Shannon Pufahl (Author of On Swift Horses)

Shannon Pufahl is currently reading Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Oct 28, 2019 04:56PM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Shannon Pufahl rated a book it was amazing Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism by Elizabeth Tallent	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
If you read only one book in 2020, make it this one. Scratched is a book so unique, so profound and moving, so precise in both its descriptions of the physical world and the emotions we attached to and draw from that world -- it can only be the work ...more
Oct 05, 2019 09:08AM · like · see review
Shannon Pufahl rated a book it was amazing Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution by Marilynne Robinson	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I read Housekeeping in college and became an evangelist for it. Then I read The Death of Adam, Robinson's first book of essays, and became an evangelist for Robinson herself. She has a reputation now, thirty years after those books, as a very America ...more
Sep 23, 2019 09:10AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Shannon Pufahl rated a book it was amazing In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Hemingway's first book, and much literary labor has gone into its interpretation, particularly of the structure. Stories that feel more or less complete are set against italicized vignettes of war, bullfighting, and other acts of masculine heroism. C ...more
Sep 23, 2019 09:08AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Shannon Pufahl rated a book it was amazing Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution by Marilynne Robinson	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I read Housekeeping in college and became an evangelist for it. Then I read The Death of Adam, Robinson's first book of essays, and became an evangelist for Robinson herself. She has a reputation now, thirty years after those books, as a very America ...more
Sep 23, 2019 08:54AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Shannon Pufahl rated a book it was amazing In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Hemingway's first book, and much literary labor has gone into its interpretation, particularly of the structure. Stories that feel more or less complete are set against italicized vignettes of war, bullfighting, and other acts of masculine heroism. C ...more
Sep 23, 2019 08:04AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Shannon Pufahl wants to read Lighthead by Terrance Hayes	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Sep 07, 2019 09:29AM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Lighthead by Terrance Hayes. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Lighthead by Terrance Hayes <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Shannon Pufahl wants to read Nebraska: Stories by Ron Hansen	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Sep 07, 2019 09:29AM · like
Shannon Pufahl wants to read H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Sep 07, 2019 09:29AM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Shannon Pufahl wants to read Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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Shannon Pufahl is currently reading

Where the Red Fern Grows
by Wilson Rawls

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Scratched: A Memoir of Perfectionism
by Elizabeth Tallent

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If you read only one book in 2020, make it this one. Scratched is a book so unique, so profound and moving, so precise in both its descriptions of the physical world and the emotions we attached to and draw from that world -- it can only be the work If you read only one book in 2020, make it this one. Scratched is a book so unique, so profound and moving, so precise in both its descriptions of the physical world and the emotions we attached to and draw from that world -- it can only be the work of a singular, brilliant mind. I was deeply moved and changed by this book.

----

So often a book is described as “re-inventing” such and such: the novel, the memoir, the essay, the modern conception of truth, the idea of love or fate or childhood. As a selling point, these descriptions suggest our strong, enduring desire for those things to be reinvented, to encounter, as readers, new forms of literary performance and feeling. We needn’t search far to understand why: Most books perform the same rituals of plot and character, they use prosody and lyricism to influence readerly feeling around dramatic standbys such as conflict, stasis, and catharsis. We actually like this far more than we will admit, since much of what we hope for when we read is to find our own ideas echoed back to us, in language we did not know or could not access, and to find in the rhythms of drama the cleansing and the usefully moving. There is nothing wrong with this. Our obsession with newness is a product of a 20th century literary culture that valued innovation, that saw innovation as the only conceivable response to a world gone crazy. Our 21st century literary culture seems to value the late capitalist appraisement offered by the unseen, the final newness that will sate our endless desire. That we still look to the literary to solve these problems seems to me a mostly very good thing.

But real reinvention is painful, rare, and glorious, and it serves no “cultural” purpose. Scratched, which is one of the best books I’ve ever read, asks the tired old memoir form to accommodate the irony at the center of the book’s existence: The narrator could not, for many years, allow any of her work to be published, because a desire for perfection so profound enthralled her. Enthralled is the right word, I think, because she is not stopped by this desire but trapped by it, and she thus makes, as prisoners and writers must, a glory and a phrenic object of the thing that traps her. And yet (and so), this book, about that entrapment, exists.

