Will > Books: books-of-the-year-2016‎ (22)

A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain’t shit and by then it might be too late. We were girls once. It’s exciting, lovin

A girl nowadays has to get nice and close to tell if her man ain’t shit and by then it might be too late. We were girls once. It’s exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way. No shame in loving an aint-shit man, long as you get it out of your system good and early. A tragic woman hooks into an aint-shit man, or worse, lets him hook into her. He will drag her until he tires. He will climb atop her shoulders and her body will sag from the weight of loving him.

All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season. But we didn’t. We shared this sour secret, a secret that began the Spring Nadia Turner got knocked up…

In a lot of ways, I was writing in the direction of my fears. When I was younger, one of the worst things I could have done was to get pregnant. Another thing that really scared me was the idea of losing my mother - from the Vogue interview

And I thought the book was going to take place just in one summer. But then as I got older, I realized something obvious—that the coming-of-age process doesn’t happen so neatly. The book, I think, is about this central question of how girls grow into women when the female figures who are supposed to usher you into womanhood aren’t there. - from the Vogue interview

I grew up with this book. I started writing it when I was about 17 or 18, so either in college or about to go to college—and then started working on it more seriously in college and then grad school. So when I started writing The Mothers, I was the same age the characters were. I grew up as the characters stayed the same. - from the Jezebel interview

… what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the “waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets. The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to—rather than continue to subtract from—the nation’s wealth. Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor, felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export. In return they would be kept from a life of crime, avoiding, in Hakluyt’s words, being “miserably hanged,” or packed into prisons to “pitifully pine away” and die.

During the colonial period, the right to vote for the lower house of colonial legislatures had been defined in traditional British terms: Only people who had freehold landed property sufficient to ensure that they were personally independent and had a vested interest in the welfare of their communities could vote. - from The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828 by Donald Ratcliffe

Franklin understood that maintaining class differences had its own appeal. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he edited, an article was published in 1741 that exposed why people preferred having a class hierarchy to having none. Hierarchy was easily maintained when the majority felt there was someone below them. “How many,” the author asked, “even of the better sort,” would choose to be “Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and Tyrannical Rule over all below them?” There was something desirable, perhaps even pleasurable, to use Franklin’s utilitarian axiom, in the feeling of lording over subordinate classes.

A prison official said it all: “One dies, get another.” Poor whites were inexpensive and expendable and found their lot comparable to suffering African Americans when it came to the justice system. Nothing proves the point better than the fact that both black and white convicts were referred to as "niggers."

What a world, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a ru

What a world, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close, but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn’t stand. - Colson Whitehead

People get ready, there’s a train a-coming - Curtis Mayfield

I had the idea for the book about 16 years ago, recalling how when I was a kid, I thought the Underground Railroad was a literal railroad and when I found out it wasn’t, I was disappointed. So I thought it was a cool idea, and then I thought, “Well, what if it actually was a real railroad? That seems like a cool premise for a book.”  But I had just finished up a research-heavy project and wasn’t up for that kind of ordeal again, and I didn’t feel mature enough or up to the task. But every couple of years, when I was between books, I would pull out my notes and ask myself if I was ready. And inevitably I would realize that I wasn’t really up for it. It wasn’t until about two years ago that I really committed to the idea. - from the Bookpage interview

The first chapter in Georgia I tried to make realistic and stick to the historical record, and then after that, I wanted to stick to the truth of the black experience but not necessarily the facts. As we go to South Carolina and Indiana and the different states that Cora goes to, I am playing with history and time, moving things up to talk about the Holocaust, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the eugenics movement. So in some sense, it’s not really a historical novel at all because I’m moving things around. - from the Bookpage interview

Primarily I read slave narratives. There are a few histories of the Underground Railroad; one of the first ones I read, which proved the most useful was Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich. That gave me an overview of the railroad, but the main thing was just reading the words of former slaves themselves. - from the Bookpage interview

”…when all you have is the memory of a thing,” she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.”

