've also been in one of my crime and mystery periods.  This is largely becuase I've been traveling and doing a lot of papers for a class. Along with the speed of movement and dependability of the genres, there's a great deal to be learned about story telling, pace, and structure, especially from the late, great Elmore Leonard.Dennis Lehane says this of Elmore Leonard's plots: 

Where other novels zig, Leonard’s zag. Plot is not a series of bricks built upon bricks to erect a formidable edifice, but a loose collection of steps one or two primary characters take down a path that crosses another path that leads to a building with a room where more people are gathered. When one of those characters goes out the back door and down a fire escape, the original character follows and enters an alley which leads to another path which winds further away from that first path, which nobody remembers anyway because it’s, like, 10 paths back. In other words, Elmore Leonard’s plots feel less like plots and more like life.

Lehane's piece on Leonard ("Get Shorty" at 30 in The Guardian) also speaks admiringly of Leonard's dialogue and how his crime stories are character driven rather than plot driven.

REVIEWS

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa

This novel by the writer-activist Abulhawa covers the history of Palestinians in Israel from 1948 to the early 2000's with richly drawn characters and various historical events--mostly political catastrophes for the Palestinian people.  There is a strong nostalgia for the life in small olive farming communities before the foundation of Israel, and for Palestinian folkways and foods and religion and family ties.  The main character Amit has a loving literary father who wakes her at dawn in the refugee camp Jenin to read to her, usually from the work of Khalil Gibran.  There are friends who are European and Jewish.  There is a hint of what was and might have been, from the Palestinian perspective.

And then there are the catastrophes for the land-tied traditional people in Amit’s family: the clearing of the Palestinians from their home, the conditions in the small refugee camp where Amit grows up and has the kind of fun children do, wherever they are. 

The family, however, has terrible wounds: the oldest children, twin boys, are divided as babies when a Jewish solider kidnaps one of the boys to give to his deeply disturbed but nuturing wife, a survivor of the death camps in Europe.  Amit and her older brothers’ mother goes into depression and psychosis, and, much later, dementia.  Amit's beloved father disappears; Amit herself is badly wounded by an Israeli sniper. She ends up going to an orphanage-school in Jerusalem to honor her father’s devotion to education.

    The middle third of the novel covers families in Lebanon, including the horrific massacres in the PLO refugee camps Sabra and Shantila in 1982 Lebanon by right wing Christian Lebanese, overseen by the Israeli army.

    Then come the intifadas.  Amit’s lover dies after she goes to the U.S. to make a place for him and their coming child.  She spends much of her life-- skipped over rather cursorily in the novel-- living in the U.S., and finally, when her daughter is college age, goes back with her to Jenin after a visit from her Jewish brother who has found out about his past and is looking for his family.

    The final section, back in Jenin and Jerusalem, is also harrowing, but deeply satisfying at the same time.  There is no end to blood-shed, but Abulhawa explores the possibilities for good even in the middle of great evil and violence.

    To be honest, I had trouble finishing the book. I have friends in Israel and friends and family who are deeply commited to the State of Israel.  As I write this, we are in the middle of the Gaza War after the murders and rapes and kidnapings in Southern Israel by the anti-semitic Hamas terrorists. We are in the middle of the Gaza War in which Israel has already purportedly killed 20 or 30 times the number of Palestinans as Hamas killed Israelis.  I kept wincing and putting the book down.  I saw Abulhawa herself on a youtube report from Gaza for Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.  She is highly partisan, a founder of a group that builds playgrounsds for Palestinain children–and an important member of the BDS gorup (Boycott Divest Sanctions). A lot of people do and will view this novel as propaganda.

    But even if Abulhawa, who lives in Pennsylvania, made up half ot it, it is still a powerful record of suffering and violence.

 

 

 

 

Valediction by Linda Parsons reviewed by Felicia Mitchell

Sometimes I pick up a particular book I like by Pema Chödrön, as if it will transport me to a psychic space that comforts me. But as much solace as Chödrön’s words bring, sometimes I will put the book aside and walk outdoors, into my yard or a forest, more at home with the natural world that helps me to make sense of my own life. With my feet on the ground and my head in the air, I breathe and feel less adrift in a life that can elude me. Other times, I read poems that I have accumulated over the years by writers whose experiences make mine make more sense. A poem can tether together so many of the threads that bind us to the myriad experiences of a life. Sometimes they make us feel less alone.

The sort of connection that can emanate from a good poem or book of poems is perhaps more helpful than any self-help book I have read. I like poets who weave words into patterns to bring others closer into that psychic space that explains exactly what it is like to be human, to be mortal, to live with not only death but the weight—and light—of what a lifetime can give. As poets, our dare is that others might hear us. Our hope is that our words will be as indelible as, Linda Parsons writes in “Dust to Dust,” the “small label / on the brass letterbox / I gave my grandmother / forty years ago, memento . . .” (14). This is why I love Valediction, a new collection of poems and short prose pieces from Parsons (Madville Press, 2023). Her voice resonates from her indelible words.

Valediction is thus meditative for both author and reader. Reading it is like being inside a mind where a deep wisdom resides, where there is the possibility of redemption, where life and death circle alongside loss and light, where family—as complicated as it can be, as contrary as it can be with the good and the bad—makes sense, if you wait long enough or look through the prism of a sage adulthood. The poems, in order to effect this reaction, are perfectly crafted, diction palpable as the imagery invoked from garden to travels to memory. Every poem is finely wrought. For example, “Believe” weaves imagery of past and present to assert “I do believe we can shape our grief / solid as brick—or torch it like straw” (74). So many poems weave sense out of history and mind, as also in “Recipe for Troubled Times,” about a father’s death, which begins, “Throw it all in the pot—the war and hunger / years, the Depression’s hoboes, pandemic pandemonium . . .” (48). Consider, too, “Overtaken,” where “my DNA / commingles columbine and verbena, / sweat of my sweat” (24).

The motif of commingling deepens the reading experience, where one finds meditation embodied in “October’s thinning veil” (“Visitation: October,” 11), a game of checkers (“Checkers with My Granddaughter,” 54), a mother’s nail polish on her toes or the absence thereof (“My Mother’s Feet,” 62). It occurs in far-flung places the poet has travelled, in her yard, and in rooms for Thai massage. Sometimes it is like breath, other times a reaching out in order to reach in, as in “The Motherhouse Road,” a poem that encompasses the travel that is solace alongside an assertion of the need for holy retreats. This poem shows how turning towards the self includes finding a place for others, in life and in memory, including a former husband and a complicated mother “who remembers nothing bad / or fractured, beatific in her nursing home bed” (55). Healing, this poem and others show, is possible, so much of this healing a reaching outwards into travel, the natural world, domestic rituals. “Plaintive ocarina, / call me to bear all the light coming,” the poet writes in “Valediction,” a riff on John Donne’s poem inspired by the loss of a dog but transcendentally more than about the loss of the dog (8).

Such light counters darkness, which is what we find in the poems and prose pieces in this collection where the poet is both the healer and the healed. In “Roy G Biv,” Parsons writes, “My assignment in sixth grade / was to harness light” (46). She has been doing that in one way or the other ever since. Consider the pandemic-inspired “Everywhere and Nowhere at Once,” which shows with its weaving of Deepak Chopra’s words that both still the poet and draw her into her own “sodden earth,” with cicadas, oak, and trumpet vine grounding literally and figuratively. The poet’s discipline with her own life, her own karma, informs a healing grace that shows a human being healed who can then better heal. But there is no heavy-handedness in the way the wisdom is shared, with the voice of the poet inviting us into a safe space rather than preaching. “I’m not a healer,” the poet writes in “Garden Medicine,” “though maybe / I am—my ordinary hands laid on the scathing past // to cool its sear . . .” (22). The paradoxical, sometimes koan-like, makes the poems even more meditative.

I should mention that along with the exquisite poems the prose pieces, each a “Visitation,” are woven so gracefully through the book, with their topics echoing topics addressed in poems, offering a prismatic effect to their role in the collection. “Prose pieces,” inspired by the Covid Garden Project workshop, are termed “essayettes” rather than prose poems, but their inclusion draws us to consider the distinction when some might have called them prose poems. Bridging the best of her poetry and prose, these prose pieces embody the elements of the essay or “essai” in its truest essence: an attempt to make sense of something in contemplative prose that sketches the thought processes reflecting more than it tidily concludes. Questioning, implicit or explicit, is at the heart of a good essay, as with this question in “Visitation: White”: “How will we fare in the next inch toward light, a new year I infuse with starlike hope?” (70).

