“The Bridge of Sighs”
In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice….To see a life back to front, as everyone begins to do in middle age, is to strip it of its mystery and wrap it in inevitability, drama’s enemy.
Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls wrote the Bridge of Sighs nearly a decade ago although the book is timeless in the classic Russo style of writing about life in a small town in upstate New York. A 640-page novel divided into 24 chapters (of which 23 are named), the Bridge of Sighs is primarily the story of Louis C. Lynch (also known as Lucy), a 60-year old business owner who has lived his whole life in Thomaston, New York – a small industrial town described as a trifecta of “stupidity, ignorance, and violence” and not unlike the real Johnston or Gloversville in New York which were known for their tanneries and glove making industries. Read more 
The Light Between Oceans
The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point….
Using the two oceans – the Indian Ocean and the Great Southern Ocean – as a metaphor for two families whose lives blend and collide, M.L. Stedman tells the story of the Sherbourne’s and the Roennfeldt’s in a book entitled The Light Between Oceans.
Published in 2012, the 340 page novel is divided into three parts (Book 1, Book 2, and Book 3 ) and 37 chapters. A New York Times bestseller, The Light Between Oceans is also being made into a film that will be released in September, 2016. Read more
Imagine Me Gone
So like a cripple I long for what others don’t notice they have: ordinary meaning.
Imagine Me Gone is the very emotional story of a family living with mental illness during the later half of the 20th century (1960’s, 70’s. 80’s, and 90’s). The story begins in 1962 in London. A young American woman named Margaret is working at a library in the suburbs when she meets John – “a showman when he’s on, capable of great largesse” – at a a party. Eighteen months later, Margaret and John become engaged but after Margaret returns from visiting her family in Massachusetts over the holidays, she wonders whether they will marry after she learns that John is in a psychiatric hospital with what is described as an “imbalance.” Unsure of what this really means, Margaret remains committed to John and helps him return to his former self although in retrospect years later she realizes “we live among the dead until we join them.” Read more
“The Emerald Light In The Air”
I’m not of this world.
The Emerald Light In The Air is a collection of short stories written by Donald Antrim that were originally published in the New Yorker Magazine. If you’ve never read Antrim’s work before (and, even if you have), it’s helpful to know a few things about him because his stories often mirror parts of his life.
Born in 1958, Antrim was raised in the south by an alcoholic seamstress mother and a father (a scholar of TS Eliot) who married and divorced twice. Moved from place to place, Antrim’s childhood was anything but idealic although boarding school and college (he graduated from Brown) paved the way to a writing career. Read more
“Orphan #8”
Did anyone know what was going on there? Of course they did. They must have.
Kim van Alkemade, a writing professor at the University of Pennsylvania at Shippensburg spent about five years researching and writing her first novel – Orphan #8, the story of Rachel Rabinowitz, a 4-year old orphan sent to live in the Hebrew Infant Home in New York City in 1919. While there, Rachel becomes part of a medical research study in which healthy children (who were dehumanized by being assigned numbers) are x-rayed to see if radiation could provide an alternative to the surgical removal of tonsils. The doctor conducting the study – Dr. Mildred Solomon – is a recent graduate of the male dominated medical school system and an ambitious young doctor who did not adequately weigh the risks or consider the rights of children without a voice. Read more
“A Personal Matter”
Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you, one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation for you to survive in it.
Kenzaburō Ōe is a Japanese writer of essays, short stories, and novels that primarily deal with social, cultural, political, and philosophical issues. Born in 1935, Ōe has had many of his works translated into English and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. Influenced by Kafka, Twain, Lagerlöf, and a host of French writers, Ōe often writes of the desire for adventure, the mundane parts of life, and the truly horrific parts of our existence in a nuclear age. But, the biggest influence on Ōe’s literary career seems to be his firstborn son, Hikari. Read more
“A Thousand Acres”
What is a farmer?
A farmer is a man who feeds the world.
What is a farmer’s first duty?
To grow more food.
What is a farmer’s second duty?
To buy more land.
Why does a society value appearances, secrets, and hard work over basic human rights? And, what does it say about a society that condemns a victim for speaking out against a perpetrator for unspeakable crimes? These are the questions Jane Smiley seems to be asking in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Thousand Acres. Published in 1991, A Thousand Acres refers to that magic number of acreage that most midwest farmers ascribe to own – a thousand acres of rich, fertile Iowa farmland. It’s the number that sets one farmer apart from another, especially if the land has been handed down from generation to generation and is unencumbered by a mortgage. Read more
“Purity”
Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?
In Jonathan Franzen’s newest novel Purity, the author introduces the reader to Purity (“Pip”) Tyler, a 23-year old recent college graduate with $130,000 in student loan debt living in a squatter’s house in Oakland, California. Distancing herself from the mother who raised her in the Santa Cruz mountains, trying to find her biological father, and employed in a dead-end job, Pip is all but disillusioned about the world and the impact she will make on it. When offered an internship to work for the Sunlight Project – an organization that prides itself on leaking government secrets – in Bolivia, Pip takes a leap of faith, quits her job, packs up, and moves to South America. Read more
“The Men’s Club”
Brotherhood is exclusive, not universal.
35 years ago, men rarely sought out each other’s company outside of a sporting event, a bar, or a bachelor party. While women were leaning on each other and seeking camaraderie in Mommy & Me events, book clubs, and aerobic classes, men went to work, fulfilled family obligations, and briefly escaped to society sanctioned events which did not generally include meeting at one of their homes for a men’s club get together. So, when a group of seven men – a retired professional basketball player, a tax accountant, a lawyer, two psychotherapists, and two college professors – come together to form a men’s club – “a regular social possibility outside of our jobs and marriages,” there is curiosity and reluctance to take a road less traveled, as depicted in the fictional novel, The Men’s Club. Read more
“The Wife of Martin Guerre”
…when hate and love have together exhausted the soul, the body seldom endures for long.
While scouring the shelves described as “classics” in an independent bookstore (Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry) in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, I discovered The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis (a poet and writer who lived from 1899-1998). On the back cover of the book were the words: Read more
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