One of the most beautiful books I’ve read. Robert Stone, another one of my favorite writers, said that “[t]here’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’ By this metric, Salter’s Light Years is one of the most striking works of art I’ve encountered. Read it. This book captures how life, time, landscapes, inner lives, people, perceptions, and relationships move and change. Salter may be my new favorite writer.
Here are a few passages, among many, that stood out:
“The present is powerful. Memories fade.”
“In the turning of seasons, they would be green again, these great trees. . . They would again, in addition to their beauty, to the roof they made beneath the sky, to their whispering, their slow, inarticulate sounds, the riches they poured down, they would, besides all this, give scale to everything, a true scale, reassuring, wise. We do not live as long, we do not know as much.”
“It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.”
Nedra and Viri are a married couple whose favoured life is centred around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But fine cracks are beginning to spread through the shimmering surface of their life - flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, tender and resonant, Light Years is an exquisite novel of lost lives and the elusiveness of happiness.
Love this short novel/novella about a literary critic/priest looking back on his life. This is my first book by Bolańo, and it won’t be my last! The details about Chile’s literary and political trajectory were fascinating and timely. The personal history—which functioned at times like a confession—and the way the work unfolded in a nontraditional way hooked me. And the writing is second to none. Unexpected and apt similes pop up like they do in Neruda’s work (and Pablo looms large in this book). My kind of book.
As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel-Roberto Bolano's first work available in English-recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to…
Loved this book! Tom Outland's story, a story within a story, is remarkable and worth the price of admission alone. The writing is superb throughout and really shines in descriptions of the natural world, especially in the American southwest. Cather manages to capture and portray complex inner lives with the utmost clarity. The way that Godfrey St. Peter develops throughout the story struck me as unique and also true. Willa Cather's insight into human nature and ability to express an entire lifetime in such a short space stuck with me. The Professor's House puts me in mind of Stoner by John Williams--another of my favorite books.
From Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather, The Professor's House is a vivid look into the domestic life of a 1920s Midwestern town and its people. Godfrey St. Peter, a professor at the unnamed Midwestern university near Lake Michigan, is preparing to move into a new home with his wife. As he looks upon the shabby house he's grown comfortable in, St. Peter muses about his life and his scholarship, philosophizing particularly on the people whom he's loved. His relationship with his wife and his daughters have become more and more strained over the years as St. Peter has alienated himself…
An “introspective, haunting tale that remains with us” (Heavy Feather Review) about a former revival preacher who walks away from an Eastern Kentucky prison in the 1970s, following a cat named Buffalo and trying to reconcile himself with his past.
After Frank escapes from a prison in Kentucky, his journey to find meaning in the absence of his former life as a charismatic traveling preacher leads him all up and down the US and Canada, delving into his own memories and questions of faith, family, self, and stories—and where those stories lead us.
Taking only a cat named Buffalo and a desire to outrun his former life, he journeys to the fringes of society. As he struggles to survive, Frank confronts his past, seeking redemption amidst the wilderness. As Frank traverses the shadowy edges of society, he encounters remnants of his former self, forcing him to confront his deepest regrets and desires. Blake’s haunting prose captures the essence of a man on the brink of transformation, urging readers to ponder the thin line between redemption and damnation.
BookLife Editor's Pick | Etchings Press Novella Prize winner | Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel Finalist | Feathered Quill Book Award for Debut Author Finalist | National indie Excellence Award for Book Cover Design Finalist | Featured on Deep South Magazine’s Reading List
“Blake’s atmospheric prose will pull readers into Frank’s resigned fatalism, and Pineville Trace serves as the incisive, elegiac odyssey of a confidence man who has lost his sense of spiritual direction.” —Publishers Weekly BookLife
“A man escapes from prison only to find he can’t separate himself from his past. Wes Blake renders the tale with great empathy and in language that’s so lyrical it practically lifts from the page. Blake is a writer to watch.” —Lee Martin, author of Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Bright Forever
“This was an utterly compelling read. Blake’s prose is sparse and simple, whose short, almost broken, sentences sing with enormous power.” —A W Earl, SmokeLong Quarterly
“Blake’s writing provides a contemporary case-study on artful, effective minimalism. The effect is an introspective, haunting tale that remains with us.” —Mia Carroll, Heavy Feather Review
“Despite his own certainty that he is a fraud, Frank emerges for the reader as the truest kind of prophet, following a cat named Buffalo and searching for “the old magic,” seeking an answer to that universal question: what ultimately releases a man from his own demons? A haunting debut!” —Julie Hensley, author of Five Oaks
“Blake’s writing of place and the natural world is transportative. A slim, blues-tinged novel that made me feel, think, and remember.” —Rebecca Fishow, author of How to Love a Black Hole
"The book is atmospheric and hypnotic and layered with meaning and ambiguity and complexity in the best possible sense, and I will remember for a long time.” —Anthony Varallo, author of What Did You Do Today?