“Visitation: Conjunction,” also more narrative than a poem from Parsons might be, begins, “This winter solstice, our national psyche and our homebound selves hung in the balance. I took a breath, a break from doomscrolling, and sat on my porch steps” (47). A reflection on “my own dire conjunctions up close and personal” (47) leads the poet back to the light that sustains:

Time orbits as it will, worldly upheaval or no, and the light in its sure return urges us to rebuild, repair, yes rebirth ourselves from whatever ash we’ve become in our hard trying and doing. In the end, luck has nothing to do with it. (47)

I could not find better advice almost anywhere. I am thus thankful for the gift of resilience and wisdom Parsons shares, as well as a gift of being able to find the right path through life and her words. In “Airing Out,” she says, “I take myself to the sun” (4). This book takes us there too, where we are allowed to bask in the possibilities that reside in everything, from “Varadero’s opal waters” (“Elegant Decay,” 68) to a “gazebo feathered with tall phlox, begonia, / spent lunaria” (“Garden Medicine,” 22).

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin 

    This was so good!  I readsome LeGuin years ago--Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, part of the Earthsea books. At the time I praised her work for its feminism and because I was glad there was some grown up science fiction. I missed this one, and I reallly liked it. The main character is Orr, a man who dreams “effectively”–predictive dreams which he can’s control. The setting is a mildly dystopian future (I think it was imagined as taking place in the nineteen-nineties, but it's easy enough simply to see it as an alternative world). 

Orr is sent for psychiatric evaluation and treatment to Dr. Haber–ambitious, skillful, brilliant, and generally wanting the best for the world in an abstract way. He develops a way to control Orr’s dreams, and indeed, some things improve a little, but more are disastrous. For example, Dr. Haber tells Orr to dream of a world with no differences among races/ethnic groups and no war. The world he dreams has everyone with exactly the same color gray skin–and war has ended on earth because threatening aliens have landed on the moon.

Of course, since it’s LeGuin, the aliens turn out to be different from what people like Haber expect. The story telling never falters, the bits and pieces of the future world are interesting (although none of the versions of the futre include the digital revolution). The people are complex, and the changes surprising and satisfying.

The good news for me is that I missed of LeGuin'w work, so have a lot to read!

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

This was highly entertaining, the first of the novels about Dexter, a somewhat controlled sociopath/serial killer who only kills other serial killers who are really bad (child molesters, woman-choppers). This was the source of the popular t.v. show I never watched.

Dexter has a powerful Dark Passenger who periodically takes the wheel as it were, and Dexter goes hunting. Dexter also, however, has a deceased adoptive father who gave him permission to kill, but only bad people.  He is hilarious in his observations about humans (of which he doesn’t consider himself one) and very insightful about who he is himself.  He has a sister, genetic child of his adoptive parents, for whom he prefers that things go well.

His job is in the police department of Miami as an expert on spatter patterns–that would be blood spatters.  He can have sex, but really doesn’t get the point.  He is most fascinated by a true artist serial killer who seems to be trying to attract him,

I was highly amused and entertained up until the final quarter or so when the plot seems to get more attentiion than the characters.  It tries, IMHO, to be too explosive, too complete, too melodramatic. Otherwise, it's quite a t rip to get sucked into Dexter’s world view.

 

 

 

The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart

    Briefly, this was more fun than it should have been.  Mary Roberts Rinehart was famous in her time (early 1900's) as an American mystery writer. It feels like it’s emulating if not imitating the British. I had always wondered about her because I once got a grant with her name on it, (1976: Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation Fellowship–I just looked it up, and I don’t remember how much money or how I got it or anything about it).

The plot is boringly complicated, and I didn’t even try to follow it, but I did like the self-described spinster narrator and her relationship with her maid.  She never wants to admit she cares about anyone, and turns out to care a lot about the maid and her her niece and nephew. And she likes adventure.

It’s an oddity to read in the twenty-first century, but not awful.

 

 

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

I just can't seem to get up a head of steam about Agatha Christie, the mystery writer who has reputedly sold more books than anyone but Shakespeare and God  (if you believe God wrote the Bible.)   This one began with a pleasant lightness as various vacationers--British, American and Belgian (well, that's just Hercule Poirot)-- are sitting on the beach at an island resort chatting and exposing their quirks of character. There's a henpecked husband and a femme fatale who appears to be fascinating a young man while his wife suffers.  There's an unhappy teenage girl, there's a retiree who tells long boring stories, there's Poirot etc.etc. 

     Before long, of course, there's a murder too. I was mildly curious about whodunit, but more curious about how Christie would go about resolving the mystery.  I didn't really care a lot, though--it's much more like a puzzle or a game than any portrayal of human behavior. I just don't get the appeal. Not to mention that she was a notorious casual-cultural anti-Semite.

 

Take a look at this article from The Forward called "What Did Agatha Chrisite Really Think of Jews?".

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

As usual, I am blown away by Roth’s excellent structure: 200 pages, one night in the present time of the novel, with a couple of powerful flashbacks that act as a meditation on family dynamics and what it means to be Jewish. 

And, also as usual, in spite of the brilliance and tightness and some hilarious moments, I get impatient with Roth’s–what?  Misogyny? He gives the 23 year old protagonist, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, a hard time too. He is unbearably randy, always trying to get the nearest woman down on the rug in with him. And somehow, that Roth is making fun of him isn't enough: I'm still impatient.

He is visiting in the rural Berkshire Hills home of his beloved maybe-mentor Lonoff who is probably diddling the mysterious lovely European Amy Bellette.  Lonoff’s wife Helen, an aging, shiksa, repeatedly collapses in jealousy and insists she’s leaving.  Nathan eats it all up, while reading Henry James and imagining (I think) that Amy Bellette is writing about how she is really Anne Frank but intends to keep her survival hidden.

THe best part is, as usual, Newark: it's all about Nathan’s love of his father and mother and his fury at them for not loving a story he has written that exposes (they think) family dirty laundry to the Goys that makes the Zuckermans and the Jews look bad. There’s a lot of humor in this, and the whole Anne Frank is Alive theme is (probably) a fantasy of Nathan’s so he can marry her and please his parents (“and this is Nathan’s fiancée Anne Frank, yes, that Anne Frank...”).

 

For an excellent wayback review, see the  1979 Kirkus review here.

 

 

 

 

  

The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford

I have to think Hillary Mantel read this older book and perhaps was even answering it in some way with her Thomas Cromwell novels. Ford Madox Ford's Cromwell isn't nearly as interesting--intelligent and unscrupulous, but more coarse. 

Ford does some nice scene setting with his details of the late days of Henry VIII, and a lot of the minor characters are good--including King Harry himself, but Katharine Howard the fifth queen is pretty a much a cipher.  That is, she runs around a lot and has plenty of lines, some witty, but she doesn’t hold together as a character for me. 

Ford Madox Ford was a major player in his time, writer, publisher, and friend of everybody who was anybody in the early 20th c. literary world in Britain. But aside from the setting and a few set pieces, The Fifth Queen seemed pretty clunky and melodramatic to me. People just keep popping into Katharine’s rooms and having long, theatrical dialogues.

It does capture the youthful impetuosity of the Tudor era: nobody seemed to have gotten very old. King Henry is seen as decrepit, but he's in his late forties and early fifties here.

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth the Great by Elizabeth Jenkins

I was inspired to reread this biography already on my shelves after my lukewarm response to Ford Madox Ford's novel The Fifth Queen.

I first read this when I was fifteen, thanks to a frankly intellectual World History teacher, Mrs. Anna Lee Townsend at Shinnston High School. She recommended the Time Life Reading series to her class. I think I was the only one who asked for a subscription for my birthday or Christmas or something, and I was very proud of my sophistication. The books were good too, many still read. They opened big windows wide for me: Mistress to an Age about Mme de Staël, The Worldly Philosophers about great economists, and a slew of other. I probably liked this one best, though.

Elizabeth the Great was published in 1958 (see Kirkus here: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/elizabeth-jenkins/elizabeth-the-great/), and it has really aged well. It isn't a work of original scholarship, but it is well-documented and includes many aspects of its subject, including some psychological speculation.

It emphasizes Elizabeth's great strengths as a ruler: her sense of a relationship with the people of England and her determination to save money for them (even as she herself, as required and as she loved, wearing vastly expensive jewels and clothing and living a fantastically luxurious life style). She was also determined to stay out of war, frequently through endless negotiations over marriage proposals.

She was always pretty neurotic (Daddy has Mommy beheaded, anyone?) She apparently had a pretty ample sex life but it was always sans penetration. She was sometimes pettily nasty to subordinates, but kind to young people and very loyal to old friends.

The book is a perfect mix for me: how a woman in a past time made her way, respectrably scholarly style, but also lively and willing to speculate. It's an even better now that I'm an old lady myself: a lot made sense to me now that didn't before: the whole threat of the vast power of Spain darkens much of her reign, and her final execution of Mary Queen of Scots was timed in relation to thata. She did lead an awful repressiion of Catholics, but generally preferred religious toleration. I'll probably read it again one day, but I'll have to get a new copy because this sixty plus year old volume crumbled in my lap.

 

Jenkins herself lived to be 104! See her obituary for more reading ideas: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/books/09jenkins.html.