In asking the memoir form to accommodate this irony, the memoir is, in actual fact, reinvented. The first dazzling section, about the moment of the narrator’s birth, offers an understanding of a mother’s painful rejection of her own child (the narrator) that relies not on common notions of cruelty or entitlement, but on the mother’s own enthrallment to beauty and perfection. It would be easy for the writer to see this as implausible, because such empathy may seem to readers of the common memoir, livers of the common life, acrobatic and only literary. Instead, the writer illuminates something we only vaguely understood to be in darkness at all: Our own enthrallment to beauty, the way a desire for it embanks us behind narcissism and prevents our connection to others.

The sections that follow offer some of the best and most insightful writing I’ve read about childhood. Like Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood (one of the very best memoirs), there is no pity or blame here, but an enduring, robust, athletic desire to understand. To watch an adult mind at work in this way is to give the lie to most writing about childhood, and to remake what we think childhood is -- a thing to be mourned, to be investigated only for its relevance to the adult life. Instead we understand childhood to be a continuation of the human need for beauty, which carries through a family and a life and into the next.

A singular and very brilliant book. ...more

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Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution
by Marilynne Robinson

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I read Housekeeping in college and became an evangelist for it. Then I read The Death of Adam, Robinson's first book of essays, and became an evangelist for Robinson herself. She has a reputation now, thirty years after those books, as a very America ...more

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In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway

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Hemingway's first book, and much literary labor has gone into its interpretation, particularly of the structure. Stories that feel more or less complete are set against italicized vignettes of war, bullfighting, and other acts of masculine heroism. C Hemingway's first book, and much literary labor has gone into its interpretation, particularly of the structure. Stories that feel more or less complete are set against italicized vignettes of war, bullfighting, and other acts of masculine heroism. Characters are not shared from story to vignette (though many of the full-length stories are about Nick Adams, famously) and often protagonists and narrators are not named. Critics wonder how to read these vignettes, which are generally outside time and do not build in a linear or conventionally narrative way. The stories, by contrast, begin in Adams' childhood, and though not all the stories involve Adams, his maturation -- through failed romance, war, and pilgrimage -- nevertheless make up the collection's true heart.

Hemingway himself claimed that the collection was arranged in a deliberate and careful way, meant to evoke themes of alienation in the new century (In Our Time was originally published in 1924), the rearrangement of borders (both geographic and psychological) by war, and the emotional costs of masculine performance (of which war is an example). Hemingway is very often critiqued for his misogyny and treatment of female characters, and I won't attempt to correct this perception -- such critiques are certainly supportable. However, I tend to read Hemingway as very critical of the conventionally masculine, and I think the vignettes about war, bullfighting, and other acts of violence are there to cast into greater relief the experiences of Adams and other (male) protagonists in the full stories, whose experiences are, in essence, about the damage caused by violence and stoicism, and the losses, confusions, and sorrows caused by limited emotional language. Yes, women in these stories have full lives only insofar as they relate to men, and much of the content and circumstances are white, male, American (baseball, fishing, whisky). But there are still (in 2019, nearly 100 years later) plenty of story collections and novels that get a lot of play and attention, about those very things, and without the kind of critique offered by Hemingway, via the vignettes. Perhaps we dismiss Hemingway for the responses of his readers (often true, for writers) who saw his work as "about" fishing or bullfighting or wine-drinking. Or perhaps because his critique was too measured or artful, and in that way arguable or ambiguous, even totally ineffective -- perhaps because he's not good at women or race, to say the least -- perhaps because he failed to change the meaning of fishing, fighting, wine-drinking, and we had to endure the men who came after him, whose work is often characterized by violence as regeneration, by sexual deprivation as sincere spiritual affliction (Discuss: is Rabbit Angstrom's main problem that he doesn't feel sufficiently laid? Is he the original InCel?).