The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.

…given enough time, any weight can become too much to bear

..despite what the newspapers said, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of free-love writing, when free love was widely condemned, rarely practiced, and terrifically marketed.

Something does not have to happen for it to feel real.

What you call conflict of interest, I call synergy.

…if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.

She remained in people’s good graces by being exactly who they wanted her to be. She aced every test. She won every academic award the school offered. When the teacher assigned a chapter from a book, Faye went ahead and read the whole book. Then read every book written by that author that was available at the town library. There was not a subject at which she did not excel…Everyone said she had a good head on her shoulders…She was always smiling and nodding, always agreeable. It was difficult to dislike her, for there was nothing to dislike—she was accommodating, docile, self-effacing, compliant, easy to get along with. Her outward personality had no hard edges to bump into. Everyone agreed that she was really nice. To her teachers. Faye was the achiever, the quiet genius at the back of the room. They gushed about her at conferences, noting especially her discipline and drive.
It was, Faye knew, all an elaborate game.

Mr. Hill knew from the time he was in elementary school that he wanted to be a writer. In second grade, he wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story about a brave knight trying to rescue a princess from a haunted castle. He titled it “The Castle of No Return” and illustrated it himself. (“The Castle of No Return” still sits in a box somewhere in his parents’ attic, but Mr. Hill sneaked the story into “The Nix,” during a pivotal flashback to Samuel’s childhood.) - from the NY Times profile

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll all agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now. “
“This sounds awful.”
“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.

He pilfered so much from his own life that he had to reassure his mother that Faye was not based on her. “I had to warn my mom, ‘Some of this is going to sound very familiar to you,’” he said.

I was also writing this during our great recession, which was in part caused by the things we thought were so safe they were eventually risk-free. Things like mortgage-backed securities, AAA-rated sovereign debt. The retirement that you’ve been working all your life for suddenly gone in a flash. And so one of the things I was thinking about was that kind of economic anxiety that was happening in the country while I was composing the novel and it seemed to be that, yeah, the reason why the financial crisis was a crisis was because we believed that things were so safe as to be risk-free. We thought they were too good to be true, so the housing market could never fail, you know, and so I guess that helped me connect the personal stories with the political, it helped me see what’s happened between this mother and this son is happening writ large in the rest of the country.

We don’t always know ourselves, who we can become, what we may do, after evil has done what it likes with us.

We don’t always know ourselves, who we can become, what we may do, after evil has done what it likes with us.

We were made, once. My twin, Pearl, and me. Or, to be precise, Pearl was formed and I split from her. She embossed herself on the womb; I copied her signature. For eight months we were afloat in amniotic snowfall, two rosy mittens resting on the lining of our mother. I couldn’t imagine anything grander than the womb we shared, but after the scaffolds of our brains were ivoried and our spleens were complete, Pearl wanted to see the world beyond us. And so, with newborn pluck, she spat herself out of our mother.

Everyone survived by planning. I could see that. I realized that Stasha and I would have to divide the responsibilities of living between us. Such divisions had always come naturally to us, and so there, in the early-morning dark, we divvied up the necessities: Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. I would take the sad, the past, the good.

...the newcomers did not care to understand the strange new country beyond taking whatever turned a profit. They knew only what they knew. The fore

...the newcomers did not care to understand the strange new country beyond taking whatever turned a profit. They knew only what they knew. The forest was there for them.

For me, the chief character in the long story was the forest, the great now-lost forest(s) of the world. The characters, as interesting as they were to develop, were there to carry the story of how we have cut and destroyed the wooden world. - from The New Yorker interview

She urged editors to praise the manliness and toughness of shanty men, inculcating axmen with the belief that they could take extreme risks and withstand the most desperate conditions because they were heroic rugged fellows; the same sauce served settlers into the third generation, who believed they were “pioneers” and could outlast perils and adversities. Loggers and frontier settlers, she thought, would live on pride and belief in their own invulnerability instead of money.