The Angels of Sinkhole County by Deborah Clearman

 

Deborah Clearman's new novel The Angels of Sinkhole County is set in a mythical West Virginia with strange place names and charmingly realistic denizens who include a family of affluent come-heres and several working class families who serve as their caregivers (the "angels" of the title). The caregivers adore the old Major, and when he dies, come up with a ramshackle plan to keep their jobs and help each other and an aphasic hermit. The adult son and daughter of the deceased Major–he a local veterinarian and she an artist from New York City–perhaps unrealistically but absolutely hilariously, join the plot.

All the characters, in spite of what could have been stereotype and slapstick, are fully human, with detailed back stories and plenty of their own problems. Before it's over, it appears that at least half the people in town are in on the secret. The novel is a charming mix of angst, poverty, drugs, struggle, and love. They fumble forward like Shakespearean lovers wandering in an enchanted woods.  Clearman's ability to mix real life with high comedy and bring people together in a common if perhaps off-kilter purpose is brilliant and enjoyable.

 

 

 

Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard

I'ts been a while since I read an Elmore Leonard crime novel.  His other big category is Westerns, but of course his westerns are about crime too. Cat Chaser, is early nineteen eighties, and one of the most noticeable things to me is that there are fewer guns in hands than usual.  Guns are used and discussed, but there just aren't that many. The highest ranking bad guy, a former torture boss for Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo, has made good in real estate in Florida, and he hires a set of bungling Cuban refugee brothers to cut off our hero's private parts.  With big shears.  That's the kind of story it is. The main character, George Moran, a former soldier who was wounded in one of our little wars, in the D.R., runs a motel now, and is in love with the Trujillo torture general's wife. Apparently because they're both from Detroit.

Once it gets rolling, it's vintage Leonard. There's a nice running theme about a girl rebel that George sort of casually goes looking for in the Dominican Republic (she shot at him and captured him in his days as a soldier, but his actual wound was by friendly fire). Instead of finding her, however, he finds big trouble with Mary the general's wife.

There are several other really nice minor characters-Leonard always gives even flunkies and supernumeraries a little bit of attention, which I appreciate.  He likes his slightly aimless but basically good white guy protagonists best, but makes a space for everyone. 

If you have any interest in Leonard, be sure and read Dennis LeHane's appreciation of him in The Guardian.

 

 

Three by Lisa Scottoline:  Lady Killer;  Everywhere that Mary Went;  Legal Tender

Well, I thought I had a new fast-food read here:  Lisa Scottoline is a best seller and highly praised by big names  in the Crime writing world  (Including Michael Connelly), so I borrowed Lady Killer as an e-book from the library.  It was witty and light, but I liked the narrator's voice. Next I bought the first book in the series (not available for borrowing).  That one, notes below, Everywhere That Mary Went, I liked less.  It has the same narrator, Mary DiNunzio, but it didn't feel as sharp--maybe Scottoline hadn't quite mastered her form? 

I tried another from the library, which I stopped reading after two pages, not likimg it without a first person narrator. I gave her one more try, book two of the series Legal Tender, with a narrator who is Mary DiNunzio's boss in Lady Killer. This one I liked well enough to read, rapidly, but I think I've had it with Scottoline for now.  They go down like marshmallow Peeps, and leave me with a grit of sugar in my teeth. 

Lady Killer.  With a Philadelphia setting and a lawyer sleuth from South Philly, it is wonderfully full of cannoli and quotations from The Godfather and a great group of “mean girls” protagonist Mary DiNunzio’s went to parochial school with. They are victims, suspects and helper sleuths.  Mary is smart and very determined and devoted to helping out her community, but also sloppy and mourning her husband, prim in sexual behavior and torn over religion (abortion comes up). Throughout she is witty and touching.

Nothing is especially subtle–Mary seems to be falling for a good looking man whose South Philly mother thinks is gay, and this causes lots of funny but not light-handed situations and jokes.  So there’s a romance component. Best are Mary’s very humanly grounded skills and above all her mama’s spicy red gravy for the pasta and other details from real life.

 

Everywhere That Mary Went is again (or rather, the first) young lawyer Mary from South Philly with her parents and an identical twin sister who is a nun!  (and doesn't appear in the more accomplished Lady Killer).  Mary is being followed, maybe stalked  (Everywhere that Mary Went, get it?) and she falls for one of her employees and has to solve the murder than no one else seems capable of. She spends most of the book being terrified.

 

Legal Tender starts a new character, Bennie Rosato who will meet up later in the series with Mary.  Bennie has a single mother who is possibly schizophrenic.  She is six feet tall (Mary is petite) and works out with long runs and rowing.  Her voice, though, has a lot of the same wise cracking, which is what I like.  Lots of suspects laid out for us before we have a murder, and when the murder finally happens, everything points to Bennie herself who is just a little too able at running and hiding and finding supplies and whatever she needs.

One good part is her sneaking into a big fancy law firm where she used to work and breaking into the computers and arranging ID for herself and a work space and computer. She orders a load of appropriate clothing from a personal shopper and passes as a visiting lawyer from the New York office.

It's clever and suspenseful, but then she keeps going, doing three or four other clever moves, including setting a good friend on the right track to recover from a heroin addiction.  It's all a little too much, but I like Bennie, and it moves. 

 

 

Tally-Ho by Oscar Silver

    This is a first person paranormal PI novel (first book of a trilogy), and it has that light tone, an old school sleuth who drinks rather a tremendous amount of what he always refers to as single-malt.  The Scotch is smoky and peaty and made me want to have one, but he (and people he likes) do seem to drink all day long.

    Anyhow, our PI Hobbs is an ex-cop with a gambling habit and a pleasant knee-breaker bookie who shows up occasionally. Hobbs' gambling losses, though, are out of loyalty: he always bets on the New York Mets). 

Hobbs gets called in to work for a wealthy Duchess around whom people are dying rather viciously and vividly.  Our boy Hobbs (Thomas Hobbs--is there meaning in his sharing a name with the philosopher famous for insisting human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” without a strong government?) 

Just as Hobbs is setting out on his new job, he begins to hear a voice that he is flexible and strong in his ego to accept as something strange but not insane. I particularly appreciate his willingness to accept this, after some questions and arguments, of course.

There’s some police work, often with his friend who is still a detective with the NYPD. There's a little mostly-off stage sex, more single-malts, plenty of action and snappy comebacks.   Many things are worked out at the end, but Silver leaves a few things open for the next books.   

Warnings:  The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy by Leondard Grob and John K. Roth Reviewed by Joe Chuman

Two eminent scholars of the Holocaust have written a passionate and engaging book on the dangers our democracy faces and what we must do to save it. It is essential reading.

American democracy is standing on a precipice. With the unthinkable, namely a Trump victory looming, the last several years have spawned a glut of volumes sounding the alarm: The 2024 presidential election may mark the end of the American experiment.

Warnings, co-authored by Leonard Grob and John K Roth, is a most valued addition to this timely genre. Its approach, organizational structure, and voice reflect the distinctive backgrounds of the writers. Roth and Grob are both Holocaust scholars with decades of scholarship to their credit. John Roth has authored, co-authored, and edited over 35 volumes on the Holocaust. Grob had founded a Holocaust Center at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he had long taught, as well as a program bringing scholars from various religious traditions together for biennial conferences spanning decades, dedicated to applying Holocaust studies to contemporary political and social problems. Both writers, who have previously collaborated, are in their eighties and are retired professors of philosophy.
Despite the academic backgrounds of its authors, Warnings is highly accessible to the general public, written in a voice that is passionate, heartfelt, and personal. The reader cannot fail to be moved by the humanity of the writers, whose teaching and activism have reflected democracy in practice.

Our democracy is in grave danger, and the book resonates a sense of urgency while veering away from stridency and avoiding despair. As implied, the thesis funnels into the upcoming presidential election and how we have reached this point. As the books subtitle – The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy- implies, it mines the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany to provide usable lessons for the roads we must avoid if democracy is to be rescued from the dark forces of authoritarianism. Its historical interest is focused more on the conditions that created the groundwork for the Holocaust than on the details of the genocide itself. The narrative also includes Russia's assault on Ukraine as exemplary of an additional example of the encroachment of authoritarianism on freedom and democracy, and the emergence of fascistic tendencies resembling the rise of Nazism, while not drawing false equivalences. But the American situation remains the book's primary concern. The rise of Donald Trump, his minions, and the MAGA culture are laid out in explicit detail while not mincing words.

The danger we confront is starkly presented to the reader at the beginning:  “...American democracy remains at risk. It could be trumped by conspiratorial, vengeance-driven, violence-prone, antidemocratic authoritarianism, as an American version of fascism.”

