Probably the greatest writer’s crush I have ever had on anyone has been on Virginia Woolf. She combines a poetic sensibility with a modern point of view; she celebrates the small moments in life by painting with a very large brush. All of her novels are basically explorations of the same extended metaphor, the tide […]
Writer’s Crush: Virginia Woolf Read More »
“I suppose there’s a time in practically every young boy’s life when he’s affected by that wonderful disease of puppy love.” When I first encountered Where the Red Fern Grows, I didn’t know of that joy. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Beenck, read the story aloud to us, and I was captivated by it. We
I longed for a dog: Where the Red Fern Grows Read More »
As a New Year’s project, I decided to identify and reread the novels that have had the biggest influence on my life. I identified ten, and will be discussing them over the next few months. The first, Farmer Boy, is from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series of books. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy was
I wanted to be a Farmer Boy: first book love Read More »
“Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came
Writer’s Crush: Iris Murdoch Read More »
Ann Radcliffe “Osbert, for greater security, was conveyed from the tower into a more centrical part of the castle, to an apartment spacious but gloomy, whose gothic windows partly excluding light, threw a solemnity around, which chilled the heart almost to horror. He heeded not this; his heart was occupied with horrors of its own.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson “A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.” “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” “I trust a good deal
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Celestine Sibley “When I saw him heading for my office, looking a little like a dressed-up poodle dog in his white tie and tails, I knew what he was looking for. And I was dimly conscious of the fact that Johnny had flicked on the light in the little cubicle where, under Paula’s ladylike lash,
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“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew
Writer’s Crush: Gabriel Garcia Marquez Read More »
” It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.” From A Clockwork Orange “So now it was to be Georgie the General, saying what we should do and what not to do, with Dim as his mindless grinning bulldog. But then I viddied that
Writer’s Crush: Anthony Burgess Read More »
“This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her…This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time
Writer’s Crush: Carson McCullers Read More »
