B. Morrison's Blog, page 68

Women's Review of Books, Vol. 30, No. 1, January/February 2013

I was delighted to discover this journal at the AWP Conference a few years ago. Book reviews introduce me to books I otherwise would have missed and the ones longer than a few paragraphs, generally found in journals dedicated to reviews, often provide context and background that increase my appreciation of the book. However, as VIDA has been tracking in The Count, in most journals very few reviewers are women and very few books by women are reviewed. The numbers are startling. This conscious...

Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Ron Rash

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this collection of stories set in North Carolina. The various accents of the readers enhanced the verisimilitude of the characters and their environment. Rash was recommended to me by Jake when I visited Asheville recently to do a reading at the marvelous Firestorm Café and Books. Like many before me, I fell in love with the town and its plethora of interesting and active people. I also fell in love with the mountains, or rather renewed my old love affair wit...

The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain [1]

Coincidentally, while I was reading Antonia Fraser’s enchanting account of her marriage to Harold Pinter, in the car I was listening to the story of another marriage to a famous writer. The Paris Wife is Paula McLain’s fictional treatment of Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson. Like McLain, I’d been intrigued by a line in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his account of Paris in the 1920s. I read it back in college, and the line has stayed with me all these years: “I wished I had die...

The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

Coincidentally, while I was reading Antonia Fraser’s enchanting account of her marriage to Harold Pinter, in the car I was listening to the story of another marriage to a famous writer. The Paris Wife is Paula McLain’s fictional treatment of Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson. Like McLain, I’d been intrigued by a line in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his account of Paris in the 1920s. I read it back in college, and the line has stayed with me all these years: “I wished I had die...

Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, by Antonia Fraser

This surprisingly enjoyable memoir tells of Fraser’s 33-year relationship with the playwright. She calls it a love story and, indeed, it is. Her first sighting of him is across a crowded room, though “it was lunchtime, not some enchanted evening, and we did not speak.” The enchantment comes later, when they do finally meet at a dinner party celebrating the first night of a play directed by her brother-in-law. She says they were “reckless” that night: both were married with children, he one an...

No Time Like the Present, by Nadine Gordimer [2]

This new novel from the Nobel Prize-winner continues Gordimer’s chronicle of the evolution of her native South Africa. Here in the U.S. we get very little news about other countries. As newspapers have restructured, dismantling their overseas desks, we are forced to go out on the internet to read foreign newspapers or turn to novels such as this one for details about what is going on.

Steve and Jabu met as activists during the Struggle and married despite misogyny laws. Now, in post-reconcili...

No Time Like the Present, by Nadine Gordimer [1]

This new novel from the Nobel Prize-winner continues Gordimer’s chronicle of the evolution of her native South Africa. Here in the U.S. we get very little news about other countries. As newspapers have restructured, dismantling their overseas desks, we are forced to go out on the internet to read foreign newspapers or turn to novels such as this one for details about what is going on.

Steve and Jabu met as activists during the Struggle and married despite misogyny laws. Now, in post-reconcili...

No Time Like the Present, by Nadine Gordimer

This new novel from the Nobel Prize-winner continues Gordimer’s chronicle of the evolution of her native South Africa. Here in the U.S. we get very little news about other countries. As newspapers have restructured, dismantling their overseas desks, we are forced to go out on the internet to read foreign newspapers or turn to novels such as this one for details about what is going on.

Steve and Jabu met as activists during the Struggle and married despite misogyny laws. Now, in post-reconcili...

The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje

A young boy—only eleven—is sent alone by ship from Colombo to London where he will join the mother he hasn’t seen in four or five years. He is nominally supervised by a woman his uncle knows, but since she is in First Class he rarely sees her. For his meals he is seated at the Cat’s Table, the one farthest away from the Captain’s Table and clearly reserved for the least important passengers. There he meets two other boys his age, Ramadhin and Cassius, who will become his constant companions o...

The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart, by Mathias Malzieu

This fantasy novel is the story of young Jack who was born on the coldest night of the year, so cold that his heart is frozen. To save his life, the midwife, Dr. Madeleine, who is also a mechanical genius and suspected witch, grafts on a cuckoo clock to act as his heart. The clock dismays would-be adoptive parents, so the orphaned Jack continues to live with Dr. Madeleine and her entourage in 1800’s Edinburgh. Dr. Madeleine warns him that strong emotions may damage his fragile heart; above al...