In 1967, when I was ten years old, my mother married Harlan Frame, and we moved that summer to a house he’d bought for us in Slaughter, Texas. Harlan was a farmer, a word my mother found too plain; she’d tell people Harlan ranched, though he kept fewer than a dozen cows on a patch…
You preferred to reserve a table in the corner, and over the appetizers you may apologize, but first we must order the cook to harvest well, tuck away the sorry scattering of nostalgia under a wing or beneath a bone. No real specters this evening, as your plot spins out over the aromas and glances…
Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter, a novel: About one of the most controversial figures in American history, the abolitionist John Brown, Banks’s epic novel is narrated by Brown’s son and comrade, Owen. The novel not only traces Brown’s crusade against slavery, leading to his famous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, but also becomes a deeply moving…
Was this your first, uh, infidelity, Mrs. Kennedy?” asked the somewhat prissy, prurient marriage counselor, to whom Arabel and Bertram Kennedy had gone after her teary confession that she loved another man-a very young man, Richard, not only unemployed in a gainful way but a poet, whom she meant to marry. A pause, while both…
Yes, they were like windows, all those medical jars, not the eyes themselves. No, they were like acorns, or rocks, hard, solid things—enemies of glass—yet kept safe, sealed, untouched, behind glass. Every day I would scrutinize the jars, take them one by one from their organized comb in the bottom bureau drawer of my father’s…
Mary Gordon, Spending, a novel: Gordon explores new territory with an indelibly vibrant, witty character, Monica Szabo, a fifty-year-old artist who decides to accept a handsome commodities trader as her patron. He gives her money, sex, and poses as a model. However, when her new series of paintings makes her rich, famous, and controversial, her…
She knew she would not reach Cole Cole even before she started to walk, knew she could not do twenty-five kilometers in the sand with this pack. These new boots, she had learned on her last hike with Freyda, were a half size too short, had bruised her big toenails on the Towers of Paine…
Driving home from the hospice, from his death, four a.m. now, his last possessions in a paper bag beside me on the seat, the heavy glasses, the teeth in a margarine tub, his cheap watch on my arm as though I’d stolen time back, the smell of his skin on my hands; over the city…
Donald Hall, Without, poems: In his fourteenth collection, Hall writes with grief, grace, and courage about the poet Jane Kenyon, his late wife. The first half sketches her illness and death. The second half is comprised of verse letters he addresses to Kenyon in the ensuing year. This book stands as a poignant and powerful…
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