Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding

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Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding

(Guest post by Charles Baxter)

Before COVID-19 arrived on the scene, you could go into bookstores and browse. You could amble down the aisles and look for something that might snag your attention. For much of my adult life, I’ve suspected that books are not simple inanimate objects but are haunted.

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Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You, and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: Life after Disaster

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Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You, and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: Life after Disaster

When I asked my younger sister, who has been through quite a lot and is miraculously still alive, how she was doing, she said, “Well. I am well. I live with my family in my happy home where we are all safe and nothing bad is happening to us.” Before I can question that, because in fact there is quite a lot going on with the multiple generations of that household (and their dog, cat, and gecko), she said, “But I have an internet connection.”

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Margot Livesey on Andrea Barrett's Archangel

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Margot Livesey on Andrea Barrett's Archangel

(Guest post by Margot Livesey)

If I weren’t a writer, then I always thought I’d work for Oxfam and if I couldn’t work for Oxfam then I’d like to teach people to read. What could be more life-changing than the experience of letters becoming words, words becoming sentences, sentences becoming paragraphs that can fly off the page and into the world? As friends who work in theatre and music struggle to keep their art forms alive, I marvel at my banquet of words, and how I share that banquet with friends and strangers.

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Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

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Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

(Guest post by Ron Nyren)

My father had an uncanny ability to manage numbers. He could add long strings of them in his head, as well as multiply and divide sizable figures without writing them down, skills that served him well in keeping the books for the family business, Nyren Brothers Florists, then later as troubleshooter for a wholesale florist, and finally as a real estate agent before he retired. He also served as treasurer for the church, the town’s garden club, and just about every other organization he belonged to. In his last few years, in his late 80s, when his short-term memory began to fail him, he patiently taught my mother to take over balancing the checkbook.

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Anne Raeff on Toni Morrison’s Beloved

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Anne Raeff on Toni Morrison’s Beloved

(Guest post by Anne Raeff)

Two years ago, tired of being in a perpetual state of anger about the state of the world and the United States especially, my wife, Lori, and I decided that we needed a different approach to life. We needed to do something we had never done before, something that would give us purpose and from which we could learn in a new, not an intellectual, way. Over the years of our relationship—we have been together for 28 years—we sometimes talked about adopting a child or fostering, but we enjoyed the freedom and focus on our work and writing that childlessness provided, so the conversations never were very serious. But this time, when my wife, Lori, mentioned fostering, we kept on talking about it, imagining what it would be like.

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Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, and Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed: Foreshadowing Emergency

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Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, and Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed: Foreshadowing Emergency

As I write this, we are in a heartbreaking, enraging, and also potentially transformative moment, confronting the systems that make up structural racism, including state-sponsored and sanctioned murder and the inequities in every system from housing to the job market to health care. When Ezra Klein asked Ta-Nehisi Coates what he saw when he looked at the country, Coates said that he couldn’t believe he was going to say this, “…but I see hope. I see progress right now.” The anguish has been going on for a long time now, but this is the first time we’ve seen it erupt on such a massive, international scale, and in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that underscores our sense of urgency. We are remembering George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and too many more. We remember them in action, in protests, in voting, and in our commitment to standing with the Black Lives Matter movement.

So what is the role, in this moment, of fiction, whether reading or writing?

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Angela Pneuman on Samantha Harvey's Dear Thief

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Angela Pneuman on Samantha Harvey's Dear Thief

(Guest post by Angela Pneuman)

Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief is a single, book-length letter addressed to the narrator’s oldest friend from childhood, the rarely named Nina—a heroin addict who had an affair with the narrator’s husband. It’s been nearly a decade since the two women, now in their fifties, have seen each other, and the letter is written on the occasion of the narrator’s husband, Nicolas, asking to return to a shared life with the narrator. As she writes, the narrator considers the offer, discusses it in this long, one-way conversation. There’s nothing in the book outside of the direct address—even the narrator’s life, as she moves in and out of the days it takes her to write the letter, is carefully transcribed. But even though it’s quite literally a one-way conversation, what makes this book so lovely and even dynamic is how the letter writer moves so easily among her current life, remembered events—often revisited and adjusted as memories are—and moments of bold imagination. The imagined moments are what stand out to me—I’m so interested in the technique, which seems especially helpful within the restrictive first-person point of view, and the added restriction of the epistolary form.

