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…Continue reading A Second Coming for Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
Category: 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…Continue reading I Sailed with Magellan
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…Continue reading Travels with My Aunt
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…Continue reading Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje
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…Continue reading the longest work of fiction in history