Birds of America

Birds of America came out in 1998, Lorrie Moore’s third collection of short stories. The twelve stories in this book follow the lives of unwilling East Coast transplants to the Midwest, people with terminal illnesses, people in relationships and marriages that have twisted and gone wrong, families that have slowly grown unbearable. And yet each [...]

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The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World

A few years after William Shakespeare’s death, his business partners, actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, approached the printer William Jaggard with a proposal that he publish a complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Some of Shakespeare’s plays had been printed individually in small editions called quartos, but Jaggard elected to print this collection in the larger folio format, and in [...]

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The Language of Bees

I read The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the first of Laurie King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery novels, in 1995. I remember it fondly: I was in graduate school at the time, and working at a bookstore, and the second book in the series, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, had just come out on the shelves. Paul, one of [...]

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The Puttermesser Papers

The Puttermesser Papers, by Cynthia Ozick, is actually five linked stories. Between them, they tell the life (and death and afterlife) of Ruth Puttermesser, whose name means “butter knife”, and who is a low-level bureaucrat in Manhattan. From the first sentence, Ozick’s distinctive voice never stops telling us who Puttermesser is:  Puttermesser was thirty-four, a [...]

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Love in the Time of Cholera

In an unnamed South American city at the turn of the century, a young telegraph operator named Florentino Ariza falls in love the with beautiful Fermina Daza. Encouraged by her romantic aunt, Fermina exchanges letters with Florentino, and the two eventually agree to marry. When Fermina’s father learns of the secret arrangement, he forbids the [...]

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Soldier’s Heart

Elizabeth Samet writes about “soldier’s heart” in several ways in the course of this book. It’s a phrase that can mean courage (“steel my soldiers’ hearts,” says Henry V), or the values a soldier holds dear. It is also the name of a condition that has been diagnosed since the Civil War: at first considered [...]

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Wives and Daughters (film)

Earlier this summer, I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s lovely long novel Wives and Daughters (you can read my review of it here.) In the comments, several of you told me that I would enjoy the BBC adaptation of it, so when I had a sick day last week, I got in bed with my knitting and [...]

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Spoon River Anthology

Edgar Lee Masters published the Spoon River Anthology in 1915. It’s a collection of free-verse poems, but it’s meant to be read as a novel: each poem is in the voice of a different person who lived and died in Spoon River, Illinois, and now speaks from beyond the grave. The anthology caused an instant [...]

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Good in Bed (audio)

I read very few books that could be classified as chick lit, not because I think the genre is irretrievably bad, but because it’s too difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.  I do like a nice wish-fulfillment fantasy from time to time, and good chick lit about smart women trying to cope with [...]

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The Tangled Thread (Morland Dynasty #10)

The Tangled Thread,the tenth book in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s long-running Morland Dynasty series, finds Jemima Morland and her children living in relative peace in England. Jemima’s main worry is whether any of her unconventional children will ever find and marry a suitable spouse. When the inheritance of an estate as large as Morland Place is at [...]

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