The only thing at once more precious and more fragile than a true story is a free life. A Pulitzer finalist and long-listed for the Man Booker Prizer, The Moor’s Account is a work of fiction based on real historical events and people. Through the eyes of our narrator Mustafa, aka Estebanico, a Muslim from Morocco, the reader experiences the life of a successful merchant in Portuguese controlled North Africa, enslavement, and an ill-fated Spanish quest for gold in La Florida. Lalami’s inspiration came from […]
Has everyone been reading Nalo Hopkinson without me?
Sometimes, when one is introduced to a gifted writer who has been crafting fine works for going on two decades, one feels both excited to have found such a trove and yet irritated to have not known about her sooner. This is how I feel after reading Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel Brown Girl in the Ring, published in 1998. The novel won several awards and was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award. It is an absolutely fascinating combination of dystopian future, Caribbean folk tale, […]
Friends and Enemies
And so we come to the end of Elena Ferrante’s epic story of the lifelong friendship of two Neapolitan women. In The Story of the Lost Child, Ferrante continues to write on themes of feminism, politics, family, and community dynamics through her memorable characters. Book Four sees Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo into middle age and beyond, with their complicated relationships to creativity, men, their children and each other. This book also brings the reader back around to the mystery introduced in Book One: what […]
A New York Love Story
Saint Mazie is the fictional story of a young woman in New York City. Told through Mazie’s diary excerpts and interviews with those who knew her or knew of her, the story begins in 1907, when 10-year-old Mazie received the diary as a present, and runs until 1939, when the entries end. From the first pages, we learn that Mazie was a woman of some note in the Bowery, a queen to some, a saint to others, and yet she questioned whether or not she […]
What if PG Wodehouse had written Wuthering Heights?
Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons is a marvelous send up of brooding romantic literature in the vein of the Bronte sisters. In addition to a crazy woman upstairs, a dark and hunky cad, crazy gibberish talking locals, and a plucky dauntless heroine, Gibbons gives her reader some hilarious dialogue and overall goofiness that is difficult to resist. Gibbons represents the best of British humor a la Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome and of women writers of the 1930s such as Dawn Powell and […]
Being of Two Minds
Patricia Highsmith might be best known for her Ripley novels and their film adaptations, but Strangers on a Train, her first novel, set the path for her career and has likewise been adapted several times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. It is an unsettling, suspenseful psychological thriller that features brutal crime and some deep philosophical pondering. Guy Haines, an up and coming architect, is on his way home to Metcalf, TX, with the expectation that his philandering wife Miriam is going to finally […]
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