Unanswerable questions, or answerable only through contention, a mode which feels increasingly irrelevant, by virtue of being mostly performed. My view, though, is that this book is Hemingway's most strident critique of the masculine (as the thing that makes war, that demands large and small-scale violence in order be expressed, that seems to make that violence itself personally or culturally meaningful), and that the structure bears out this reading. Part One of "The Big Two-Hearted River" is some of the best writing about the long arc of trauma, then or now. Later, books like The Old Man and the Sea will glorify more than critique, but here Hemingway has not lost the thread yet. Essential reading. ...more

Shannon Pufahl rated a book it was amazing

Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution
by Marilynne Robinson

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

I read Housekeeping in college and became an evangelist for it. Then I read The Death of Adam, Robinson's first book of essays, and became an evangelist for Robinson herself. She has a reputation now, thirty years after those books, as a very America ...more

Shannon Pufahl rated a book it was amazing

In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Hemingway's first book, and much literary labor has gone into its interpretation, particularly of the structure. Stories that feel more or less complete are set against italicized vignettes of war, bullfighting, and other acts of masculine heroism. C Hemingway's first book, and much literary labor has gone into its interpretation, particularly of the structure. Stories that feel more or less complete are set against italicized vignettes of war, bullfighting, and other acts of masculine heroism. Characters are not shared from story to vignette (though many of the full-length stories are about Nick Adams, famously) and often protagonists and narrators are not named. Critics wonder how to read these vignettes, which are generally outside time and do not build in a linear or conventionally narrative way. The stories, by contrast, begin in Adams' childhood, and though not all the stories involve Adams, his maturation -- through failed romance, war, and pilgrimage -- nevertheless make up the collection's true heart.

Hemingway himself claimed that the collection was arranged in a deliberate and careful way, meant to evoke themes of alienation in the new century (In Our Time was originally published in 1924), the rearrangement of borders (both geographic and psychological) by war, and the emotional costs of masculine performance (of which war is an example). Hemingway is very often critiqued for his misogyny and treatment of female characters, and I won't attempt to correct this perception -- such critiques are certainly supportable. However, I tend to read Hemingway as very critical of the conventionally masculine, and I think the vignettes about war, bullfighting, and other acts of violence are there to cast into greater relief the experiences of Adams and other (male) protagonists in the full stories, whose experiences are, in essence, about the damage caused by violence and stoicism, and the losses, confusions, and sorrows caused by limited emotional language. Yes, women in these stories have full lives only insofar as they relate to men, and much of the content and circumstances are white, male, American (baseball, fishing, whisky). But there are still (in 2019, nearly 100 years later) plenty of story collections and novels that get a lot of play and attention, about those very things, and without the kind of critique offered by Hemingway, via the vignettes. Perhaps we dismiss Hemingway for the responses of his readers (often true, for writers) who saw his work as "about" fishing or bullfighting or wine-drinking. Or perhaps because his critique was too measured or artful, and in that way arguable or ambiguous, even totally ineffective -- perhaps because he's not good at women or race, to say the least -- perhaps because he failed to change the meaning of fishing, fighting, wine-drinking, and we had to endure the men who came after him, whose work is often characterized by violence as regeneration, by sexual deprivation as sincere spiritual affliction (Discuss: is Rabbit Angstrom's main problem that he doesn't feel sufficiently laid? Is he the original InCel?).

Unanswerable questions, or answerable only through contention, a mode which feels increasingly irrelevant, by virtue of being mostly performed. My view, though, is that this book is Hemingway's most strident critique of the masculine (as the thing that makes war, that demands large and small-scale violence in order be expressed, that seems to make that violence itself personally or culturally meaningful), and that the structure bears out this reading. Part One of "The Big Two-Hearted River" is some of the best writing about the long arc of trauma, then or now. Later, books like The Old Man and the Sea will glorify more than critique, but here Hemingway has not lost the thread yet. Essential reading. ...more