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
BOOK REVIEW
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.
New York Times columnist Brooks (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, 2011, etc.) returns with another volume that walks the thin line between self-help and cultural criticism.
Sandwiched between his introduction and conclusion are eight chapters that profile exemplars (Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne are textual roommates) whose lives can, in Brooks’ view, show us the light. Given the author’s conservative bent in his column, readers may be surprised to discover that his cast includes some notable leftists, including Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, and A. Philip Randolph. (Also included are Gens. Eisenhower and Marshall, Augustine, and George Eliot.) Throughout the book, Brooks’ pattern is fairly consistent: he sketches each individual’s life, highlighting struggles won and weaknesses overcome (or not), and extracts lessons for the rest of us. In general, he celebrates hard work, humility, self-effacement, and devotion to a true vocation. Early in his text, he adapts the “Adam I and Adam II” construction from the work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Adam I being the more external, career-driven human, Adam II the one who “wants to have a serene inner character.” At times, this veers near the Devil Bugs Bunny and Angel Bugs that sit on the cartoon character’s shoulders at critical moments. Brooks liberally seasons the narrative with many allusions to history, philosophy, and literature. Viktor Frankl, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Tillich, William and Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf—these are but a few who pop up. Although Brooks goes after the selfie generation, he does so in a fairly nuanced way, noting that it was really the World War II Greatest Generation who started the ball rolling. He is careful to emphasize that no one—even those he profiles—is anywhere near flawless.
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9325-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
