The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, Peter Orner‘s beautiful novel set at a boys’ school in Namibia during the early 1990s, will be released tomorrow. If you didn’t catch it the first time around, get it now. Related: an interesting piece by Binyavanga Wainaina in the June issue of Harper’s, excerpted from the “Glory,” which appeared in the Spring issue of Bidoun. You can read Wainaina’s essay in its entirety on the Bidoun web site. A taste: One day, when I was twelve years old, in a small public school in Nakuru, the whole student body was called out...
Litbits: excerpts from good books
I Sailed with Magellan
Back to Short Story Month (which is happening over at Emerging Writers Network), I’m currently reading Stuart Dybek’s beautiful collection, I Sailed With Magellan. I highly recommend the entire collection, in particular a story I heard him read a few weeks ago at the North Dakota Writers’ Conference, “We Didn’t.” Click here to see a list Dybek’s work in Ploughshares. Even if you haven’t read much of Dybek, you’re probably familiar with his widely anthologized very short story, “Pet Milk.” His other acclaimed story collections are The Coast of Chicago and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Here’s a good interview...
Travels with My Aunt
Not too long ago, I picked up a used copy of Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt at Green Apple. Just started reading it last night. The book is narrated by a retired bank manager who meets his aunt for the first time at his mother’s funeral. A taste from paragraph one: Everyone thought me lucky, but I found it difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother’s funeral. And a...
Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje
I’ve just finished reading the ARC of Michael Ondaatje’s extraordinary new novel Divisadero, which will be published in May. The book begins with a harrowing familial violence on a farm in Petaluma and ends in another country at another time. San Francisco residents will recognize the title, which is the street where the novel’s overriding consciousness, Anna, lives as an adult. I say “overriding consciousness” because, while Anna narrates some portions of the novel, there are also large swaths of omniscience, as well as points at which the omniscient narrator collides, unexpectedly, with Anna’s voice. Years after the violence...
the longest work of fiction in history
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...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
