On the heels of Paul Collins’s wonderful Sixpence House, I’m reading Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism. (The paperback was released with a different subtitle: A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism, which is a more accurate description of the tone and content of the book than the hardcover subtitle). The book is both a memoir of Collins’s son’s diagnosis with autism and a history of the condition. Like everything Collins writes, it is full of ephemera and surprises, such as the case of a Henry Darger, a janitor with no friends or family whose oeuvre was...
Monthly Archives: January 2007
Tillie Olsen dies
Tillie Olsen passed away on the night of Jan. 1. Her story is inspirational for anyone who has struggled to be a writer while raising a family and paying the bills. She raised four girls alone and was 50 years old when she published her first book, the story collection Tell Me a Riddle (she won the O’Henry Award for the title story). Read Constance Corner’s very interesting biographical sketch of Olsen at Modern American Poetry. Olsen’s granddaughter, Ericka Lutz, is the co-editor of the online magazine Literary Mama.
More from Sixpence House
Collins unearths an early fictional biography based on the life of Emily Dickinson, penned by Helen Hunt Jackson, and “published by Niles to ianaugurate its No Name series, which published new works by writers like Jackson, Louisa May Alcott, and Christina Rossetti anonymously, allowing the books to stand or fall in review columns on their own merits.” A different world, eh? (See yesterday’s post for more on Collins’s marvelous book.)
Sixpence House
I’ve just finished reading Sixpence House, by Paul Collins. What a wonderful book on which to end 2006! This memoir about Collins’s year in Hay-on-Wye, the “Kingdom of Books,” was published way back in 2003, but somehow it slipped past my radar until I came across it at the San Francisco Public Library last week. I first had the opportunity to meet Collins back in 2002, I believe, when he invited me to read with him, Wendy Lesser, and Lewis Buzbee, at the Booksmith in San Francisco. I believe his first book, Banvard’s Folly, had recently been published. Collins...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