Most valuable is the authors' rigorous explication of the substance of democracy on multiple levels and beyond the mere exercise of periodically casting votes. The book's richness is vested not solely in the threat to democratic institutions but in the public and personal values that sustain those institutions. As they make clear, democracy is not a static framework of institutions. It is a living process. A prevailing theme is that democracy is not self-executing or self-sustaining. Also emphasized is the paradox that lies at the heart of democracy. In the authors' words, “democracy's existence invites its demise.” It is a product of the will, values, and virtues of the people below who will determine whether our democracy survives or will give way to authoritarianism. Referencing Elie Wiesel, arguably the foremost writer on the Holocaust, “the opposite of the epitome of evil is not hate, but indifference.” Democracy will die unless the people reverse the slide into indifference, unless they care sufficiently to sustain it. That reversal is the writers' primary task.

The writers inform us in the opening chapters that dialogue is essential to democracy, and the format of the book structurally reflects that central dynamic. The book's organization serves as a meta-example of the centrality of dialogue to democratic process. The volume's eight chapters are subdivided into the reflections of one author and then a response by the other. The views of each are not challenged so much as augmented and enriched by the responses of the coauthor. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction and ends with a postscript that serves as a summation. Woven throughout the substantive content are autobiographical references that further humanize the ideas presented and evoke an engaged and caring response.

The initial chapter on the role of philosophy in preserving democracy clearly emerges out of the life-long professional vocations of both Roth and Grob as academic philosophers. At first glance, the presumption that philosophy can play a role in significantly influencing political life appears counter-intuitive. As Grob notes, “The relative silence of academic philosophers in the face of the Holocaust is deafening.” As one who has taught in the academy this fails to surprise. Philosophy is an arcane discipline, and with the exception of a small number of public intellectuals, is notably removed from the practical realities which thickly comprise everyday political realities. This is probably more the case in contemporary America than it was in Europe in the 1930s.

Yet this is not philosophy, despite their academic pedigree, as Lenny and John and understand it. They return us to philosophy's Socratic roots. Philosophy so applied is arguably the possession of any and all thoughtful persons whether academically trained or not. The foundational premise that ties the volume together is that of values, values which all people in a democratic polity can possess and realize. In the current moment more so than ever. The heart of philosophy is openness to varying and opposing viewpoints, which is realized through discussion and dialogue. It is the disposition of curious people who are actively engaged in their world. The essence of Hitlerian thought was one of closed absolutes. Jews were responsible for all of Germany's problems; Aryans comprised the superior race. No questions asked. We witness a similar approach in Trump's Big Lie, conspiracy theories, and gratuitously proffered misinformation. To question such assertions is to be treated as the enemy. The tone for fascism is set.

With decades of teaching behind them, it is not surprising that education and the relation of education to democracy should be of central concern. That relation has been a major dynamic of progressive thought for decades. It has long been asserted by social theorists that improving education is the primary driver for the improvement of society overall. Since the 1960s, major critiques have been written and innumerable reports commissioned on ways to improve American schools.

Yet Germany of the Nazi era throws into contention a positive relationship between education and the flourishing of a civilized and humane society. Mid-twentieth century Germany produced the most highly educated society on the planet. Here was the land of Goethe and Beethoven in which the Enlightenment flourished. Yet, it was Germany, the pinnacle of rationality, science, and technology, that applied those superior capabilities in constructing killing factories that enabled the murder of millions of human beings with the greatest efficiency in the quickest period of time at the cheapest cost. Education did not save the victims of the Holocaust. It was perversely employed to perpetrate history's greatest evil. That ostensible contradiction was starkly illustrated by a fact that Lenny tersely recounts:  “On January 20, 1942, fifteen members of the Nazi Party and the German government met at a villa at Wannsee near Berlin. The agenda: to coordinate the destruction of the European Jews, the 'Final Solution' of 'the Jewish question,' Eight of them held doctoral degrees from German universities. Their academic accomplishments did nothing to keep them from committing genocide. So, Americans need to be warned that if education is crucial for democracy, its quality and its commitments are a matter of life and death.” The final clause is the determining clarifier. Clearly having an educated public per se is no guarantee that authoritarianism will not emerge. It is rather the quality, method, and content of education that are determinative.

Nazi education provided the counter-example. As Lenny notes, “Nazi education glorified functional means-ends reasoning. It lacked concern for the ethical dimension of the end toward which such reasoning was employed. The classrooms of the Weimar period embraced voraussetzunslos Wissenschaft, science lacking moral concerns. The result during the years of the Holocaust itself: the loud silence of the German railroad worker who never inquired, let alone protested, where the cattle cars were going: the silence of the Zyklon B factory worker who never inquired about, let alone protested, the lethal use of the product to gas Jews to death.”

The lack of ethically based teaching has long been absent in American schools. Questions arise: which ethical values? Whose ethics? Morality is broadly understood to be grounded in religion. Consequently, the separation of church and state would make the explicit teaching of ethics difficult as it is contentious in public schools.

The problems that concern us at this strident moment are not so much the absence of moral issues, but the imposition of policies that reflect a morality that is politically driven and increasingly extremist. The authors cite the initiatives fueled by the MAGA cohort, including rampant book banning, attacks on teaching about racial and gender justice, and the whitewashing of American history that speaks to its dark underside. In its stead, a balanced view is replaced by an uncritical interpretation of the history that aligns with the views of Donald Trump's base, namely that America is an exceptionally great and just nation. It's a view that invokes romanticized versions of 1950s society when white, male dominance went significantly unchallenged. Also cited are the long-lasting issues of the undervaluing of the teaching profession, overcrowded classrooms, and a nod to the inequities that are created when schools are sustained by property-tax revenues.

Not surprisingly, the authors see necessary value in educating about the Holocaust and its contextual antecedents. Yet when one witnesses the extraordinary outbreak of antisemitism, including on college campuses, in light of the Israeli assault on Gaza in response to the Hamas massacre of October 7th (which is often cited as the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust), I asked myself how aware are today's students of the evil of the Holocaust? And if they are aware, what difference does it make? For today's college students born after 2000, the Holocaust may feel like a very distant event, no longer relevant to the contemporary political world. More captivating, one learns, are contemporary ideologies of post-colonialism,which for some student activists exclusively maligns Israel, the Jewish state, as a perpetrator. Ideological reductionism, not nuance, details, or complexity is arguably a product of contemporary college education. Education plays a formative role, but not the kind that one who sees the dangers of anti-democracy lurking would not want to encourage.

As educators, Lenny and John are, nevertheless, realists who affirm the limitation of education in sustaining the values and practices we need at this moment. They end their chapter on education with the sober conclusion that “...the cliché 'education is the solution' is naive and banal in the current American context. Education-for-democracy is under siege in the United States.” Yet, without providing evidence, they remain hopeful that the majority of Americans stand with them in affirming democratic values.

Political theorists have long had difficulty with religion. Progressive mid-twentieth century thinkers conventionally assumed that religion would fade as education expanded, the prestige of science would grow stronger as the populace ascended the economic ladder. Religion was not construed as a significant political actor.

Ensuing events on the international stage and domestically have shown that these prophesies were ominously mistaken. In the Muslim world, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1970 was a game changer. In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is pushing the country that is officially a secular democracy toward becoming a Hindu state. The American analog was marked by the movement of evangelical Christians back into the political arena. With the emergence of The Moral Majority, the reentry into the public square, in the late 1970s, of tens of millions of evangelicals has moved the entire political landscape far to the right. The breeding ground for current extremism was then set in place.

The effects of this tectonic change are discussed in Warnings' chapter on religion. John Roth notes,  “...no threat to democracy in the United States is greater than White Christian nationalism. It is the American 'cousin' of both the German Christian nationalism that supported Hitler and his genocide against European Jews and the Russian Orthodox Christian nationalism that has backed Vladimir Putin and his grisly war in Ukraine. In the United States White Christian nationalism, whose allies include some Roman Catholics, 'mainstream' Protestants, and even secular fellow travelers, is not synonymous with White evangelical Christianity. But the overlap with the American evangelical tradition is significant, striking, and sinister. The difference and the overlap pivot on the degree to which White Christian nationalism and White evangelical Christianity privilege White power to define and control American identity and the future of the United States – legitimating violence, if necessary, to do so. If Christians abandon Christianity at its best and fail to resist White Christian nationalism, then God help us.”

It needs to be noted that Donald Trump would not have become president without the support of White evangelicals. They comprise the centerpiece of his electoral base. He received upward of eighty percent of the evangelical vote and he is poised to do so again.

For John, the powerful role that religion is currently playing is personal. He is the son of a Presbyterian minister and remains a church-going Christian. His identity is rooted in the best of the Christian tradition. His reflections include the work of the German resistance theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who forfeited his life in the struggle against Hitler. As a scholar of the Holocaust, John notes that had it not been for the churches' support for Hitler's antisemitic Nazism, Jews would not have been murdered during the Holocaust.

