Norman Rush0.0 Had Jane Austen been in the Peace Corps in Africa in the 1980s, Mating is the book she might have written. Set in Botswana in the days before the end of apartheid, Norman Rush's novel is, essentially, a comedy of manners played out in Austen's approved milieu: a country village. Granted, the village in question, Tsau, is a utopian society created by the great American anthropologist Nelson Denoon, and run largely by and for disenfranchised and abused African women. Still, the issue that interests Rush (and the one that fueled Austen's novels) is the age-old question of who mates with whom, and why? The unnamed narrator is a 32-year-old postgraduate student in anthropology whose dissertation has just gone south on her. Drifting around the edges of the expatriate community in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, she first meets Denoon.
Entranced by this potential soulmate, our heroine strikes out into the Kalahari Desert with a couple of donkeys and follows him to his utopia where sexual attraction, regional politics, and social experimentation make for very strange bedfellows, indeed.
Mating is a fiercely intelligent, hugely ambitious novel that takes on feminism, socialism, political corruption, foreign-sponsored rural development projects, and, yes, male-female relations in ways that are simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. Certainly Rush's language is a big part of what makes the novel work: the narrator's combination of elevated vocabulary and wacky non sequiturs is inspired. When, for example, Denoon explains to her that most of the women in Tsau are celibate and therefore so is he, she reflects that "of course the spiritus rector of a female community would need to be a sexual solitary, at least during the foundational period." She then wonders if "this situation was the analog of western series on television where the female watchership shrank to nothing when the producers let the marshal get married." Mating is remarkable for its wit, its acuity, and its ability to satirize without demeaning; it's also a heck of an entertaining story. Jane Austen would have been proud. --Alix Wilber
Louis Begley5.0 "Extraordinary...Rich in irony and regret...[the] people and settings are vividly realized and his prose [is] compelling in its simplicity."
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
As the world slips into the throes of war in 1939, young Maciek's once closetted existence outside Warsaw is no more. When Warsaw falls, Maciek escapes with his aunt Tania. Together they endure the war, running, hiding, changing their names, forging documents to secure their temporary lives—as the insistent drum of the Nazi march moves ever closer to them and to their secret wartime lies.
Стивен Диксон0.0 The esteemed and prescient critic John Hollander wrote that "Frog represents a new phase of Stephen Dixon's work, and manifests a new concentration of creative power and unfailing rhetorical control, and it should certainly bring him the broadened recognition which is already so deep a one." Indeed, when first published in 1991, Frog earned Dixon nominations for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and elevation to the front rank of American letters. Combining interrelated novels, stories, and novellas, Dixon's multilayered and frequently hilarious family epic—the story of Howard Tetch, his ancestors, his parents, his children, and the generations that follow—"reassures us that whatever is precious can never be completely lost" (The Baltimore Sun).
Stanley Elkin0.0 Bobbo Druff, a coca leaf-chewing street commissioner on the cusp of just-past-it, transforms his mid-life crisis into a paranoid web of mysterious events in a plot reminiscent of Hitchcock.
Сандра Скофилд0.0 Gully Fisher’s twin sons will soon be 45, and are the push and pull of their clan. Michael is almost too good; immune to consternation, he is the family rock, while Fish is the family maverick, acting out what the others cannot bring themselves to do. Michael’s wife, Ursula, spends her days rearranging the lives of failed families, and craves a deeper intimacy with her taciturn husband and her two children. Katie, still seduced by Fish’s tales of Vietnam and jail, has a new job and a boyfriend, and thinks of breaking away. The elder Fishers, celebrating 50 years of marriage, teeter on the line between suppressed anger and fierce loyalty. When Katie and Fish’s 9-year-old daughter, Rebecca, appears from Texas (where she is being raised by Katie’s mother), she lurches across this landscape and the entire family is beset by a summer of little squalls. By the fall, a few secrets are out, and they’re all better for it. This is a novel full of the telling: poignant details that illustrate the fabric of domestic life, allowing the reader a shock of recognition. It is often funny, sometimes sad, always wise. All the Fishers are emotionally complex characters who reveal fresh insights into human nature and relationships. At a time when groups are springing up all over the country in order to provide instant intimacy and support for people lost in their selfhood and history, this is a novel demonstrating that love can be messy, silly, painful, and utterly idiosyncratic—that marriage and family can be uniquely defined. The Fishers are such a family, loving because they are bound, because they have the habit, and because the larger world can’t understand them. They love more than they know how to say, and they love beyond deserving.
Филип Левин0.0 Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel’s Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine’s characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living ‘at the borders of dreams.’ One reads The Tempest ‘slowly to himself’; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of ‘the dark from the dark.’ What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language.”
—Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal
In The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne.
The poet's mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems.
In the book's second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his "family" the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute.
Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto.
"I just knew we were going to live some history," Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.
Орландо Паттерсон0.0 This magisterial work traces the history of our most cherished value. Patterson links the birth of freedom in primitive societies with the institution of slavery, and traces the evolution of three forms of freedom in the West from antiquity through the Middle Ages.
