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I just finished The Arsonist by Sue Miller. The novel centers around the story of Frankie Rowley and her family in a small New England summer town living in fear as an unknown arsonist is setting fires to the homes of the summer people. It highlights the differences between the “have nots” of the locals and the “haves” of the summer people, who take over the small village each summer. The fear heightens after each fire causes suspicion and finger pointing in the community. Frankie has spent her life running away from her privileged upbringing. She returns to New England to her parent’s summer home to rest and reevaluate her life after many years back and forth between the US and Africa, where she worked for an NGO, caring for people living in extreme poverty. In this “too” small ordinary town, she meets and falls in love with the editor of the local newspaper. This affair is turns out to be not quite what she expected. Here is a review from The Washington Post. In the New York Times, Sunday Book Review section Emily Eakin reviews Euphoria, by Lily King in her article titled Going Native on June 6, 2014. Eakin writes, “In King’s exquisite book, desire — for knowledge, fame, another person — is only fleetingly rewarded, and gratification is inseparable from self-deceit.” Read more...
Ron Charles writes in his review of ‘Euphoria,’ a novel based on Margaret Mead by Lily King on June 17, 2014 for The Washington Post: “With her influence on the sexual revolution, Mead was a globe-spanning iconoclast, alarming some and cheering others, becoming finally something of a totem upon which various groups cast their hopes and fears. So it’s refreshing to see the world’s most famous anthropologist brought down to human scale and placed at the center of this svelte new book by Lily King.” Read more... Jan Ciabattari for npr books writes in a review on June 5, 2014 titled “Suspense Along the Sepik With the Young Scientists of ‘Euphoria", “The arrival of an iconoclastic new book by Helen, Nell's lover and a fellow disciple of Franz Boas, leads to an excitement so intense they read it aloud to each other from beginning to end. "Looking at our faces you might have said we were all feverish and half mad," Bankson muses. Helen's book "made us feel we could rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew."” Read more... Camilla Gibb reviews Euphoria by Lily King – the colourful love life of Margaret Mead for the Guardian on Wednesday, December 24, 2014 "King immerses us so fully in the lives of her characters that they remain excellent company beyond the pages of this book. Her research is so well digested that she is able to drop us into the complexities of their work without being didactic. We can forgive the occasional cliche – “the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go” – and recognise the radical value of early anthropology to our understanding not just of the other, but of ourselves." Read more... David Grossman, the author of one of our favorite reads, "To the End of the Land" will be speaking at the THE 2015 SAINT LOUIS LITERARY AWARD PRESENTATION at Sheldon Concert Hall on September 30 at 7 pm. He won the St. Louis literary award this year. A cocktail reception follows the presentation. The speech is free. The reception costs $50. Hope to see you there. "And it’s not even a novel in the normal sense, but rather a mass confabulation that evaporates in front of us, an astrological divination waning like the moon, the first section 360 pages long (or are those degrees?), the last a mere sliver. But it’s a sliver that delivers.," writes Bill Roorbach. Oct. 16, 2013, The New York Times. Kirkus Review writes,"She blends elements of Victorian adventure tale, ghost story, detective procedural à la The Moonstone and shaggy dog tale to produce a postmodern tale to do Thomas Pynchon or Julio Cortázar proud; there are even echoes of Calvino in the author’s interesting use of both astronomy and astrology." "But it is also a massive shaggy dog story; a great empty bag; an enormous, wicked, gleeful cheat. For nothing in this enormous book, with its exotic and varied cast of characters whose lives all affect each other and whose fates are intricately entwined, amounts to anything like the moral and emotional weight one would expect of it," writes in Kirsty Gunn's review of The Luminaries, for "The Guardian." Lucy Daniel of The Telegraph writes, "This world turned on its head is an eerie place. On Moody’s arrival he looks for constellations by which to guide himself: “The skies were inverted, the patterns unfamiliar, the Pole Star beneath his feet, quite swallowed... He found Orion – upended, his quiver beneath him, his sword hanging upward from his belt; Canis Major – hanging like a dead dog from a butcher’s hook.'" "As for madness, "The Luminaries" offers instances of avarice, fear and all manner of desperation. Hokitika, for American readers, may bring to mind the iconography of the Wild West—the brothel, the saloon, the general store—and the varied fortunes of the mining camp, with its wild-eyed prospectors, the lucky few who hit it rich, the unlucky many who do not, each preying on the other for advantage," writes Martin Rubin for the Wall Street Journal. In Simmy Richman's review for The Independent, she writes, "Add to all this intrigue a devious device based on the astrological signs – Catton has stated that she is interested in these only for what they might say about character, rather than any belief they can be used to predict the future – and it all amounts to the type of novel that you will devour only to discover that you can't find anything of equal scope and excitement to read once you have finished." Clementine Cake Adapted from Dawn Datso Sasha Maslov for The New York Times By JOHN WILLOUGHBY This dessert, loosely based on a Sephardic orange cake, uses whole clementines, peels and all, for a flavor rich in citrus. The cooking time may seem long, but much of it doesn’t require much attention from the baker. And the first step, reducing the fruit, may be done ahead of time. TOTAL TIME 3 3/4 hours PREPARATION INGREDIENTS