Despite articulated hope, the authors concede that the mainline traditions have not done enough to oppose the onslaught of White Christian nationalism and its authoritarian initiatives. In this reviewer's opinion, such realism is warranted. Mainline Protestant churches are greatly diminished, with some very greatly hemorrhaging members. Younger generations, especially, see no value in traditional religion and have greatly remained unaffiliated. Whatever commitment to the prophetic voice of Jesus evangelicalism once espoused is now gone. Evangelical Christianity has primarily become an extremist political movement, which perversely sees Donald Trump as sent by God. It has lost its soul.

The book's chapter on death and the dead is the most poignant. Here recalling the Holocaust plays a specific and powerful role. For Lenny such appreciation is deeply personal in that close family members were killed in the Holocaust. The dead convey an essential message to us, or “through us” as the authors remind us. Lenny Grob's reflections are especially moving. Seldom has the continuity between past lives and our present obligations been so compellingly stated:  “If respecting the dead includes the possibility of hearing their call, what might the dead be saying? In particular, what are they saying to, or through me? As the grandson of grandparents murdered in Eastern Poland (today western Ukraine) and as a scholar of the Holocaust, I have heard a summons. I feel commanded by the murdered ones to remember – literally to help 'remember' – a world dismembered eighty years ago. The Holocaust was an attempt to destroy the realm of human solidarity. I hear the silent screams of Holocaust victims telling me to insist that it is unacceptable to engage in acts that murder the victim a second time. The Holocaust's dead implore me not to see them merely as victims, but as living persons who had names, took part in family events, and energized the communities they inhabited. I am asked to see their deaths not as objective facts but as subjective blows that strike me. I am summoned to my best to gather together pieces of the dismembered world of the Holocaust. For me, that means working toward healing our democracy's torn egalitarian fabric.”

In short, our active work now to save our democracy not only safeguards the present and sets the stage for future generations, but retrospectively honors the lives of those who perished before us. Saving our democracy does not, therefore, solely consist in preserving needed institutions. It is a spiritual engagement that speaks to the living connection of human lives across generations.

A chapter devoted to pandemics is well-named in that it goes beyond the extent of death caused by the Covid-19 virus and the divisive politics it spawned. As the authors note, “Accompanying its virulence, lethal plagues of moral, and spiritual infection are at pandemic levels in our body politic.”

What follows are analyses of ethnocentric racism that accompanied the plague, including the proliferation of lies and lying that emanate from Donald Trump and poison the political and social environment. As the writers assert, pervasive lying rots out the foundational ground from which democracy grows and endures. There is discussion of judicial tyranny and cruelty, focusing primarily on the Supreme Court; the attack on women with rescission of Roe, the diminution of voting rights, and an upsurge in rule by minorities. Gun violence, environmental degradation, and other entrenched ills are manifestations of contemporary plagues tearing away at our democracy.

A concluding chapter highlights means of resistance and grows out of the analyses of the threats to democracy the text previously documents and describes. There is a listing of concrete political initiatives, among them supporting, through action and financial donations, candidates who promote democracy, support of progressive NGOs, and funding for Ukraine's defense, which is a battle line in a war to save freedom and democracy from Putin's onslaught. They include standing for progressive immigration reform, supporting science, and aligning with the Justice Department in its prosecution of Donald Trump for the January 6th insurrection and other crimes.

Warnings employs the past, specifically the Holocaust, to better understand the dangers of the present with a view toward sustaining democracy now and into the future. It oscillates between immediate concrete measures and abstract and long-lasting values. Most appealing was the authors' emphasis on the cultivation of ethics and personal virtues in the public at large to ensure democracy's survival and flourishing. They begin and end their treatise with the assertion that democracy is not self-executing, but ultimately rests on the will and commitment of an informed citizenry.

When it comes to the cultivation of virtues and ethics that form the character of individuals, perhaps a chapter on family and the socialization of children would be a relevant addition to the comprehensive analyses presented by two knowledgeable scholars and activists. Warnings is an important book, written, as noted, with urgency and passion. Its purpose could not be more relevant to the greatest issue of our time. Many books have been written about the looming threat to democracy and the consequent rise of authoritarianism. What makes Warnings different – and eminently compelling – is the deep personalism conveyed by John Roth and Leonard Grob. It is an enriching element that underscores the humanism and sincerity of these two wise thinkers.

Democracy, as stated several times throughout, is a process. Warnings is part of that process, and as such, is an exemplification of the very ideals it describes and promotes. It is a book that merits a wide readership.

 

RESPONSES TO PREVIOUS ISSUES

Eddy Pendarvis says, "I'm so glad you reviewed The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. I loved McBride's The Good Lord Bird and haven't read anything else by him for fear I'll just be disappointed. He won the National Book Award for that novel, I believe.  Anyway, I'm with you on caring more about character than about 'pyrotechnics.' It's the main reason I just can't read Samuel Beckett's work. Maybe it's my being dense, but I never can care about his characters. I'm fascinated by the character of John Brown, and I thought McBride's young boy, whom Brown insisted on believing was a girl, just offered a wonderful take on Brown."

Nikolas Kosloff, who identifies himself as a fan of the short story, likes Daphne DuMaurier's short story "The Doll."  He says, "Oddly, I find this short story which was lost to be better than a lot of her published work."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/30/the-doll-daphne-du-maurier

 

 

 

 GOOD READING & LISTENING ONLINE AND OFF

 

Joe Chuman, whose book reviews sometimes appear here (see Warnings above) , was in Israel recently.  He expresses a lot of what I have been feeling and thinking about the war in Gaza in his substack piece.

John Loonam has an essay and review in The Washington Independent Review of Books: The essay:  TemmaE@gmail.com /features/the-voices-of-reason .    The review:  https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-vanishing-of-carolyn-wells-investigations-into-a-forgotten-mystery-author

Latest Barbara Crooker poems

Two pieces from Scott Oglesby's memoir online at Red Dirt Press.   Red Dirt Press is  a publication focused on "New South" writers, and the two pieces from Telling Dixie Good-bye are "Waiting For Mama" and "Rednecks and Sofabeds."

 

 

 

 ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS

Notes on Self-Publishing by Oscar Silver

 Self Publishing. My experience is you won’t get rich doing this. I have an editor who has worked on all three of my books. I can recommend her services. Her web site is “Edits by Stacey” (https://editsbystacey.com/). She isn’t terribly inexpensive but very helpful.
My books are printed etc. by IngramSpark. Again not terribly expensive but cheap isn’t how I would describe them. Also on the cost side is how much can you afford for cover art. In a nut shell self publishing isn’t inexpensive.
I turned to self publishing after collecting over a hundred agent rejections. This may be sour grapes but I felt almost none had read any of my submissions, all less than a chapter long. I can summarize the responses:“You’re not Dan Brown.”  And I am not.
Self publishing will get your hard work in print.
Mine started and still is a vanity project. I like the work and what I have created.  Luckily I don’t need my book proceeds for lunch money.
Good luck!

Oscar Silver's trilogy is Tally Ho; Low Hanging Fruit; and A Family Business.

 

 

How I Got My Book Published by Alison Louise Hubbard

 

My Historical Fiction, True Crime novel, The Kelsey Outrage, the  “Crime of the Century” was published by Black Rose Writing in January, 2024.

My journey from writing to publication began in Meredith Sue Willis’s Novel class at NYU. I wasn’t sure exactly when I had taken that first class, but on picking up my copy of Meredith’s book, OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS, I read her inscription: “To Alison, with best luck on your novel! 10-24-11.”

Oh, no! I thought. Did it really take me that long? For anyone attempting to write or publish a book, fear not. It probably will not take you that long. But if it does, take comfort in one of the things I learned along the way: each book in its own time....  Full Article at A Journal of Practical Writing

See Alison's novel at Amazon.com.

Are you looking for an agent?  Try  Query Track!

The wonderful  Persimmon Tree   offers some thoughts about beginnings in fiction.

 Here are a couple of resources for writing short stories.  One from writers.com offers several possible structures, including Freitag’s pyramid:https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-story-outline .

A couple of books that are old but useful are  Master Class in Fiction Writing by Adam Sexton and How Fiction Works by James Wood.   I often get older books at bookfinder.com.

The best sources for where to submit are the classifed section at NewPages.com.  There are others online.  I have a somewhat out-dated list on my website.

April 2024  Adventures in Editing with Danny Williams

This is witty and wonderful: One hundred tips to improve your novel (or not)

Check out Shepherd.com for a new way to browse books--author and other recommendations for what to read!

 

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Rediscovered! Temma Ehrenfeld's Morgan: The Wizard of Kew Gardens

Imagine George Constanza turned into Harry Potter....
A sardonic pot-smoking New Yorker, develops magic powers.

 

 

 

 

 

Patricia Park's new novel WHAT'S EATING JACKIE OH?, comes out on 4/30. JACKIE OH.  She is inviting everyone to a book signing at the Strand on Tuesday, 4-30-24 at 7:00 p.m. She sayds, "JACKIE OH is appropriate for ages 12 and up, 12 (grade 6) and up, so it'd mean the world if you can share the book with teachers, students, and kids in your life...as well as adults."

