When I have launched this blog I did it with intention of spread Brazilian culture and culture produced by other countries around world. And then I wanna say thank you for the people from 120 countries who visit us. Thank you! Thanks to Washington Post, NYTimes, Amazon, USAToday, Paris Review, LRB, GoodReads, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Harpers, Simon and Schuster, Latimes, NPR, London Review and other sources by permission... You are the responsible by these dreams. Thank you for All!
Short stories show a valiant effort from John Grisham
By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
Give the king of the legal thriller credit for expanding his literary range. Today, Ford County, John Grisham's first collection of short stories, hits stores.
In these seven tales, all set in a fictional Mississippi county, Grisham tries to create a textured portrait of a complicated place and its residents. Fans may recall Grisham has used Ford County before, notably in his 1988 debut novel, A Time to Kill.
It's a versatile effort as Grisham shows off his literary chops: He can do wry, emotional, funny, serious. But the effect of reading Ford County is a bit like his recent foray into non-fiction. You admire his courage, but these new genres don't highlight Grisham's gift, crafting addictive plot-driven novels.
The book opens with "Blood Drive," a black-humor tale about what happens when three guys drive to Memphis to donate blood for an injured pal and end up sidetracked – hello, strippers – in the big, bad city.
In "Fetching Raymond," Grisham details a family's journey to Parchman Prison to witness the execution of their son and brother for murder. The story is grim and moving yet strangely funny as a media circus. Gobbling down his last meal, the condemned man and his family bicker until the finality of what's ahead sets in. The piece is pitch-perfect and offers the best writing in the book.
Another story features a scrambling bottom-feeder divorce lawyer, and the last one details what happens when a gay white man with AIDS returns to Ford County and finds friendship with an elderly black woman.
Is this great Grisham? No. He plays best in the long game of novel writing. But admire him for accepting a new challenge.
If you’re not yet a rabid devotee of Douglas Adams and the The Hithhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of science fiction novels, yet find your interest piqued by the numerous pop cultural mentions that have been scratching at the corner of your attention over the years, I suggest that you travel immediately to your nearest bookseller, grab a copy of the eponymously titled first installment of the series and proceed to devour it, preferably along with a bag of your favorite snack food and something to wash it down (the snack food, not the book).
Those of you who have already been seduced by Adams’ Monty Pythonesque satire of the human condition, well known for its propensity to leap off the page and tickle its reader until the milk spurts voluminously from one or more orifices, are likely wondering whether, eight years after Douglas Adams’ untimely death at age 49, Eoin Colfer’s new installment to the Hitchhiker’s realm can possible measure up to the work of its progenitor.
Yes and no. Eoin Colfer, while a talented and respected writer (author of the Artemis Fowl YA series) is no Douglas Adams, and there are, of course, legions of Hitchhiker's fans who will say it was misguided for Adams' widow and publisher to allow this venture at all, no matter what author was chosen. That the story of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian Astra, Zaphod Beeblebrox, et. al. ended when Adams published the fifth and final book in the trilogy, Mostly Harmless, in 1992, and if not then, most assuredly when Adams, in 2001, suffered a heart attack and died.
The plot of And Another Thing... is something of a thin storyline built around a claching of the egos and desires of Galactic President, Zaphod Beeblebrox; Irish entrepreneur and planetary developer, Hillman Hunter; Thor, the hammer-wielding Norse god; and a well-known secondary character from previous Hitchhiker's books.
Colfer does an admirable job of approximating Adams' style without making it a parody. He employs the same satirical tone that Adams would in the course of skewering everyone from personal trainers to wealthy land developers to the gods, themselves, as well as the ridiculous plot twists and inventive humor that Hitchhiker’s fans have become accustomed to. And Another Thing... is frequently funny in the way that we've come to love in the five previous books. Here for instance, Colfer describes the aesthetics of Vogon spaceships in classic Adams' style:
"Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, toward beauty. Vogon ships did not nod toward beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley. They spat in the eye of beauty and bludgeoned their way through the notions of aesthetics and aerodynamics. Vogon cruisers did not so much travel through space as defile it and toss it aside."
No, Eoin Colfer doesn't nail it, and no one could expect him to. I would quibble over some of the characterization choices he makes with Ford and Zaphod, and Arthur, having receded so far into himself and his memories, only vaguely appears as a character in this book. I also found the Hitchhiker Guide notes to be, at times, gratuitous and less thoughtful than what I recall from the earlier books. I did however enjoy the suffusion of Norse deities into the space comedy, and it was fun revisiting our friends on the Heart of Gold (minus Marvin, the paranoid android, God rest his soul). So unless you're of the more rabid camp of Hitchhiker's fans determined to cry "foul" at Colfer's tribute, you'll likely enjoy the humor and nostalgia of And Another Thing..., as I did.
