Archive for December, 2016
Here are the Best Books of 2016
Fiction:
Enchanted Islands, by Allison Amend (Nan Talese)
Hag-Seed, by Margaret Atwood (Hogarth)
Moonglow, by Michael Chabon (Harper)
The Little Red Chairs, by Edna O’Brien (Little, Brown and Company)
Poetry
Garden Time, by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon)
Biography
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, by Lesley M.M. Blume (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Peacock & Vine, by A. S. Byatt (Knopf)
Non-Fiction
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli (Riverhead)
I Review Kathleen Collins’s “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?”
Collins, whose stories are set in the ’60s through the ’70s, fits into the Protest Era. Her stories expand on her foremothers’ subjects of racial inequality and rage. Some of the book’s expressions are dated, especially “chick” and “cat,” “Negro” and “colored,” but the topics remain as pertinent today as they were in her time. Like Hurston and Petry, Collins writes about how it feels to be colored in a white world and how it feels to be a black woman in a man’s world. She writes of pent-up male rage and male-female relationships like Hurston and Petry did. But by Collins’ time, some relationships have become interracial, just as the book’s title suggests. And unlike the stories of her predecessors, many of Collins’ stories read like a filmmaker wrote them as she transfers cinematic art and technique to paper.
You can read my review of Kathleen Collins’s Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? in the Sunday, December 18, edition of the News & Observer, by clicking the image below.
You can buy Kathleen Collins’s Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? at Barnes and Noble.
I Review Michael’s Chabon’s “Moonglow”
Michael Chabon is known for his fondness for metaphors. So, it’s unsurprising that Grandpa advises the fictional Mike:
“Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. … Start with the night I was born. There was a lunar eclipse that night. … Very significant. I’m sure it’s a perfect metaphor for something.”
“Kind of trite,” I [Mike] said.
Despite Chabon’s self-deprecating humor, the astronomical metaphor is anything but trite.
You can read my review of Michael Chabon’s Moonglow in the Sunday, December 4, edition of the News & Observer, by clicking the image below.
You can buy Michael Chabon’s Moonglow at Barnes and Noble.