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 10th edition of  Review Tales Magazine is now available for purchase, in suppot of Indie Authors.  It has a curated selection of book reviews, interviews with authors, inspiring words of wisdom, and the much-loved segment of author confessions. 

The magazine is available in print and digital format.
Amazon: https://shorturl.at/jmRZ8
B & N: https://shorturl.at/DE013

 

 

Suzanne McConnell recommends Neighbors by Diane Oliver.   Suzanne says, "Miracles. Resurrection. Here are reviews of Neighbors and Other Stories, published nearly 60 years after the death of my classmate, Diane Oliver, during that tragic week at Black's Gaslight Village in Iowa City, and here's her sister Cheryl and me at the Center for Fiction launch event. We were thrilled to meet! We knew her! I'm going to visit Cheryl in North Carolina! She has just accepted an award for Diane in Austin! It's Eastertime!"

For some reviews of Neighbors see The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, and The Guardian

 

Suzanne McConnell and Diane Oliver's sister Cheryl; Diane Oliver

 

 

Jane Hicks' new book of poetry The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we've lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.

 

 

 

Marc Kaminsky's latest translations from the Yiddish of the poems of Jacob Glatshteyn are in the current issue of The Manhattan Review (vol.21. No. 1).  The issue is available as hard copy or digitally, and can be ordered at Manhattan Review .

The new translations include: "My Wandering Brother," "Sabbath," "The Joy of the Yiddish Word," "Variations on a Theme," "Millions of Dead," "Prayer," and "Yiddishkeit." 

Ernie Brill has a new book of poetry, Journeys of Voices and ChoicesLeslie Simon says, “Ernie Brill’s rich, memorable poems reflect his encyclopedic and kaleidoscopic mind. From Brooklyn street life to war in Southeast Asia and occupation in the Middle East, his words do not rest. Yes, they become those journeys to another way of seeing every place and time he brings us to, envisioning a way out of here when the going gets kind of rough.  Unapologetic work poems, tender love poems, even some carefully crafted sonnets, and a trove of Black Lives Matter hybrid haikus where he will not let us forget those names, those lives, those murders. Requiem and revolution. He’ll convince you of the sacred art of skateboarding. I’d hop on his traveling machine any time. Don’t miss this ride.”

 

 

James Crews says of Barbara Crooker's new collection Slow Wreckage, “Opening a book of poetry by Barbara Crooker, you instantly know you’re in the hands of a contemporary master. She ushers us seamlessly into each moment, whether it happened last spring or fifty years ago. Though on the surface, Slow Wreckage might seem to be about aging and loss, Crooker brings us back again and again to the physical pleasures of being alive, in spite of surgeries and intense pain, in spite of those “delicious burdens” we must carry each day. Even in the midst of grieving her late husband, she confesses: “But right now, I have what I need: the sun coming up/tomorrow morning, the clouds, pink frosting, spreading all the way to the horizon.” Her expansive, honest, and clear-eyed poems are exactly the medicine we need to “love in these dangerous times.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BUYING BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER

 

A not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool of brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the donation to a bookstore of your choice. Lots of individuals have storefronts there, too including me.

 

If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or as an e-book.

You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left.  Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.

 

The largest unionized bookstore in America has a web store at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.

I have a lot of friends and colleagues who despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the issues back in Issue # 184,  as well as even older comments from Jonathan Greene and others here.

Another way to buy books online, especially used books, is to use Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can see what you really have to pay. Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores.

Paperback Book Swap is a postage-only way to trade physical books with other readers.

 

Ingrid Hughes suggests another "great place for used books which sometimes turn out to be never-opened hard cover books is Biblio. She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for $4 including shipping."

 

If you use an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927).  Also free from the wonderful folks at Standard E-books are redesigned books from the Gutenberg Project and elsewhere--easier to read and more attractive.

 

 

RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER

Please send responses to this newsletter directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you say otherwise, your letter may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.

 

LICENSE

Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Meredith Sue Willis.  Some individual contributors may have other licenses.

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   Meredith Sue Willis, the producer of this occasional newsletter, is a writer and teacher and enthusiastic reader. Her books have been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, HarperCollins, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, West Virginia University Press, Monteymayor Press, Teachers & Writers Press, Mountain State Press, Hamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.

 

 

BACK ISSUES

 