Robert Sabbag's Down Around Midnight recounts the horrific plane crash that he survived in 1979 and the results of the author's recent attempts to contact the other survivors, bystanders and first responders. Best known for his book about the 1970's cocaine craze Snowblind, Sabbag proves capable in relating the kind of story that no author ever really expects that they might need to write.
The book starts strong by giving the reader what they came for right off the bat - a first person blow by blow description of the actual plane crash itself. The idea that a successful author would be among the passengers who survived such a trauma, an event that most people in the developed world share as a common dread, and then tell the tale is a gruesome yet enticing premise. It appeals to the secret rubber-necker in all of us, drawing our focus and sideways glances as we try not to look at what we are approaching amid the flashing lights and ambulances.
But what is a memoir if not an invitation to gawk at another's life, their most personal thoughts and emotions? The implied purpose is to allow the reader a candid look into another's mind, one of the truest gifts a person can give the world, a shameless, honest stare at the heart of another, dark or light, perhaps most often both.
In this instance it is a shameless, honest stare into the heart of a man who states over and over that he doesn't really want to talk about it. This must have been a terribly difficult book to write, as evidenced by the nearly thirty-year hiatus between precipitating event and the telling of the tale. The story has been begging to be told all along, and in fact it seems inconceivable in this age of tragedy-exploitation that the author did not capitalize on this nightmare before now.
But that's the thing: this event was a nightmare. It was something so awful to have lived through that several people associated with the event still do not want to talk about it, and the author was clearly upset by the very notion of calling on his fellow passengers and their families. On that night in 1979 people made mistakes, people became heroes, people made extremely difficult decisions, and some people were maimed or killed. And because the crash took place on the small island of Cape Cod, many of these people were connected to one another in more than one way.
Sabbag does his best to piece together a meaningful hodge-podge of reactions to the crash from everyone who will talk about it, but resists the obvious temptation to find some overly-sentimental Hollywood ending to what amounts to a group of people making the best of a terrible accident. Sabbag himself is still clearly battling demons of guilt over decisions he made in the emergency situation in the immediate aftermath of the crash, and his sometimes overly-confident tone reveals a more insecure person than it intends to project. The author's inability to hide from his readers' prying eyes is what makes Down Around Midnight both haunting and worthwhile, and all that much more disturbing. It would seem that some wounds run thirty years deep.
Do not read this book straight (Straight. Derives from stretch. Things don't come straight, you have to get them straight) through from A (A stands for answer, ...adultery, highest grade) - and on that subject, Jerry Clower once said that the football coach at Mississippi State was making progress on keeping his players in school: 'He's got those boys making straight A's! Some of their B's are still a little crooked, but...' - through Z (Zoology. Pronounced zo-ology. Look at the letters. Count the o's.)
To know Jerry Clower is to appreciate Roy Blount's humor and his wisdom, which he expresses in what seems to be the most mundane and roundabout of ways. Yet, he quotes Finnegan's Wake, Socrates, Ezra Pound, and a host of others. As one reads hither and yon, one's appreciation for Blount grows. He believes, as he quotes Mark Twain in his essay "Fresh Mark" in his collection Long Time Leaving, that the "intensely right word" has an effect that is "physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt." This "dictionary" is a search for the right words in a highly entertaining and enlightening book.
Blount's introduction begins with a discussion of the meaning of the relationship between a word and its meaning. Scholars say the relationship is arbitrary, which leads to a discussion of the sound a pig makes. Is it oink (US), hroo (Russia), or grogner (French for grunt)? This leads to a discussion that brings the reader to spice, tang, delicacy, and sphincter. It really fits together rather well, a quite entertaining serious discussion of words. Although Blount has made a living for four decades "selling combinations of letters on the open market ... (it) does not entitle (him) to tell you how to write or talk." He then proceeds to tell the reader that an angel dies every time a word is used injudiciously. Our inability to use "lie" and "lay" and "I" and "me" correctly are especially grating.
Blount has a remarkable ability to bring in a wide range of possibilities for many of the words he explicates. Consider tragedy. It begins with Vice President Cheney shooting his friend then examines reporters' reactions, which lead to contretemps, disaster, mishap and misadventure, catastrophe, and calamity. He suggests that the better description of the "tragedy" is simply a "hunting accident, in which Mr. Cheney's friend narrowly escaped serious injury and which undoubtedly caused Mr. Cheney himself considerable distress." The point is that sometimes one word does not fit the situation and an appropriate group of words is the often the better "word."
Add this to your stable of reference books. It has just come out in trade paperback. Use it to determine when to use flack/flak, if/whether, the subjunctive tense, or I/me. You can learn an alternative meaning for hoo-hoos, or whether using a double negative is ever appropriate. Has anyone ever surpassed Faulkner in this usage?