“How big is this forest?” asked Duquet in his whinging treble voice. He was scarcely bigger than a child.
“It is the forest of the world. It is infinite. It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning. No one has ever seen its farthest dimension.”

Even if everyone knew it was too late, we’d still keep on. There seems to be something in the human psyche that is unable to stop and step back and repair and fix things. It’s not willing to. It’s like we can’t shift easily. There’s just something in people. It’s the fatal flaw in humanity, I think. Once we start doing something, we keep on. - from the Globe and Mail article

these things happened to people. ... I mean, if you've got to kill off a character, you might as well do it with a bit of panache. - from the NPR interview

…technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to

…technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (AirBnB) to dating (Tinder). One industry after another is simply knocked out via venture-backed entrepreneurial daring and hastily shipped software. Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept, and their numbers only grow in time. With the explosion of venture capital, there is no shortage of bananas to feed them. The question for society is whether it can survive these entrepreneurial chaos monkeys intact, and at what human cost.

mostly failed scientists like me who had sold out to the man and suddenly found themselves, after making it through years of advanced relativity and quantum mechanics, with a golf-club-wielding gorilla called a trader peering over their shoulder asking them where their risk report was. We were quantitative enablers, offering the new and shiny blessings of modern computation to the old business of buying and selling… quants were the eunuchs at the orgy. The fluffers on the porn set of high finance. We were the ever-present British guy in every Hollywood World War II film: there to add a touch of class and exotic sophistication, but not really consequential to the plot (except perhaps to conveniently take some bad guy’s bullet.)

anyone who claims the Valley is meritocratic is someone who has profited vastly from it via nonmeritocratic means like happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort, or some concealed act of skullduggery. Since fortune had never been on my side, and I had no privileged cohort to fall back on, skullduggery it would have to be.

There are worse ways of monetizing sociopathy than startups. If you know any better ways, I’m listening.

"The way I see it our son got into Harvard, Duke, and Penn. He has a job. He is relevant to the world. I only hope my life can be as relevant." - from the Philly.com article

Each week, sister Sonja said, Start at the beginning, her dark fingers bending around a small black notebook, pen poised. Many moments passed befor

Each week, sister Sonja said, Start at the beginning, her dark fingers bending around a small black notebook, pen poised. Many moments passed before I opened my mouth to speak. Each week, I began with the words I was waiting for my mother…

My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.

On a different planet, we could have been Lois Lane or Jane or Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas. We could have thrown our hats up, twirled and smiled. We could have made it after all. We watched the shows. We knew the songs. We sang along when Mary was big-eyed and awed by Minneapolis. We dreamed with Marlo of someday hitting the big time. We took off with the Flying Nun.

Maybe this is how it happened for everyone—adults promising us their own failed futures, I was bright enough to teach, my father said, even as my dream of stepping into Sylvia’s skin included one day being a lawyer. Angela’s mom had draped the dream of dancing over her. And Gigi, able to imitate every one of us, could step inside anyone she wanted to be, close her eyes, and be gone. Close her eyes and be anywhere.

Bushwick was the character I knew the best. And then I wanted to create a narrative around it, so I invented these four girls and their stories. I also wanted to talk about girlhood, what it means to grow up a girl of color, and what it means to grow up inside the backstories and dreams of your parents, who have their own ideas of where you should go while you're trying to make your own space in the world.

We pretended to believe we could unlock arms and walk the streets alone. But we knew we were lying. There were men inside darkened hallways, around street corners, behind draped windows, waiting to grab us, feel us, unzip their pants to offer us a glimpse.

We lived inside out backstories. The memory of a nightmare stitched down my brother’s arm. My mother with a knife beneath her pillow. A white devil we could not see, already inside our bodies, slowly being digested. And finally, Sister Loretta, dressed like a wingless Flying Nun, swooping down to save us.

