For long-time readers of this website, it will be no secret that I regard James Sallis as far more than the “noir mystery writer” that he is often labeled. A specialist in spare, minimalist writing that is compressed, incisive, and often metaphorical, he is a writer who takes literary chances and whose recent work has been as experimental as it has been insightful. One of the best literary writers in the United States, in my opinion, Sallis has always been concerned with questions of innocence and guilt, strength and weakness, and the past and its effects on the present and future. He creates often sad, damaged characters doing the best they can in a noir atmosphere in which they must fight their own demons in order to have any chance of success. His main characters make mistakes, sometimes big ones, but at heart they have an intrinsic sense of honor despite their closeness to violence. Main character Lamar Hale, a physician who has lived in Willnot for many years, is one of over thirty characters introduced in the first thirty-two pages, illustrating the fact that there are no strangers in Willnot – Hale knows everyone. As Sallis individualizes these characters, Hale’s feelings about them become clear and the reader comes to know the town well. Many have secrets, including Lamar Hale himself. The arrival of a mysterious former resident and the discovery of a mass grave set the action in motion.
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Within the first two paragraphs of this dramatic and incisive study of human relationships, author Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (Ojibwe) Indians, introduces a series of powerful conflicts which pit family against family, culture against culture, and generation against generation. In the opening scene, quoted at the top of the review, Landreaux Iron, a careful and respected member of his culture, accidentally kills Dusty Ravich, the five-year-old son of Peter Ravich, a friend and family member with whom he had planned to share the meat from the buck. Racing back to Peter’s house, Landreaux encounters Peter’s wife Nola, who becomes understandably hysterical, and by the time the tribal police, the county coroner, and the state coroner have arrived, the trauma has been felt by all the members of both devastated families. Later, Landreaux, his wife Emmaline, and their five-year-old son LaRose take solace in the traditions of their Indian culture by going to the sweat lodge. There, in their mystical dreams, they have a vision of the future. True justice and repentance, they decide, can only be achieved if Landreaux gives his own five-year-old son, LaRose, to Peter Ravich and his wife Nola to raise as their own. The action of the novel evolves from this decision in the first few pages of the book.
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Although author Herman Wouk talks about writing as a crapshoot, he himself also had a talent for being in the right place at the right time, recognizing new opportunities and new avenues of communication (such as television) as they have arisen. This talent, combined with his incredible dedication to long-range goals and seemingly unlimited energy – several times spending seven or eight years on a single book – led to popular success as well as literary recognition. Though many people over the years have suggested he write an autobiography, he has always been reticent about his private life, and his wife even told him, “Dear, you’re not that interesting a person.” This book, which he has declared will be his last, is a memoir, but in it, Wouk limits its scope to his work and the people and events which influenced it. About the author, one learns only as much as he deems necessary to understand how and why he wrote what he did. One of the most ambitious and principled writers of the past century ,Wouk has said that this book is his last. With a career which has spanned comedy, serious historical fiction, popular fiction, philosophy, and religion, Wouk has sold hundreds of thousands of books and had a major impact on the people and the culture of this country. He will be one-hundred-one years old on May 27, 2016, but with his energy, I would not bet anything on this book being his last.
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In this first of two “Dorothy Parker novels” by Ellen Meister, Violet Epps, a thirty-seven-year-old movie critic with a major magazine, is waiting for the maître d’ in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City to seat her. When a “Dr. Walker” pushes her aside, claiming in a loud voice that he has a reservation, the best Violet can summon up in outrage is the silent wish that she could channel Dorothy Parker’s caustic wit to put this man in his place. Though she can be astute and clever in her reviews, Violet, in her personal life, constantly shrinks from confrontation, “held captive by her own timidity.” Poet and critic Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967), who eventually materializes to help Violet, held court at the Algonquin’s Round Table throughout the 1920s and became famous among New York’s literary elite for her ability to puncture the pretensions of the arrogant with ascerbic remarks, puns, and bons mots. The Round Table members, consisting of Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood, Percy Coates, and others, were so pointed in their comments that they were once described by fellow member, Edna Ferber, as “The Poison Squad,” adding that “They were actually merciless if they disapproved. I have never encountered a more hard-bitten crew.” When Parker materializes to help Violet, her world changes completely, though not without many complications.
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With an opening story which feels like some bizarre, twisted, and darkly humorous version of Deliverance, O. Henry Award-winner Arthur Bradford turns not just this plot on its head but every other plot in every other story in this collection. These interconnected stories feature a young, naïve speaker, usually identified as “Georgie,” who seems born without a sense of caution, someone who appears to have no ability to predict disasters as he enthusiastically follows his imagination or heart without a glance backward – or forward. Few readers will be able to resist this character, whose heart is in the right place though he lives on a completely different plane from the rest of the world. Even those few main characters who are not specifically identified as “Georgie” might just as well be Georgie in terms of their personality and behavior, acting the way many of us dreamed of behaving in an earlier, simpler world, long before we grew up and learned to “pay attention,” “think of the future,” and “be careful.” It is the tension between our empathy for Georgie and our frustration with him for his gullibility that keeps the reader entertained and involved, though Georgie is guaranteed to make every parent who reads this book cringe.
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