by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 21, 2008 | craft of writing, memory, reviews, truth |
The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I read it in April. In this novel, the narrator describes her family of origin in terms of the labels we acquire, as families and as individuals in a family. “The Hegartys didn’t...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 19, 2008 | journeys, reviews, shapes |
If I weren’t reading all of Rachel Cusk’s books to look at how her writing develops over time, I would not have finished her sixth book, In the Fold, published in 2005. As one reviewer wrote, “too little happened to too many people.” Or...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 14, 2008 | novels, reviews, shapes |
For anyone who enjoyed Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you will love her new novel, Home. For she has just crossed town, so to speak, and turned around to tell us the story from a different porch. On...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 31, 2008 | reviews |
“The weather was unusually warm for the last day of October. We didn’t even need jackets. The wind was growing stronger, and Jem said it might be raining before we got home. There was no moon.” To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee I read it in...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 28, 2008 | reviews, shapes, truth |
The Lucky Ones is Rachel Cusk’s fifth book. In it, there is a Contents page, which announces five sections. Each section stands by itself. There is a passing reference in each section to at least one character in another section. With a lovely circularity,...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 20, 2008 | novels, reviews, stories |
In a 1921 New York Times article entitled, “What is a Novel, Anyhow?”, Henry Kitchell Webster, writes “A novel is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as a fictitious prose narrative of sufficient length to fill one or more volumes. Well, do you...