Condescension actually shortens lives. What professionals call “elderspeak”—the belittling “sweeties” and “dearies” that people use to address older people—does more than rankle. It reinforces stereotypes of incapacity and incompetence, which leads to poorer health, including shorter lifespans. People with positive perceptions of aging actually live longer–a whopping 7.5 years longer on average—in large part because they’re motivated to take better care of themselves.

We reinforce the association with constant nervous reference to forgetfulness and “senior moments.” I used to think those quips were self-deprecatingly cute, until it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school, I didn’t call it a “junior moment.” Any prophecy about debility, whether or not it comes true, dampens our aspirations and damages our sense of self—especially when it comes to brain power. The damage is magnified by the glum and widespread assumption that, somewhere down the line, dementia is inevitable.

Especially in the emotional realm, older brains are more resilient. As we turn eighty, brain imaging shows frontal lobe changes that improve our ability to deal with negative emotions like anger, envy, and fear. Olders experience less social anxiety, and fewer social phobias. Even as its discrete processing skills degrade, the normal aging brain enables greater emotional maturity, adaptability to change, and levels of well-being.

When Orson Welles said “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone,” he was mistaken. Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis—a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonized by microbes while they are still unfertilized eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right—a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collection. An entire world.

…animals emerged in a world that had already been teeming with microbes for billions of years. They were the rulers of the planet long before we arrived. And when we did arrive, of course we evolved ways of interacting with the microbes around us. It would be absurd not to, like moving into a new city wearing a blindfold, earplugs, and a muzzle. Besides, microbes weren’t just unavoidable: they were useful. They fed the pioneering animals. Their presence also provided valuable cues to areas rich in nutrients, to temperatures conducive to life, or flat surfaces upon which to settle. By sensing these cues, pioneering animals gained valuable information about the world around them…hints of those ancient interactions still abound today.

As microbiologist Patrice Cani told me, “The future will be a la carte.”
And in this a la carte future, we won’t have to stop at picking the right bacteria for the job. Some scientists are picking the right genes for the job, and combining them into artisanal bacteria. Rather than just recruiting species with the right abilities, they are tinkering with the microbes themselves to endow them with new skills.

When she walks across the field she opens her arms wide and imagines a world so big, so full of people, she would never tire of exploring it, her eyes fixed on the sky above until she slips on some sheep droppings, only just managing to catch her fall. Liam ís always telling her the ground is just as important as the sky.

The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes m

The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ‘em.

I was thinking about Lon Chaney who had line about, “There’s nothing funny about a clown at midnight.” I think that’s part of the horror writer’s job: to create unsettling juxtapositions. You find something that seems harmless and innocent, and pair it with aspects that are disturbing. Christmas is a joyous occasion, it’s a time of pleasure and family, but there’s something about Christmas songs in the middle of the summer that’s not quite right.- from Nightmare Magazine interview

Carol said, “Sometimes when I’m in The Bright, I would swear I feel my [late] sister standing right next to me, close enough so I could lay my head on her shoulder, like I used to. When we shine, they all come back to us, you know. The light we make together shows everything that was ever lost to the darkness.
Harper clamped down on a shudder. When they spoke of The Bright, they had all the uncomplicated happiness of pod people.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. - Louis D. Brandeis

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. - Louis D. Brandeis

The party’s platform was an almost exact replica of the Freedom School’s radical curriculum. It called for the repeal of all campaign-finance laws and the abolition of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It also favored the abolition of all government health-care programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. It attacked Social Security as “virtually bankrupt” and called for its abolition too. The Libertarians also opposed all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, and called for an end to the prosecution of tax evaders. The platform called for the abolition too of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, among other government agencies. It demanded the abolition of “any laws” impeding employment—by which it meant minimum wage and child labor laws. And it targeted public schools for abolition too, along with what it termed the “compulsory” education of children. The Libertarians wanted to get rid of the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, seat belt laws, and all forms of welfare for the poor

