Book of the Month – Page 10

Ordinary Light: A Memoir (2015) by Tracy K. Smith

Stephanie Whetstone2016-05-01T10:00:41-04:00

Critical Assessment "In 'Ordinary Light,' Smith writes as a daughter who has lost her mother and is thinking of her own daughter as she submits to the 'powerful nostalgia for the very years I was in the process of living, when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.' Every line of her prose is well behaved. But ambition had been there all along: 'I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by — the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment [...]

Ordinary Light: A Memoir (2015) by Tracy K. SmithStephanie Whetstone2016-05-01T10:00:41-04:00

New Collected Poems (2012) by Wendell Berry

Stephanie Whetstone2016-04-01T11:30:44-04:00

Critical Assessment "'New Collected Poems' reprints nearly 200 pieces from Berry’s long career, including the poems from his most recent collections: 'Entries,' 'Given,' and 'Leavings.' Although his voice proves more musical in these poems than in his prose works, his theme is essentially the same: a reverence for nature, a respect for the near and tangible as opposed to the distant and hypothetical, and a distrust of economies of scale. . . . "Like another poet-farmer, Robert Frost, Berry views nature not as a postcard image, but as a window into what endures – and what does not. In 'Planting Crocuses,' [...]

New Collected Poems (2012) by Wendell BerryStephanie Whetstone2016-04-01T11:30:44-04:00

Juno’s Swans (2018) by Tamsen Wolff
Gallery

Juno’s Swans (2018) by Tamsen Wolff

admin2019-09-12T15:07:44-04:00

Critical Evaluation “Juno’s Swans by Tamsen Wolff is not a traditional queer “first love” novel. It’s not a story about becoming and it doesn’t contain bromides about the magic of new love. What it offers instead is a story about the limits of love: both the crash at the end of a first love, and the tunnel vision infatuation can give, the kind where everything outside that adoring gaze becomes flattened. Juno’s Swans gives us Nina, a high school senior washed ashore from a summer in Cape Cod in which she went to an acting residency, fell madly in love with Sarah, [...]

Juno’s Swans (2018) by Tamsen Wolffadmin2019-09-12T15:07:44-04:00

The Baron in the Trees (1959) by Italo Calvino

Stephanie Whetstone2016-03-01T01:00:04-05:00

Critical Assessment "Calvino, it seemed to me, had managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic. Calvino, with his frequent references to comics and folktales and film, and his droll probing of contemporary scientific and philosophical theories, had encompassed motifs associated with brows both high and low in an internationally lucid style, one wholly his own." Jonathan Lethem, "Italo for Beginners," The New York Times, November 20, 2005. First Excerpt "I have mentioned [...]

The Baron in the Trees (1959) by Italo CalvinoStephanie Whetstone2016-03-01T01:00:04-05:00

Citizen (2014) by Claudia Rankine

Stephanie Whetstone2016-02-01T10:55:19-05:00

Critical Assessment "Claudia Rankine’s book may or may not be poetry – the question becomes insignificant as one reads on. Her achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an unsettled hybrid – her writing on the hard shoulder of prose. She eavesdrops on America and a racism that has never gone away. Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle poetry award in the US in recognition, partly, of the shocking truth it tells. Through brief encounters and troubling retellings of recent news, Rankine puts one, as a white reader, on constant alert for any unconscious racism in oneself. [...]

Citizen (2014) by Claudia RankineStephanie Whetstone2016-02-01T10:55:19-05:00

Anne of Green Gables (1908) by L. M. Montgomery

Stephanie Whetstone2016-01-01T12:00:35-05:00

Critical Assessment "This picture of Prince Edward Island life and character by a Prince Edward Islander of genius, Miss L. M. Montgomery, cannot fail to delight every Canadian who reads it. It is only necessary to read a few pages of the book to be assured that "Anne of Green Gables" is in conception and style, the fruit (the first fruit, we believe) of a richly endowed mind of rare imaginative capacity. Her scenes and the personages with which she peoples them become real as one reads." "Recent New Books," The Gazette, August 14, 1908. First Excerpt "'I can't feel exactly [...]

Anne of Green Gables (1908) by L. M. MontgomeryStephanie Whetstone2016-01-01T12:00:35-05:00

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) by Katherine Anne Porter

Stephanie Whetstone2015-12-01T12:00:56-05:00

Critical Assessment "The three short novels that make up Pale Horse, Pale Rider — Old Mortality, Noon Wine, and the title story itself — ask in turn the three questions that, as the critic Mark Schorer put it, humankind has always asked: What were we? What are we? What will we be? . . . "But it is where we find ourselves in this century that makes the title story of Porter's collection one that must be read. . . . "It is 1918, in the midst of both World War I and the influenza epidemic, a concurrence that one character [...]

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) by Katherine Anne PorterStephanie Whetstone2015-12-01T12:00:56-05:00

Remainder (2005) by Tom McCarthy

Stephanie Whetstone2015-11-01T12:00:27-05:00

Critical Assessment "The subject of identity – how human memory and reality might be manipulated by outside agents – features in countless futuristic books, stories and films, and has been especially popular in the last decade as advances in the visual, auditory and surgical arts have made us increasingly wary of trusting our senses. But McCarthy's superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction. His bleak humor, hauntingly affectless narrator and methodical expansion on his theme make "Remainder" more than an entertaining brain-teaser: it's a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is [...]

Remainder (2005) by Tom McCarthyStephanie Whetstone2015-11-01T12:00:27-05:00

Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Stephanie Whetstone2015-10-01T12:00:11-04:00

Critical Assessment "There are some novels that tell a great story and others that make you change the way you look at the world. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah is a book that manages to do both. "It is ostensibly a love story – the tale of childhood sweethearts at school in Nigeria whose lives take different paths when they seek their fortunes in America and England – but it is also a brilliant dissection of modern attitudes to race, spanning three continents and touching on issues of identity, loss and loneliness." Elizabeth Day, "Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Review," The Guardian, [...]

Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieStephanie Whetstone2015-10-01T12:00:11-04:00

Meet Mr. Mulliner (1927) by P. G. Wodehouse

Stephanie Whetstone2015-09-01T12:00:20-04:00

Critical Assessment "Mr. Wodehouse has never descended further into the dangerous regions of broad farce than in his latest book, "Meet Mr. Mulliner." He has never taken larger liberties with the entire cordon of esthetic probabilities. If his hand had been a shade more heavy, or his spirits a trifle less effervescent, the descent might easily have been a disaster. As it is, Mr. Wodehouse has done a job which few, if any, of his contemporaries could have managed. He has punned and bubbled and burlesqued his way through nine frothy, inimitable stories. Not one of them is strained beyond the [...]

Meet Mr. Mulliner (1927) by P. G. WodehouseStephanie Whetstone2015-09-01T12:00:20-04:00

Contact Info