Tag Archives: american literature
The Old Maid by Edith Wharton
Several times in 2010 I told myself I’d get back to Edith Wharton. I didn’t. But after writing my Best of 2010 list, I decided it was about time I got back to the books and authors I’d intended to … Continue reading
Filed under Fiction, Wharton, Edith
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
Power, authority and ‘the rules.’ I picked Hard Rain Falling off my shelf as part of my determination to read more titles from NYRB. I read a couple of their books last year, and Stephen Benatar’s Leave Her Safe At Home was so … Continue reading
Filed under Carpenter Don
McTeague by Frank Norris
This 2009 reading of Frank Norris’s McTeague was the third reading for me, and I returned to this American classic novel of Old San Francisco after watching Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent film version with its appropriate title: Greed. McTeague is one … Continue reading
Filed under Norris Frank
A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis
I really loathe giving up on a book. It’s a point of pride for me. Long story but as a teenager, I didn’t finish George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and if anyone even mentioned this author’s name, I’d inwardly groan. Many years later, I … Continue reading
Filed under Davis L.J
Oil! by Upton Sinclair
“The boy had got by heart every one of the Bolshevik formulas that the people of Russia had a right to run their own country in their own way; that our troops had no business shooting and killing them without … Continue reading
Filed under Sinclair, Upton
The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty
“The sun shone down of all our possessions. “ In Eudora Welty’s tale The Robber Bridegroom wealthy planter Clement Musgrove has a tragic past. When captured by Indians years before, Musgrove lost his wife and son, but his precious daughter, … Continue reading
Filed under Welty, Eudora
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
“I don’t want to wear a uniform any more.” Catch 22 is a savagely funny, bitter, and terrifying novel. How can such diametrically opposed terms be applied to the same book? The answer is simple: Catch 22 is brilliant. The … Continue reading
Filed under Heller, Joseph