[In the late 1980s, Richard Fink], after studying the Kochs’ political problems for six months, drew up a practical blueprint, ostensibly inspired by [right-wing icon, economist Friederich] Hayek’s model of production, that impressed Charles by going beyond where his own 1976 paper on the subject had left off. Called “The Structure of Social Change,” it approached the manufacture of political change like any other product. As Fink later described it in a talk, it laid out a three-phase takeover of American politics. The first phase required an “investment” in intellectuals whose ideas would serve as the “raw products.” The second required an investment in think tanks that would turn the ideas into marketable policies. And the third phase required the subsidization of “citizens” groups that would, along with “special interests” pressure elected officials to implement the policies. It was in essence a libertarian production line, waiting only to be bought, assembled and switched on.

...the days of community policing were over. The world was a bottleful of sparkling darkness and the cops were charged with keeping the cork in it

...the days of community policing were over. The world was a bottleful of sparkling darkness and the cops were charged with keeping the cork in it while the rich shook and shook.

Some say the heart is just like a wheel, when you bend it, you can’t mend it. - from a well known song by Anna McGarrigle

King knew she would remember, drifting toward sleep some day far removed, the solid thump the wood made falling upon him. It was the sound of the true heartbeat of the world, and once it had been heard, there was no way to stop hearing it. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. And what was it in that long and prolonged instant—what was it that told her this pain would go on forever? What was happening there was no erasing. There would be no apologies, no forgetting, no reconciliations. Just the opening to the pain that is your friend dead or shot or starved or beaten. Disappeared into the place where the disappeared die. She saw six cops standing over him and there was something in the way their fists rose and fell that made her heart want to stop. Like a clock that had run out of time.

For 130 years, pitchers have thrown a baseball overhand, and for 130 years, doing so has hurt them. Starter or reliever, left-handed or right-hand

For 130 years, pitchers have thrown a baseball overhand, and for 130 years, doing so has hurt them. Starter or reliever, left-handed or right-handed, short or tall, skinny or fat, soft-tossing or hard-throwing, old or young—it matters not who you are, what color your skin is, what country you’re from. The ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) , a stretchy, triangular band in the elbow that holds together the upper and lower arms, plays no favorites. If you throw a baseball, it can ruin you. When the UCL breaks, only one fix exists: Tommy John surgery…More than 50 percent of pitchers end up on the disabled list every season, on average for two months—plus, and one-quarter of major league pitchers today wear a zipper scar from Tommy John surgery along their elbows.

“My dad worked at The Cleveland Plain Dealer for 40 years, so I knew what I wanted to do when I was 12 years old,” Passan said. “I was very lucky. My dad has been editing my stuff for 20 years now and I can say he’s the best editor I’ve ever had.” - from SJI article

Mostly, I wanted to understand this for my son. He was five years old. He loved baseball. He wanted to play catch every day. He was hooked, like his dad. And the more I heard stories from other parents—of their sons getting hurt or boys they know quitting baseball teams because their arms no longer worked—the more I needed to figure out what was happening to the arm.

The Currents Lounge inside the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville is a paint-by-numbers hotel bar, with a few flat-screen TVs, a menu of mediocre food, and a broad liquor selection to help people forget they’re drinking in a hotel bar in Jacksonville.

Nothing beats a major league mound, a ten-inch-high Kilimanjaro that few get to climb. Nobody in team sports commands a game like the pitcher. He dictates the pace and controls the tempo. A goalie in hockey or soccer can win a game with superior reaction. A pitcher prevents action. There is great power in that.

He was extremely adept, had started hunting small game with his grandfather at the age of seven. Landreaux took the shot with fluid confidence. Whe

He was extremely adept, had started hunting small game with his grandfather at the age of seven. Landreaux took the shot with fluid confidence. When the buck popped away he realized he'd hit something else--there had been a blur the moment he squeezed the trigger. Only when he walked forward to investigate and looked down did he understand that he had killed his neighbor's son.

