And There was Evening And There Was Morning, Essays on Illness, Loss, and Love, by Mike Smith (WTAW Press) “Mourning,” Hilary Mantel wrote, “is work. It is not simply being sad. It is naming your pain. It is witnessing the sorrow of others, drawing out the shape of loss.” Who […]
Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, by Teri Garr Think of Teri Garr, and likely it’s as the outspoken girl next door, the slightly off-kilter girlfriend, wife, or mother—characters she played in Tootsie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Young Frankenstein. Even when Garr is playing it straight, as in […]
This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff First published in 1989, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life has since become a classic of the contemporary memoir, the kind of book you can finish, like I did, in nearly one sitting. Wolff, the author of numerous works of fiction, including short stories, […]
The Princess Diarist Carrie Fisher Blue Rider Press Release Date: November 22, 2016 ISBN 978-0-3991-7359-2 In her 1984 semi-biographical novel Postcards from the Edge, readers were introduced to actor Carrie Fisher’s wry wit, her self-deprecating insight, and her lack of calculated artifice. Over 30 years later, The Princess Diarist bridges […]
Born A Crime – Stories from a South African Childhood Trevor Noah Random House Release Date: November 15, 2016 ISBN 978-0-3995-8817-4 Reading biographies from entertainers tends to be a mixed bag. Sometimes you truly get a view of someone’s winding road to fame; other times, you get the equivalent of […]
Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama Stories that center on fathers have a distinct place in the memoir genre. For better or worse, fathers hold a place that intersects with the world and experience in a way far different from that of a mother’s. As in Jung’s archetypes, fathers […]
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, essays by Michael Chabon You know a book on fatherhood is going to be interesting when the title includes the word amateurs. The trope of fatherly wisdom, borne of experience and dispensed with measured calm, is […]
Boy Erased Garrard Conley Riverhead Books Release Date: May 10, 2016 ISBN 978-1-59463-301-0 It was sheer coincidence that had me reading Garrard Conley’s book about his experience with a conversion therapy program aimed at curing him of the “sin” of homosexuality, but the timing did give my reading of it […]
Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place, by Annie Proulx The memoir by this award-winning novelist (The Shipping News) and story writer (“Brokeback Mountain,” from Wyoming Stories) centers on the experience of building a home in the titular tract of Montana wilderness—a place, and a house, Proulx comes to love. We learn […]
Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays, by William Styron Though William Styron is best know for his novels (The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice), and a late memoir chronicling his depression (Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness), he wrote wonderful essays that draw on his power of insight, intellectual acuity, […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.