Others lighting the literary dark in this luminous and appealing collection include Jane Smiley (Charles Dickens), Junot...
In these short essays, writers discuss the works that made them want to write.
New Food Economy senior editor Fassler is also the editor of the Atlantic’s author interview series, “By Heart,” where a number of these essays originally appeared. “Part memoir, part literary criticism, part craft class, part open studio,” the pieces describe the impact or “moment of transformative reading” for each of the contributors. Stephen King’s favorite is the opening line of Douglas Fairbairn’s Shoot: “This is what happened.” “For me," he writes, "this has always been the quintessential opening line. It’s flat and clean as an affidavit.” He then goes on to describe his best opening line, from Needful Things. Khaled Hosseini picks a King story, “The Body.” Its “wonderful” opening “moved me very deeply, and it still does.” In just one page, Walter Mosley describes how two sentences toward the end of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye shook his teenage self “from my waking slumber.” For the first time he realized how language can “reach beyond the real into the metaphysical and into metaphor.” Billy Collins describes the “immediate appeal” of Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” In college, he memorized the “gorgeous” poem and since then has always tried to write his poems with an ear to making them “memorizable.” Poems and fiction dominate the collection, but Tom Perrotta picks a play, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which works a “kind of magic.” And Mark Haddon writes about music, Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew,” which “changed the way I saw the world.” Two writers pick the same poet as their inspiration: Emily Dickinson. Emma Donoghue loves her “enigmatic” “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, and Walt Whitman also get picked twice.
Others lighting the literary dark in this luminous and appealing collection include Jane Smiley (Charles Dickens), Junot Díaz (Toni Morrison), Yiyun Li (Elizabeth Bowen), Neil Gaiman (R.A. Lafferty), and Michael Chabon (Jorge Luis Borges).Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-313084-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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