A Sense of Direction – Gideon Lewis-Kraus
The fundamental flaw is the concept: the idea that three pilgrimages is better than one; that three pilgrimages equals three times the enlightenment for the writer and three times the payoff for readers.
American music legend Doc Watson is sadly no longer in the world.
The culture wars, both imagined and real, make for great tension, and that’s the stuff narrative is born from.
At their most compelling, these recent stories address Millhauser’s preoccupation with the intersection between expectation and disappointment, sensuality and revulsion.
American Masculine – Shann Ray
The Montana men of Shann Ray’s debut collection American Masculine: Stories drink and hunt, wrestle steers and reckon with fathers who beat their wives. They are Northern Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine-Sioux, and white. They are men shouldering troubled pasts.
The London Train – Tessa Hadley
Each character struggles with the existential questions they find themselves forced into: being only children and losing a parent; facing romantic commitments and romantic upheavals; finding themselves with children or childless.
The Tao of Travel – Paul Theroux
At sixteen I traveled to England with my family, bringing an SAT workbook, a five pound dumbbell, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in my overstuffed suitcase. The only useful item of this set was the novel, the lightest and most logical item. On a trip, even a great trip, escape is necessary, and an immersive book is the best medium.
Companion in Travel: Elizabeth Bishop
The reissue of Elizabeth Bishop’s collected POEMS and PROSE by Farrar, Straus and Giroux at the centennial of her birth is an opportunity for new readers to discover her work. After all, Bishop’s poems hinge on the experience of discovery, a discovery that demands awareness, not preparation.
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition – Geoff Dyer
If Dyer occasionally sounds off-pitch or elitist, it is because his voice is unapologetically singular: no one else can be Geoff Dyer.
“The two memoirs offer generous windows into a time period that is commonly mythologized but often remains inscrutable.”