#233 Ursula LeGuin, Ford Madox Ford, Elmore Leonard, Deborah Clearman, Susan Abulhawa, Agatha Christie, Oscar Silver, Jeff Lindsay, Linda Parsons, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Philip Roth, Lisa Scottoline. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Felicia Mitchell.
#232 Jim Minick, Clarice Lispector, The Porch Poems, George du Maurier, Louise Fitzhugh, Natalia Ginzburg, Marilynne Robinson; Kathleen Watt; Hambly, Connelly, Alison Hubbard, Imogen Keeper, James McBride, Jenny Offill.   Reviews by Hilton Obenzinger, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, Suzanne McConnell, and Christine Willis.
#231 Triangle shirtwaist fire, Anthony Burgess, S.A. Cosby, Eva Dolan, Janet Campbell Hale, Barbara Hambly, Marc Harshman, P.D. James, Michael Lewis, Mrs. Oliphant, Paul Rabinowitz, Nora Roberts, Strout, Tokarczuk.  Review by Dreama Frisk.
#230 Henry Adams, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jonathan Lethem, Magda Teter, Mary Jennings Hegar, Chandra Prasad, Timothy Russell, Carter Taylor Seaton, Edna O'Brien, Martha Wells, Thomas Mann, Arnold Bennett, and more. Reviews by Mary Lucille DeBerry, Joe Chuman, John Loonam, Suzanne McConnell, and Edwina Pendarvis.
#229 John Sandford, Dr. J. Nozipo Maraire, Rex Stout; Larry Schardt; Martha Wells; Henry Makepeace Thackery; about Edvard Munch;Erik Larson. Reviews and interviews by John Loonam and Diane Simmons.
#228 Edward P. Jones, Denton Loving, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Lee Martin, Jesmyn Ward, Michelle Zauner, Valérie Perrin, Philip K. Dick, Burt Kimmelman. Reviewes by Ernie Brill, Joe Chuman, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, & Danny Williams.         
#227 Cheryl Denise, Larissa Shmailo, Eddy Pendarvis, Alice McDermott, Kelly Watt, Elmore Leonard, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Suzy McKee Charnas, and more.
#226 Jim Minick, Gore Vidal, Valeria Luiselli, Richard Wright, Kage Baker, Suzy McKee Charnas, Victor Depta, Walter Mosley. David Hollinger reviewed by Joe Chuman, and more.
#225 Demon Copperhead, Thomas Hardy, Miriam Toews, Kate Chopin, Alberto Moravia, Elizabeth Strout, McCullers, Garry Wills, Valerie Nieman, Cora Harrison. Troy Hill on Isaac Babel; Belinda Anderson on books for children; Joe Chuman on Eric Alterman; Molly Gilman on Kage Baker; and lots more.
#224 The 1619 Project, E.M. Forster. Elmore Leonard, Pledging Season by Erika Erickson Malinoski. Emily St. John Mandel, Val Nieman, John O'Hara, Tom Perrotta, Walter Tevis, Sarah Waters, and more.
#223 Amor Towles, Emily St. John Mandel, Raymond Chandler, N.K. Jemisin, Andrew Holleran, Anita Diamant, Rainer Maria Rilke, and more, plus notes and reviews by Joe Chuman, George Lies, Donna Meredith, and Rhonda Browning White.
#222 Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Gaskell, N.K. Jemisin, Joseph Lash, Alice Munro, Barbara Pym, Sally Rooney, and more.
#221 Victor Serge, Greg Sanders, Maggie O'Farrell, Ken Champion, Barbara Hambly, Walter Mosely, Anne Roiphe, Anna Reid, Randall Balmer, Louis Auchincloss. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Chris Connelly
#220 Margaret Atwood, Sister Souljah, Attica Locke, Jill Lepore, Belinda Anderson, Claire Oshetsky, Barbara Pym, and Reviews by Joe Chuman, Ed Davis, and Eli Asbury
#219  Carolina De Robertis, Charles Dickens, Thomas Fleming, Kendra James, Ashley Hope Perez, Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Danny Williams.
#218 Ed Myers, Eyal Press, Barbara Kingsolver, Edwidge Danticat, William Trevor, Tim O'Brien.  Reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman.
#217 Jill Lepore; Kathleen Rooney; Stendhal; Rajia Hassib again; Madeline Miller; Jean Rhys; and more. Reviews and recommendations by Joe Chuman, Ingrid Hughes, Peggy Backman, Phyllis Moore, and Dan Gover.
#216 Rajia Hassib; Joel Pechkam; Robin Hobb; Anne Hutchinson; James Shapiro; reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman; Fellowship of the Rings#215 Julia Alvarez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Anne Brontë, James Welch, Veronica Roth, Madeline Martin, Barack Obama, Jason Trask, Katherine Anne Porter & more
#214 Brit Bennet, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Robin Hobb, Willliam Kennedy, John Le Carré, John Loonam on Elana Ferrante, Carole Rosenthal on Philip Roth, Peggy Backman on Russell Shorto, Helen Weinzweig, Marguerite Yourcenar, and more.
#213 Pauletta Hansen reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot; A conversation about cultural appropriation in fiction; T.C. Boyle; Eric Foner; Attica Locke; Lillian Roth; The Snake Pit; Alice Walker; Lynda Schor; James Baldwin; True Grit--and more.
#212 Reviews of books by Madison Smartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Mary Arnold Ward,Timothey Huguenin, Octavia Butler, Cobb & Seaton, Schama
#211 Reviews of books by Lillian Smith, Henry James, Deborah Clearman, J.K. Jemisin, Donna Meredith, Octavia Butler, Penelope Lively, Walter Mosley. Poems by Hilton Obenzinger.
#210 Lavie Tidhar, Amy Tan, Walter Mosley, Gore Vidal, Julie Otsuka, Rachel Ingalls, Rex Stout, John Updike, and more.
#209 Cassandra Clare, Lissa Evans, Suzan Colón, Damian Dressick, Madeline Ffitch, Dennis Lehane, William Maxwell, and more.
#208 Alexander Chee; Donna Meredith; Rita Quillen; Mrs. Humphy Ward; Roger Zelazny; Dennis LeHane; Eliot Parker; and more.
#207 Caroline Sutton, Colson Whitehead, Elaine Durbach, Marc Kaminsky, Attica Locke, William Makepeace Thackery, Charles Willeford & more.
#206 Timothy Snyder, Bonnie Proudfoot, David Weinberger, Pat Barker, Michelle Obama, Richard Powers, Anthony Powell, and more.
#205 George Eliot, Ernest Gaines, Kathy Manley, Rhonda White; reviews by Jane Kimmelman, Victoria Endres, Deborah Clearman.
#204 Larissa Shmailo, Joan Didion, Judith Moffett, Heidi Julavits, Susan Carol Scott, Trollope, Walter Mosley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and more.
#203 Tana French, Burt Kimmelman, Ann Petry, Mario Puzo, Anna Egan Smucker, Virginia Woolf, Val Nieman, Idra Novey, Roger Wall.
#202 J .G. Ballard, Peter Carey, Arthur Dobrin, Lisa Haliday, Birgit Mazarath, Roger Mitchell, Natalie Sypolt, and others.
#201 Marc Kaminsky, Jessica Wilkerson, Jaqueline Woodson, Eliot Parker, Barbara Kingsolver. Philip Roth, George Eliot and more.
#200 Books by Zola, Andrea Fekete, Thomas McGonigle, Maggie Anderson, Sarah Dunant, J.G. Ballard, Sarah Blizzard Robinson, and more.
#199 Reviews by Ed Davis and Phyllis Moore. Books by Elizabeth Strout, Thomas Mann, Rachel Kushner, Craig Johnson, Richard Powers.
#198 Reviews by Belinda Anderson, Phyllis Moore, Donna Meredith, Eddy Pendarvis, and Dolly Withrow. Eliot, Lisa Ko, John Ehle, Hamid, etc.
#197 Joan Silber, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander Hamilton, Eudora Welty, Middlemarch yet again, Greta Ehrlich, Edwina Pendarvis.
#196 Last Exit to Brooklyn; Joan Didion; George Brosi's reviews; Alberto Moravia; Muriel Rukeyser; Matthew de la Peña; Joyce Carol Oates
#195 Voices for Unity; Ramp Hollow, A Time to Stir, Patti Smith, Nancy Abrams, Conrad, N.K. Jemisin, Walter Mosely & more.
#194 Allan Appel, Jane Lazarre, Caroline Sutton, Belinda Anderson on children's picture books.
#193 Larry Brown, Phillip Roth, Ken Champion, Larissa Shmailo, Gillian Flynn, Jack Wheatcroft, Hilton Obenziner and more.
#192 Young Adult books from Appalachia; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Michael Connelly; Middlemarch; historical murders in Appalachia.
#191 Oliver Sacks, N.K. Jemisin, Isabella and Ferdinand and their descendents, Depta, Highsmith, and more.
#190 Clearman, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, Doerr, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Miss Fourth of July, Goodbye and more.
#189 J.D. Vance; Mitch Levenberg; Phillip Lopate; Barchester Towers; Judith Hoover; ; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; short science fiction reviews.
#188 Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban; The Hemingses of Monticello; Marc Harshman; Jews in the Civil War; Ken Champion; Rebecca West; Colum McCann
#187 Randi Ward, Burt Kimmelman, Llewellyn McKernan, Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Lethem, Bill Luvaas, Phyllis Moore, Sarah Cordingley & more
#186 Diane Simmons, Walter Dean Myers, Johnny Sundstrom, Octavia Butler & more
#185 Monique Raphel High; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Phil Klay; Crystal Wilkinson
#184 More on Amazon; Laura Tillman; Anthony Trollope; Marily Yalom and the women of the French Revolution; Ernest Becker
#183 Hilton Obenzinger, Donna Meredith, Howard Sturgis, Tom Rob Smith, Daniel José Older, Elizabethe Vigée-Lebrun, Veronica Sicoe
#182 Troy E. Hill, Mitchell Jackson, Rita Sims Quillen, Marie Houzelle, Frederick Busch, more Dickens
#181 Valerie Nieman, Yorker Keith, Eliot Parker, Ken Champion, F.R. Leavis, Charles Dickens
#180 Saul Bellow, Edwina Pendarvis, Matthew Neill Null, Judith Moffett, Theodore Dreiser, & more
#179 Larissa Shmailo, Eric Frizius, Jane Austen, Go Set a Watchman and more
#178 Ken Champion, Cat Pleska, William Demby's Beetlecreek, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gaskell, and more.
#177 Jane Hicks, Daniel Levine, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ken Chamption, Patricia Harman
#176 Robert Gipe, Justin Torres, Marilynne Robinson, Velma Wallis, Larry McMurty, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Fumiko Enchi, Shelley Ettinger
#175 Lists of what to read for the new year; MOUNTAIN MOTHER GOOSE: CHILD LORE OF WEST VIRGINIA; Peggy Backman
#174 Christian Sahner, John Michael Cummings, Denton Loving, Madame Bovary
#173 Stephanie Wellen Levine, S.C. Gwynne, Ed Davis's Psalms of Israel Jones, Quanah Parker, J.G. Farrell, Lubavitcher girls
