Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun

Almost the first thing I think of with Kazuo Ishiguro is the beguiling, perplexing mixture of the innocence and craftiness of his narrators, the puzzle of what they do and don’t know and what they are willing to tell us at any given moment. But today I find myself thinking about the ways in which the world looks back at those narrators, as in Never Let Me Go, which Ishiguro has described as an “alternate history,” and in Klara and the Sun, an emotionally realist approach to sci-fi.

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Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

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Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

(Guest post by Joan Silber)

Grace Paley was my teacher, senior year at Sarah Lawrence. People have asked me ever since what she taught me, and I don’t know that I’ve ever answered this right. What I’ve said is true: she told us fiction was all about character, she emphasized voice, and I once heard her say she could write stories when she understood they could be organized like poems. This last bit made perfect sense to me at the time—story as a pattern of emotion—though people are confused when I say it now. I wanted to be a poet then—it was a mixed genre class—and Grace’s first fiction assignment for me was to write in the point of view of someone I was not in sympathy with.

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Harriet S. Chessman on Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: Humility and the Present Tense

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Harriet S. Chessman on Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: Humility and the Present Tense

(Guest post by Harriet Scott Chessman)

I am a minimalist at heart, and now more than ever I’m searching for inspiration – comfort – significance – in the smallest number of words possible. So, last March, almost a year ago, I felt enormously glad to discover “Postscript,” by Seamus Heaney. A gorgeous, lyrical sixteen-line poem (two more lines than a sonnet), it isn’t a haiku, yet it has the feeling of a haiku blossoming into something more. I have held this poem close all year, like a touchstone; this winter, as we approach March again, it’s helping me come back to writing.

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Raven Leilani, Luster, and Aoko Matsuda, Where the Wild Ladies Are

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Raven Leilani, Luster, and Aoko Matsuda, Where the Wild Ladies Are

Over the winter break, I fell madly in love with a couple of bold, fierce, delicious books, each of which kept interrupting my expectations while remaining compulsively addictive, as in, everyone-go-away-no-I-don’t-want-to-eat-or-work-or-do-anything-but-read-this-book. I would fall into them and leave behind, for a brief blissful time, the fragile, enraging political (and medical and economic) situation. Fiction so relentless, so surprising that it becomes its own world. Some of that is the subject matter, but some of it is the sentences. As I read, I thought, vaguely, that they were interrupting linearity, poetically, but now that I look at them more closely, that doesn’t seem to be what they’re up to at all.

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Lucy Jane Bledsoe on Louise Erdrich and Miriam Toews: How to take risks

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Lucy Jane Bledsoe on Louise Erdrich and Miriam Toews: How to take risks

(Guest post by Lucy Jane Bledsoe)

In this year of global illness (not just the pandemic—but I won’t write out the depressing list, you already know it), we are at a possible crossroad. I won’t use the word opportunity, and I won’t use the word hope. They are too limp. Both allow avoidance and denial. I’m going to go with reset and refresh, both personally and as a species, because these words require planning, dialogue, boots on the ground, in other words, work. Two extraordinary novels that take readers from a harrowing place of seemingly no escape to a new vision, using gritty and detailed dialogue and action, are Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking.

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Maw Shein Win on Jennifer Hasegawa's La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living

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Maw Shein Win on Jennifer Hasegawa's La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living

(Guest post by Maw Shein Win)

In the fall of 2019, I met poet Jennifer Hasegawa at Moe’s Books in Berkeley for a reading hosted by Omnidawn (our shared publisher). Months later and at the beginning of shelter-in-place, I ordered La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, her marvelous full-length poetry collection. I was immediately attracted to her interest in “paranormal phenomena, including alien encounters” (as stated in her bio) as well as her background in performance art and poetry films.

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Mary Oliver, “Every Morning,” and Edward P. Jones, “Old Boys, Old Girls”: “You don’t know anything unless you do”

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Mary Oliver, “Every Morning,” and Edward P. Jones, “Old Boys, Old Girls”: “You don’t know anything unless you do”

My younger sister began a project this year for our older sister’s 70th birthday: our healer sister, who’s also a dancer, collage artist, explorer, and creator of memorable parties. Every morning since April, my younger sister has sent our older sister (and me, since I asked to be included in the project) videos of every kind of singing and dancing, travelogues, Broadway parodies, animals at play. She sends these very early, before she starts her family caretaking or goes out into the world, where she’s a professional nature-lover, working for the parks, serving when necessary as essential county personnel in fires and virus crises, trying to solve climate issues. Here’s the video she sent today, evidence of the essential nature of art and dance: a baby dancing to Beyoncé.

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Pamela Painter on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: The Dream as Literary Confession and Revelation

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Pamela Painter on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: The Dream as Literary Confession and Revelation

(Guest post by Pamela Painter)

Yes, we have the musings and dreams of Hamlet, and Raskolnikov, and Scrooge, Katherine in Wuthering Heights, and Offred’s dreams and nightmares in The Handmaid’s Tale, but it was the use of a dream in an Alice Munro story that provided the solution to an impasse in one of my own stories.

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Gina Berriault, “Around the Dear Ruin,” and Joy Williams, “Honored Guest” (Or, no, women characters do not have to be “likable.” Why are we still having this discussion?)

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Gina Berriault, “Around the Dear Ruin,” and Joy Williams, “Honored Guest” (Or, no, women characters do not have to be “likable.” Why are we still having this discussion?)

Today I’m thinking about that persistent question of the likability of women characters in literature (sometimes referred to as “relatability,” given that we all like to imagine ourselves as generous, honest, thoughtful, etc.…and we particularly like to imagine women as generous, honest, thoughtful, etc.…).

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Judy Juanita on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

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Judy Juanita on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

(Guest post by Judy Juanita)

Flannery O’Connor is under attack, rightfully so, for her privately held racism and bigotry. Yet I love her work, which has mentored me mightily. I can distance from an artist’s despicable character flaws yet love their work. It happened with Death of a Salesman after news broke of Dustin Hoffman’s sexist treatment of a coworker during the play’s filming; a student asked me if I would stop teaching it. I have not removed it nor O’Connor from my course list. These works expose the human condition, the dilemmas of conscience and troubles of the soul that I need students to understand.

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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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