1.Place whole unpeeled clementines in a large pot, cover with cold water and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer gently for 2 hours, adding more water as needed. Remove clementines with a slotted spoon and, once cool enough to handle, halve and remove any seeds or other hard bits. Purée in a food processor or blender and set aside. (May be done up to 2 days ahead and refrigerated.) 2.Heat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 9-inch springform pan with cooking oil, line bottom with parchment paper and spray paper with oil. 3.In a large bowl, whisk the eggs together with the sugar, salt and clementine purée. Add the almond flour and baking powder and stir until just combined. 4.Pour into prepared pan and bake until edges are golden brown and starting to pull away from sides of pan, about 1 hour. Transfer to wire rack set over baking sheet. After 10 minutes, run a knife around edge of pan to loosen cake; remove cake from pan. Peel off parchment paper and return cake to wire rack to cool completely. Decorate with dusting of powdered sugar or with chocolate glaze or candied clementines, or both. YIELD 8 to 12 servings Chocolate Glaze Here is a delicious icing that was specifically developed for the clementine cake, but can complement all kinds of desserts. It’s best made in a double boiler, but if you don’t have one, other pans will do, as described here. TOTAL TIME 20 minutes, plus time to set INGREDIENTS
PREPARATION 1.Heat a pan of water until simmering. Place all ingredients, plus 5 teaspoons water, in a slightly smaller metal or glass mixing bowl and set over the pan. Stir gently with a spatula until nearly all the chocolate has melted, then remove bowl from heat and set aside to finish melting, stirring occasionally until perfectly smooth, about 5 to 10 minutes. The glaze is ready to pour when it is between 88 and 90 degrees. 2.Pour glaze onto center of the cake’s top and let it run down the sides. Gently tap the cooling rack up and down so the glaze coats the entire cake. Let set for at least an hour before serving. YIELD About 1 3/4 cups Candied Clementines These intensely flavorful slices are the perfect garnish for a Clementine Cake and any other dessert that calls for a sweet dash of citrus. Though cooking down the fruit takes hours, you can start the simmer and leave it, checking in only occasionally. The sugar syrup left after the clemetines are removed is worth saving for cocktails or even pouring over pancakes. TOTAL TIME 4 1/2 hours PREPARATION INGREDIENTS
1.In a saucepan combine the sugar with 2 cups water and bring to a boil. Add the clementine slices, reduce heat to simmer, and place a piece of parchment paper over top of liquid to keep clementines submerged. Simmer 2 hours, then remove from heat and allow to cool to room temperature. 2.Heat oven to 250 degrees. Lay a Silpat mat or parchment paper on a baking sheet, place clementine slices in a single layer on top (making sure they lie flat), then cover with a second mat or layer of parchment and top that with a second baking sheet. Put in oven and bake for 2 hours, then remove from oven. (Reserve citrus-infused syrup in refrigerator for cocktails or other uses.) 3.When cool enough to handle, remove top baking sheet and carefully peel away top mat or parchment. Carefully lift and peel the candied citrus slices and set aside until ready to use. Broadcasts of NYC/January performances of Alice Munro's "How I Met My Husband" and "Moons of Jupiter" performed by Amy Ryan and Holly Hunter, respectively. Check these links for May dates + details:
They will be airing on two different shows. The Selected Shorts schedule is here: http://www.selectedshorts.org/fall-2011-selected-shorts-radio-schedule/ The week of the show the podcast will be available for download for five weeks on Itunes or you could also go to the radio page on our website to listen once it is posted. Due to rights issues we are only able to post the five most recent episodes here: http://www.selectedshorts.org/onair/ 10 Writing Tips from Ernest Hemingway 1. Convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader 2. Project the truth in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it 3. Write a structurally cohesive work that is architecturally perfect, “prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” 4. Strip language clean, down to the bone 5. Cut out a thousand words to make one word important 6. Train like an artist by observing people and actions 7. Try to understand and not judge the human motivation behind what they said or did 8. Practice writing down these observations until the writer captures the image exactly 9. Edit ruthlessly by removing all the “fake and overblown.” 10. Study good writers: Fielding, Kipling, Twain, James, Crane, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant, Mann, and Joyce. Hemingway on Writing, Robert C. Hart, College English, Vol. 18, No. 6 (Mar., 1957), pp. 314-320 I just finished reading The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, a beautiful book about a man named Hig and his dog, Jasper, who survive a pandemic outbreak that kills most of the population. He loses everyone and fights to survive in a lawless world. He struggles with the meaning of his life and if it is worth living. The video below is from Peter Heller's website and provides a nice trailer for the book. |
Kathy Corey
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