I wanted to write something with LaRose, I had the title—I always have the title. The rest of the book really collects the stories, the language, the characters, they collect around the title. So I knew I would write about LaRose. I had forgotten, though, that there was a LaRose far back in our family history. I really don't know anything about this LaRose, but I know the approximate dates when she lived. So I constructed a historical set of LaRoses, and then I worked out the traumas and the difficulties and everything until we came to this LaRose.

Well, the book really is about disaster in some ways. On the first page you thought something would happen, but not what did happen. And this is the same thing that happened with Y2K: We thought something would happen, everyone was prepared, and then what happened was 9/11.

Dear Murph,
It occurs to me—your brooding mind being what it is—that you may think I’m trying to lock you up in the loony bin. I’m not. You proba

Dear Murph,
It occurs to me—your brooding mind being what it is—that you may think I’m trying to lock you up in the loony bin. I’m not. You probably ought to be locked up in the loony bin, but that condition long preceded your recent shenanigans. I’m concerned that you’ll harm yourself. It’s that simple.
Your dutiful and loving daughter,
Máire

Dear Dutiful and Loving,
I’m sorry, but I never had a daughter, and I don’t know anyone named Máire. My friend Greenberg used to sing about a table down at Morey’s. Is that you? Or are you the old gray mare, who ain’t what she used to be? Ah, but who is?

Dear Murph,
Go fuck yourself.

Dear Máire,
Oh! Now I remember you.

I know I don’t look it, but I’m Irish. I lived in Ireland for a while, my first child was conceived in Ireland, I speak a little Irish, I went back last year, I’ve been back a few times, there’s something in me — I don’t know, maybe the milkman was Irish — that grabs and embraces that country. Add that to the fact that my great, dear friend McCourt, he was a great guy. And he and I talked together in the department where I teach now, and we drank together and sang together — if you think I’m good, and boy am I good, you should’ve heard McCourt — we used to sing all night. I don’t know why this stirred in me before, but I wanted to write a satirical model, and I tried twice. And I started channeling McCourt. I could hear his voice in the dialogue. - from the Chautauquan interview

The Latest News and Articles from the Major Journals
Of The Civilized Word
Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd Will Read a Compendium
Fr

The Latest News and Articles from the Major Journals
Of The Civilized Word
Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd Will Read a Compendium
From Selected Newspapers
At 8: 00 P.M. At The Broadway Playhouse

In the hills grudges never died, they remained as they took place, as the words were uttered, since there was nowhere for them to go, nothing to b

In the hills grudges never died, they remained as they took place, as the words were uttered, since there was nowhere for them to go, nothing to break them apart, the soft edges of the hills offered nothing hard enough to smash the anger, nothing sharp enough to cut through the Gordian knot, so it lived fresh, undeniable as the first day. In the hills there were only first days, no history. Nothing was allowed to die. They marked time by the growing list of wrongs until its weight pulled them under and they vanished, smothered with the breath of sand in their mouths.

for a short, lovely time she believed that her life, their life, meant this place and what they did here, what they learned by living and loving each other. It was because she still felt him here, J.B., he touched her, and nothing could change this place, this land...It was how she understood the Indians…who mourned the land, not as wealth, but as the place where all was alive, all living, in one form or another. The whites took it but the dead still walked it, the spirits, whatever they were. Her faith had removed God, dispersed him like seed or gravel. It was not that God didn’t exist. It was that he wasn’t alone, but in pieces, parts, always whole, sufficient, always multiple. So like the ancient Greeks she trod lightly, carefully, tried to give no offense to the land, the sacred grass her feet crushed, the ants hurriedly preparing caverns for the winter, pushing tiny yellow boulders out of a hole the size of a bee’s leg. Oh the offence, to walk so clumsily through the world, to crush and bring havoc, that they couldn’t help. But to give no recognition to the cost of their being alive, to the price paid for their dreams by everything else?