by Claire Messud Another Sewanee writer (once the conference is over I’ll go back to reading non-Sewanee folks, I swear), Claire Messud has written an understated, deceptively simple pair of novellas entitled The Hunters, and while each story is strong individually, they are even stronger paired with one another. The first piece, “A Simple Tale”, [...]
by Randall Kennan Kennan is another Sewanee Writer, and several stories in this collection–which focuses on African American culture in the fictional town of Tims Creek, South Carolina–were very well done. One of my favorites included The Foundations of the Earth, which dramatizes a grieving mother’s attempts to forge a relationship with her dead son’s [...]
by Tony Earley Earley, who teaches out of Vanderbilt, is attending this year’s Sewenee conference, and his debut novel Jim the Boy (which focuses on a young boy’s coming of age in a small, turn of the century Carolina town) impressed me. The writing has a sturdy, short clause quality that belies its elegance, and [...]
by George Saunders I’ve spent some time recently figuring out how to assemble a collection (how pieces fit together; whether there should be a chronological/ thematic progression) and Saunders’ book is a fine example of stories reinforcing one another. For In Persuasion Nation, Saunders uses passages from a fictional political tract by Bernard “Ed” Alton [...]
Straight Man by Richard RussoI’ve had this one on the shelf for a while, then picked it up on a whim only to be hooked by the offbeat narrator, colorful supporting cast, and crisp setting. Its rare, in my experience, to come across a genuinely funny book–not slapstick or farcical, but funny, where the humor comes from internal characterization, rather than external silliness…
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