#172 Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Alice Boatwright, Fumiko Enchi, Robin Hobb, Rex Stout
#171 Robert Graves, Marie Manilla, Johnny Sundstrom, Kirk Judd
#170 John Van Kirk, Carter Seaton,Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, The Murder of Helen Jewett, Thaddeus Rutkowski
#169 Pearl Buck's The Exile and Fighting Angel; Larissa Shmailo; Liz Lewinson; Twelve Years a Slave, and more
#168 Catherine the Great, Alice Munro, Edith Poor, Mitch Levenberg, Vonnegut, Mellville, and more!
#167 Belinda Anderson; Anne Shelby; Sean O'Leary, Dragon tetralogy; Don Delillo's Underworld
#166 Eddy Pendarvis on Pearl S. Buck; Theresa Basile; Miguel A. Ortiz; Lynda Schor; poems by Janet Lewis; Sarah Fielding
#165 Janet Lewis, Melville, Tosltoy, Irwin Shaw!
#164 Ed Davis on Julie Moore's poems; Edith Wharton; Elaine Drennon Little's A Southern Place; Elmore Leonard
#163 Pamela Erens, Michael Harris, Marlen Bodden, Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Lisa J. Parker, and more
#162 Lincoln, Joseph Kennedy, Etel Adnan, Laura Treacy Bentley, Ron Rash, Sophie's Choice, and more
#161 More Wilkie Collins; Duff Brenna's Murdering the Mom; Nora Olsen's Swans & Klons; Lady Audley's Secret
#160 Carolina De Robertis, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris
#159 Tom Jones. William Luvaas, Marc Harshman, The Good Earth, Lara Santoro, American Psycho
#158 Chinua Achebe's Man of the People; The Red and the Black; McCarthy's C.; Farm City; Victor Depta;Myra Shapiro
#157 Alice Boatwright, Reamy Jansen, Herta Muller, Knut Hamsun, What Maisie Knew; Wanchee Wang, Dolly Withrow.
#156 The Glass Madonna; A Revelation
#155 Buzz Bissinger; reader suggestions; Satchmo at the Waldorf
#154 Hannah Brown, Brad Abruzzi, Thomas Merton
#153 J.Anthony Lukas, Talmage Stanley's The Poco Fields, Devil Anse
#152 Marc Harshman guest editor; John Burroughs; Carol Hoenig
#151 Deborah Clearman, Steve Schrader, Paul Harding, Ken Follet, Saramago-- and more!
#150 Mitch Levenberg, Johnny Sundstrom, and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns.
#149 David Weinberger's Too Big to Know; The Shining; The Tiger's Wife.
#148 The Moonstone, Djibouti, Mark Perry on the Grimké family
#147 Jane Lazarre's new novel; Johnny Sundstrom; Emotional Medicine Rx; Walter Dean Myers, etc. 
#146 Henry Adams AGAIN!  Also,Fun Home: a Tragicomic
#145 Henry Adams, Darnell Arnoult, Jaimy Gordon, Charlotte Brontë
#144 Carter Seaton, NancyKay Shapiro, Lady Murasaki Shikibu
#143 Little America; Guns,Germs, and Steel; The Trial
#142 Blog Fiction, Leah by Seymour Epstein, Wolf Hall, etc.
#141 Dreama Frisk on Hilary Spurling's Pearl Buck in China; Anita Desai; Cormac McCarthy
#140 Valerie Nieman's Blood Clay, Dolly Withrow
#139 My Kindle, The Prime Minister, Blood Meridian
#138 Special on Publicity by Carter Seaton
#137 Michael Harris's The Chieu Hoi Saloon; Game of Thrones; James Alexander Thom's Follow the River
#136 James Boyle's The Creative Commons; Paola Corso, Joanne Greenberg, Monique Raphel High, Amos Oz
#135 Reviews by Carole Rosenthal, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Wanchee Wang.
#134 Daniel Deronda, books with material on black and white relations in West Virginia
#133 Susan Carpenter, Irene Nemirovsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kanafani, Joe Sacco
#132 Karen Armstrong's A History of God; JCO's The Falls; The Eustace Diamonds again.
#131 The Help; J. McHenry Jones, Reamy Jansen, Jamie O'Neill, Michael Chabon.
#130 Lynda Schor, Ed Myers, Charles Bukowski, Terry Bisson, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism
#129 Baltasar and Blimunda; Underground Railroad; Navasky's Naming Names, small press and indie books.
#128 Jeffrey Sokolow on Histories and memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement
#127 Olive Kitteridge; Urban fiction; Shelley Ettinger on Joyce Carol Oates
#126 Jack Hussey's Ghosts of Walden, The Leopard , Roger's Version, The Reluctanct Fundamentalist
#125 Lee Maynard's The Pale Light of Sunset; Books on John Brown suggested by Jeffrey Sokolow
#124 Cloudsplitter, Founding Brothers, Obenzinger on Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University
#123 MSW's summer reading round-up; Olive Schreiner; more The Book Thief; more on the state of editing
#122 Left-wing cowboy poetry; Jewish partisans during WW2; responses to "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#121 Jane Lazarre's latest; Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky; Gringolandia; "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#120 Dreama Frisk on The Book Thief; Mark Rudd; Thulani Davis's summer reading list
#119 Two Histories of the Jews; small press books for Summer
#118 Kasuo Ichiguro, Jeanette Winterson, The Carter Family!
#117 Cat Pleska on Ann Pancake; Phyllis Moore on Jayne Anne Phillips; and Dolly Withrow on publicity
#116 Ann Pancake, American Psycho, Marc Harshman on George Mackay Brown
#115 Adam Bede, Nietzsche, Johnny Sundstrom
#114 Judith Moffett, high fantasy, Jared Diamond, Lily Tuck
#113 Espionage--nonfiction and fiction: Orson Scott Card and homophobia
#112 Marc Kaminsky, Nel Noddings, Orson Scott Card, Ed Myers
#111 James Michener, Mary Lee Settle, Ardian Gill, BIll Higginson, Jeremy Osner, Carol Brodtick
#110 Nahid Rachlin, Marion Cuba on self-publishing; Thulani Davis, The Road, memoirs
#109 Books about the late nineteen-sixties: Busy Dying; Flying Close to the Sun; Looking Good; Trespassers
#108 The Animal Within; The Ground Under My Feet; King of Swords
#107 The Absentee; Gorky Park; Little Scarlet; Howl; Health Proxy
#106 Castle Rackrent; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; More on Drown; Blindness & more
#105 Everything is Miscellaneous, The Untouchable, Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher
#104 Responses to Shelley on Junot Diaz and more; More best books of 2007
#103 Guest Editor: Shelley Ettinger and her best books of 2007
#102 Saramago's BLINDNESS; more on NEVER LET ME GO; George Lies on Joe Gatski
#101 My Brilliant Career, The Scarlet Letter, John Banville, Never Let Me Go
#100 The Poisonwood Bible, Pamela Erens, More Harry P.
#99   Jonathan Greene on Amazon.com; Molly Gilman on Dogs of Babel
#98   Guest editor Pat Arnow; more on the Amazon.com debate
#97   Using Thomas Hardy; Why I Write; more
#96   Lucy Calkins, issue fiction for young adults
#95   Collapse, Harry Potter, Steve Geng
#94   Alice Robinson-Gilman, Maynard on Momaday
#93   Kristin Lavransdatter, House Made of Dawn, Leaving Atlanta
#92   Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs
#91   Richard Powers discussion
#90   William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare
#89   William Styron, Ellen Willis, Dune, Germinal, and much more
#88   Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo
#87   Wings of the Dove, Forever After (9/11 Teachers)
#86   Leora Skolkin-Smith, American Pastoral, and more
#85   Wobblies, Winterson, West Virginia Encyclopedia
#84   Karen Armstrong, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Taylor
#83   3-Cornered World, Da Vinci Code
#82   The Eustace Diamonds, Strapless, Empire Falls
#81   Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , Paola Corso
#80   Joanne Greenberg, Ed Davis, more Murdoch; Special Discussion on Memoir--Frey and J.T. Leroy
#79   Adam Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Hemingway
#78   The Hills at Home; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jean Stafford
#77   On children's books--guest editor Carol Brodtrick
#76   Mary Lee Settle, Mary McCarthy
#75   The Makioka Sisters
#74    In Our Hearts We Were Giants
#73    Joyce Dyer
#72    Bill Robinson WWII story
#71    Eva Kollisch on G.W. Sebald
#70    On Reading
#69    Nella Larsen, Romola
#68    P.D. James
#67    The Medici
#66    Curious Incident,Temple Grandin
#65    Ingrid Hughes on Memoir
#64    Boyle, Worlds of Fiction
#63    The Namesame
#62    Honorary Consul; The Idiot
#61    Lauren's Line
#60    Prince of Providence
#59    The Mutual Friend, Red Water
#58    AkÉ, Season of Delight
#57    Screaming with Cannibals
#56    Benita Eisler's Byron
#55    Addie, Hottentot Venus, Ake
#54    Scott Oglesby, Jane Rule
#53    Nafisi,Chesnutt, LeGuin
#52    Keith Maillard, Lee Maynard
#51    Gregory Michie, Carter Seaton
#50    Atonement, Victoria Woodhull biography
#49    Caucasia
#48    Richard Price, Phillip Pullman
#47    Mid- East Islamic World Reader
#46    Invitation to a Beheading
#45    The Princess of Cleves
#44    Shelley Ettinger: A Few Not-so-Great Books
#43    Woolf, The Terrorist Next Door
#42    John Sanford
#41    Isabelle Allende
#40    Ed Myers on John Williams
#39    Faulkner
#38    Steven Bloom No New Jokes
#37    James Webb's Fields of Fire
#36    Middlemarch
#35    Conrad, Furbee, Silas House
#34    Emshwiller
#33    Pullman, Daughter of the Elm
#32    More Lesbian lit; Nostromo
#31    Lesbian fiction
#30    Carol Shields, Colson Whitehead
#29    More William Styron
#28    William Styron
#27    Daniel Gioseffi
#26    Phyllis Moore
#25    On Libraries....
#24    Tales of the City
#23    Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction
#22    More on Why This Newsletter
#21    Salinger, Sarah Waters, Next of Kin
#20    Jane Lazarre
#19    Artemisia Gentileschi
#18    Ozick, Coetzee, Joanna Torrey
#17    Arthur Kinoy
#16    Mrs. Gaskell and lots of other suggestions
#15    George Dennison, Pat Barker, George Eliot
#14    Small Presses
#13    Gap Creek, Crum
#12    Reading after 9-11
#11    Political Novels
#10    Summer Reading ideas
#9      Shelley Ettinger picks
#8      Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn
#7      About this newsletter
#6      Maria Edgeworth
#5      Tales of Good and Evil; Moon Tiger
#4      Homer Hickam and The Chosen
#3      J.T. LeRoy and Tale of Genji
#2      Chick Lit
#1      About this newsletter