Flannery O’Connor

I was profoundly impressed by the stories of Flannery O’Connor – I think she’s probably the American Chekhov. They’re just so beautifully constructed, so powerful, so dazzling that the unexpected shift in plot resists analysis, almost as it does in Raymond Carver’s brilliant story “Cathedral.” The difference is that, with “Cathedral,” you can analyze it, pinpointing the moment of that shift in the triangle between the three people in the story (a lovely way to set up a story because you know that by its end the balance will shift, it’s got to be two against one). The shift there is unexpected, all right; somehow the husband the blind man team up against the wife, whereas at the beginning it’s the wife and the blind man teamed up against the husband. But at least you can follow the shift; you know exactly what’s happening. Whereas with O’Connor, as in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” or “Good Country People,” the story is so artless – or artful – that you don’t know what’s happening until suddenly at the end, there it is, it’s all happened. It’s precisely because you can’t analyze it that it’s so powerful and immediate a story.

by Anne Bernays in “For the Love of Books”

Truth in Memoir

About James Frey's A Million Little Pieces

As long as people are infatuated with “reality” as a way to restore their faith in the hope that they are the masters of their own destinies, then we will have false memoirs like this one. They are a dime a dozen and they sell. But something truer might show a different kind of story—a story that shows us how little control we have in the world, and how vulnerable we are to forces bigger that we are, and that all we have, at the end of the day, are our stories.

from Truth in Memoir by Mara Naselli at identitytheory.com

Treasure Island

This reconsideration of "Treasure Island" can scarcely be called a rediscovery, because "Treasure Island" has never been lost. Still, it is now 125 years old, and it has been more than half a century since I first read it. Even the best and most beloved of books lose some of their steam over the years, as their stories become universally familiar and as their language gradually comes to seem dated and stilted.

. . .A rereading of Stevenson's novel after all those years says nothing to me so much as that good books -- and "Treasure Island" is a very good book -- really have lives of their own, entirely apart from movies and other adaptations of them. Some of the adaptations of the book are very good, but none is as good as the book itself. "Treasure Island" is a genuine classic that still somehow retains its power to surprise, to amuse and -- even though we all know how it ends -- to raise the reader's blood pressure.

Over the years "Treasure Island" (by Robert Louis frequently has been pigeonholed, and dismissed, as a book for boys. To be sure, Stevenson had boys in mind as he wrote it, but many girls have gotten great pleasure out of it and so, for that matter, have many adults, this one included. If we insist on literary categorization, then someone really must invent a category into which could be fit all those books -- Booth Tarkington's "Penrod" novels, Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer," Johanna Spyri's "Heidi" -- that are routinely filed in the children's section yet are often read by adults, and for that matter all those books that are rated "adult" yet can, and should, be read by children of a certain age: Russell Baker's "Growing Up," Richard Wright's "Native Son," Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

A century and a quarter after its publication, "Treasure Island" apparently still is finding plenty of readers. Many different editions of it are available, some (like the Penguin) with scholarly apparatus and appendices, others unadorned and aimed, obviously, at younger readers. This reader, no spring chicken, has no doubt that they will enjoy it as much as he did when he was their age -- and that their parents will, too.

from Stevenson's 'Treasure Island': Still Avast Delight
By Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post (Monday, April 17, 2006)

Meaning in a Short Story

"A good short story should not have less meaning than a novel" (Flannery O'Connor)

A Profane Poem

A Profane Poem?
(from the blog chekhovsmistress.com)

W.H. Auden:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed on terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Profane? Apparently the asinine officials at the Coral Academy of Science in Reno, Nevada think so. They're forbidding a ninth-grader from reciting the poem in a competition there next week because of the words “hell” and “damn.” The kid's suing. (via The Poetry Foundation)

THE LATEST: A federal judge has now ruled that the school violated the First Amendment. From the opinion by Judge Brian Sandoval:

"Defendants (Coral Academy) apparently consider the poem inappropriate because it contains language that conflicts with the school's policies against students general use of profanity. However, when spoken in the context of a poem at a school-authorized, off-campus competition and written by a nationally recognized poet, the court finds that the language sought to be censured cannot even remotely cause a disruption of the educational mission."

Exfoliating Our Souls

Novels are a place where we exfoliate our souls with the rough edges of life, not pamper ourselves with fantasies that don't seem to know they're fantasies or confuse ourselves with imitation insights. . .

from This Story Will Save You by LEV GROSSMAN, Time (April 17, 2006)

Max Perkins

Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg. First published in 1978; now available from Riverhead Books, 512 pages. Paper, $17.

As a young editor, Perkins had discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, but he had done much more than that, Berg writes:

"Beginning with Fitzgerald and continuing with each new writer he took on, he slowly altered the traditional notion of the editor's role. He sought out authors who were not just safe,' con-ventional in style and bland in content but who spoke in a new voice about the new values of the postwar world. In this way, as an editor he did more than reflect the standards of his age; he consciously influenced and changed them by the new talents he published."

Among the other authors who move through Perkins' sometimes dysfunctional family of writers are Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Taylor CaIdwell, Alan Paton, James Jones, Ring Lardner and Erskine Caidwell.

Berg's book is so compelling that you're likely to dip back into it now and then, and perhaps even reread it some day. Surely the ultimate compliment for a 512-page biography.

from Writer's Digest, October 2002