This
novel is in the POV of Henry James, following him around England and the world during the
last years of his life, watching him pick up threads of inspiration for his stories. The reader is privy to his awful, slow awareness of how he had irreparably hurt the women in his life, including his sister.
And yet, he defends the selfishness he needed to do his art. Written in his style, which he referred to as “The Mystery of the Self,” you have to love his writing to love this book, and I did. Some people don’t.
Best quote from one of the women, in an argument
about sermons and fiction: “When you close The Mill on the Floss, you know
much more about how strange and beautiful it is to be alive than when you read
a thousand sermons.”
Nineteenth-century writer Henry James is heartbroken when his first play performs poorly in contrast to Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and struggles with subsequent doubts about his sexual identity.
“Like
a deer in the headlights,” we say about someone who freezes in the face
of impending doom. Why is that? Why don’t deer jump out of the way when
they see us coming
in our speeding metal machines? Mary Roach will tell you.
She is one of
the best and funniest science writers around, and her most recent book,
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law,
is about the often brutal interface where human culture meets wildlife,
whether it’s deer in the road or geese on the golf course.
In other words, this is a book about how the legal system does or does
not regulate “nuisance” animals, a wildly unsuccessful enterprise.
Even
those fiberglass predators, such as coyotes and horned owls, meant to
spook creatures, might actually attract them,
because they signal that good food is nearby. From cougars accused of
murders they did not commit, to the ineffectiveness of hazing bears,
“specialists in human-wildlife conflict are starting to move their focus
from animal biology and behavior over to human
behavior.” As always, when it comes to nature, we’re the problem.
What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in…
This
is not much more than a novella, but very compelling. The story is set in Ireland in the early 80s during bad economic times, when the Magdalene convents were still going. The treatment of the young girls was horrific.
Furlong, the owner of a
coal company, rescues one of the girls and the story ends. On first reading, it felt like the beginning of a novel, not the end of one, but in fact, you knew what the consequences were going to be, you knew that he could lose everything by what he did. It was complete as is.
I wonder if she
planned to go farther and then realized she didn’t have to.
"A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." —Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers
Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him…
In this collection of
short fiction,
characters struggle with COVID-19, ecological destruction, and grief as they
attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is not always in a
position to give back.
A young couple raises crickets for food, a woman in a caged complex is witness
to the deterioration of her neighbor, a homeless man contemplates an infant’s grave from the Westward
Expansion, and an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain.
These are among the stories from my book, where the climate crisis arrives not just as
strange and violent weather but as upheavals in our political and emotional
climates as well.
