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     |  I used to think that ‘The Corrections’ was the greatest thing I’d ever read, but I’ll have to say that ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ is better than ‘The Corrections’. Toltz did it in one book. Franzen took two to get ‘The Corrections’ out into the world. Granted, you have your whole life to write your first novel, but my God, ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ does things in 530 pages that most writers can’t do in a lifetime. Continue reading This Might Win The Booker Prize Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” consists of three pages totaling 23 paragraphs. One paragraph, mainly exposition, is five sentences long. The rest range from four sentences to several paragraphs that are only one sentence long. One paragraph, a very telling one, consists of just five words. This structure is gossamer, like a silk worm spinning out a thread. What it’s meant to catch is the extremity of a woman’s life. Mrs Mallard has just received the kind of tragic, out-of-the-blue, news that we all dread: a loved one has been in a horrific accident. Continue reading Narrative Magazine Story of the Week – The Story of an Hour  Bondurant does a great job in this novel shifting from magnificent imagery to violent outbursts of fury and drunkenness. The brothers – Howard, the war-haunted giant, Forrest, the mythic survivor, and Jack, the fearful dreamer – traverse a hard-scrabble Appalachian world where liquor becomes trade and livelihood, courage and shame. The story is framed by the appearance of writer Sherwood Anderson, on magazine assignment, as he tries to suss out the truth to the moonshine trade, which everyone knows about and about which no one will talk, and the personal tragedies and political corruption that accompanied it. Continue reading The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant  Two meth-head Cape Town gangsters on an unrelated errand break into Jack Burns’ house and end up dead. Of course, he can’t call the cops, since he and his family are on the lam from U.S. authorities. So, he disposes of the bodies, and, as we know from many other thrillers, sets a chain of events into action that endangers his family, puts him on the run again, and enters conflicts and accords with characters from Cape Town’s dark underbelly. Continue reading MIxed Blood by Roger Smith  Photography by Jason Rice Continue reading At journey’s end, I returned to my beginnings, realizing that I had screwed everything up from the start Readers have the bad rep of being navel-gazers, like those New England Transcendentalists who would walk into a tree while they were reading about the history of ancient Rome. The pot roast is burning or little Fido needs to go out for a walk but you have your nose in a book and are oblivious. (I wish.) But I think that reading keeps you honest. You can read a great short story like this one, for example, and there you are bracketed. The world and its burgeoning quota of animating life isn’t just all about your personal agenda anymore. It’s about all of us. Continue reading Narrative Magazine Story of the Week 4 | |||
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