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Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, and Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”: Muse and Bride

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Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, and Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”: Muse and Bride

Mr. Fox

Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, full of twists and discoveries, offers a set of variations and reversals on the old English folktale of Mr. Fox and Lady Mary. Though it has a number of differences from the Bluebeard tale, it has a mysterious, powerful, murderous husband. In Oyeyemi’s version, there’s Mr. Fox, a writer, Daphne, his wife, and then Mary, his muse who comes to life and upbraids him for all the women he kills in his books. The stories within stories in this novel display multiple configurations of triangles, alterations in the power structure, and new versions of old relationships.

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Annie Kim on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: The Possibility of a Walk

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Annie Kim on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: The Possibility of a Walk

(Guest post by Annie Kim)

It’s a shameful thing for a poet to admit: I hate walking. I am what you’d call a bad walker.

Sure, Wordsworth lay blissfully on his back in an empty field, staring at clouds. Wallace Stevens composed whole poems in his head as he strolled to his job each morning at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. I, though, have never been moved by a walk to do anything other than walk faster. Why walk when you can run? Drive?

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Sigrid Nunez, The Friend, and Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World: The Slowly Emerging Story

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Sigrid Nunez, The Friend, and Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World: The Slowly Emerging Story

My neighbors have a new puppy, Gemma. I first learned about Gemma, though not in a way I could understand, from another long-time member of that family: Juliet, a friendly tabby who has a timeshare interest in the soft reading chairs on our back porch. She came running up to me, meowing wildly, as I was out for a walk. I petted her, but she continued complaining, looking over her shoulder, unable to calm down enough to roll on the sidewalk and allow me to stroke her ears. I said to her, “What is it, Juliet, are you sick, what’s the matter?” But of course she had no way of telling me what was really going on. After a few days of encountering Juliet in this agitated state, I finally met Gemma, an exuberant and tiny terrier mix, capable of leaping at least a couple of feet in the air in ecstatic greeting. She tied herself in wriggling knots, flinging herself at me and licking my hands, while my neighbor, holding her leash, both laughed and rolled her eyes.

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Zadie Smith, Grand Union, and E.M. Forster, Howard's End: People Watching

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Zadie Smith, Grand Union, and E.M. Forster, Howard's End: People Watching

At this moment in history, many writers/readers, even the deep introverts among us, find ourselves wistful for people we know and don’t know, for crowds, festivals, the family on the next picnic blanket at the beach, literary festivals thick with subtext, game nights, dating, and family dinners, no matter how fraught. In this post, I thought I’d share a pair of people-watching paragraphs from a couple of beloved writers, Zadie Smith and E.M. Forster, both wonderful in their language and especially sharp and meticulous in their character portraits.

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Devi S. Laskar on Natalie Diaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec

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Devi S. Laskar on Natalie Diaz's When My Brother Was an Aztec

(Guest post by Devi S. Laskar)

One of my favorite Natalie Diaz poems is her pantoum “My Brother at 3 a.m.,” in her first book, When My Brother Was An Aztec.

I am first a poet and I had the pleasure of being Natalie’s student for one day several years ago, in a workshop in Santa Cruz. She is a terrific teacher and she talked about perspective and writing practice and continuity. Pantoum is a favorite poetry form of mine, I love the way the lines are braided through the stanzas and how you as a writer have a chance to perform a bit of magic and change meaning or perspective. In Natalie’s poetry, I admire how she tackles difficult subjects. In the case of this pantoum, it’s drug addiction. The language is vivid and precise and she gets the pantoum to bend a little at the end so that we readers end up with two POVs and it’s pure poetic magic.

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Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House, and Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being: Explosion and Flight (An Introduction to the Marvelous Paragraph Project)

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Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House, and Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being: Explosion and Flight (An Introduction to the Marvelous Paragraph Project)

In this time that’s like nothing we have seen before, it seems helpful to sometimes have small, specific things to concentrate on for a few minutes that have nothing to do with the news. And for those of us who love to read, that just might be a marvelous paragraph or two. A friend of mine once said, “I read for sentences,” which made me think about what I read for: characters, story, the problems we find ourselves in and have to navigate our way through, lives like or completely unlike our own (my friend reads for all of these too – she was making a dramatic point at the time). But I love splendid sentences too, and love them most when they’re in conversation with each other: a dialogue, an argument, a little dance. A paragraph might build up details, make and then undercut points, move deeper and deeper into an idea, or ricochet from one idea to another. This blog explores some favorite paragraphs and authors, looking at what they do and how.

To start off, here’s a paragraph that builds into an explosion, from the chapter “Dream House as Time Travel” in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. The book traces the story of an abusive relationship, even as it pokes into all the corners of narrative possibility. With a mix of playful invention and anguish, the short chapters take on traditional and unexpected forms, themes, and literary tropes in this reinvention of the memoir.

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