Books
For poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., the neurological is also archeological.
Minor White’s autobiographical undertaking lacks diaristic narrative. There’s too much neurotic navel-gazing too much of the time. Yet it is very appealing as a twisted personal miscellany whose contents range from summaries of sex dreams to snarky letters that were never sent.
Although novelist Halle Butler portrays the lives of millennial women (and men) as unhappy, anxious, and stressed, she does so in a highly entertaining way.
Besides giving us a multi-faceted portrait of Robert Frost that leaves the poet tantalizingly inscrutable, Adam Plunkett does what the best biographers of great writers do: send us back to the work with renewed curiosity and heightened appreciation.
Among this novel’s merits is its powerful celebration of the will to live, dovetailed with an evocation of the love members of a family have for one another, even under the most brutal and apparently hopeless circumstances.
There are similarities between Randall Blythe’s music and his prose; both acknowledge the inescapable turmoil, darkness, and tragedy that bedevils everyone.
In this compulsively readable novel, a Ukrainian Jewish woman does what she needs to survive in the nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic Stalin-era Soviet Union.
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