But the best use of this book is for pure and simple enjoyment. If you are reading this review, then it is very likely that you enjoy words. This book was written for us. Every reader will find something to learn or laugh at/with. I plan to keep a copy on my desk for work purposes and comic relief. In quoting Mark Twain on the humor in William Dean Howells, Blount (again in Long Time Leaving) has described himself exactly: "His is a humor which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood."
Roy Blount, Jr. has written about Robert E. Lee and the Pittsburg Steelers. His twenty books and numerous essays have encompassed a career as a humorist, novelist, biographer, journalist, and memoirist. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, he now lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold. He is a regular panelist on NPR's "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me" and is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel.
Ten pages into Little Bee, I decided there's no reason to write again-not even an e-mail. There's no reason to read again, either. Chris Cleave has done something truly stunning with language in this book, but it's not just the language. The story is fascinating and utterly believable despite its vast coincidences. Even the book jacket is arresting. I'm not sure why Simon and Schuster refused to summarize the plot on the jacket flaps. Yes, it's a truly special book, but I found the mystery off-putting. Never mind. If you don't want to hear about the plot, stop reading this review right now. Get the book.
Critics loved Cleave's previous book, Incendiary. He also has a website, where he posts the columns he writes for The Guardian. They're funny, full of gentle, sarcastic humor about his family life - well written and fun to read, but not stunning. However, halfway through Little Bee, I was stunned.
Little Bee is a Nigerian girl who has learned to talk like the Queen. She's a refuge who has been detained in an immigration detention center forty miles east of London for two years. I've never heard a Nigerian woman speaking the Queen's English, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the dialogue. But I believed in Little Bee from the first paragraph, and I loved her by page eighteen, where Cleave writes:
"I looked back at the detention officer, but he would not look up at me. While I looked, he moved his arm over the page to cover the headline. He made it look like he needed to scratch his elbow. Or maybe he really did need to scratch his elbow. I realized I knew nothing about men apart from the fear. A uniform that is too big for you, a desk that is too small for you, an eight-hour shift that is too long for you, and suddenly here comes a girl with three kilos of documents and no motivation, another one with jelly-green eyes and a yellow sari who is so beautiful you cannot look at her for too long in case your eyeballs go ploof, a third girl from Nigeria who is named after a honeybee, and a noisy woman from Jamaica who laughs like the pirate Bluebeard. Perhaps this is exactly the type of circumstance that makes a man's elbow itch."
Little Bee's life is entangled, by accident, with the life of another woman, Sarah, a white British magazine editor who lives in Kingston-upon-Thames. Sarah has just had something terrible happen to her, and she can't figure out how to feel. Sarah and Little Bee knew each other briefly in other terrible circumstances. Sarah was on vacation. Little Bee was in the middle of her real life. Now she's in the middle of Sarah's real life. Sarah has a young son who always wears a Batman costume, so he's always ready to fight baddies. There are a husband and a lover in the mix. Little Bee is in Britain illegally. Sarah's life has lost its meaning. Cleave works his magic throughout: the two women learn how to help each other. Their relationship feels perfectly natural.
Is there anything wrong with this book, I wondered? Not much. It can occasionally be too poignant. The characters aren't always likeable. However, to sum it up in one sentence, you might say this: All sorts of horrible, depressing, unjust things happen in Little Bee, but it's the most hopeful book I've ever read.
In his outstanding debut story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower captures a variety of experience that is as far-ranging as it is close to home. These stories of Viking marauders, teenage girls, and fractured families are violent and tender. They're stories told with the kind of honesty that makes us see our worst selves in the best possible light.
In "The Brown Coast," for example, a man named Bob Munroe wakes up "on his face" with a hurting jaw and a "real discomfort in his underpants." Readers quickly realize that this character's dismal physical condition is only rivaled by his desperate emotional state. Munroe has cheated on his wife, and in their separation he's stuck with the impossible task of fixing up his uncle's ramshackle seaside home.
Munroe is middle-aged, unemployed, and otherwise despicable, but readers will find themselves rallying to his side as he tries to capture a bit of beauty in the form of an aquarium "as long as a casket and three feet deep." In Munroe's efforts to sustain this collection of living creatures, we see our own Sisyphean impulse to build something beautiful only to find it broken, to rebuild it only to watch it break again.
Several others in this collection, like Munroe, are men in the middle of relationship meltdowns. "Retreat" is the story of two brothers united after one of them, a twice-divorced real estate shark, invites the other to visit the cabin he's fortifying in a remote part of Maine. In this setting, childhood rivalries become fresh, blossoming into full-blown adult tensions that aren't so far removed from their infantile origins.
In "Down Through the Valley," the narrator gets commissioned to drive his daughter and his ex-wife's lover home from a retreat center. Given the circumstances, the explosion of rage at this story's conclusion isn't so unexpected. And in "Door in Your Eye," an eighty-three-year-old widower strikes up a friendship with a drug dealer who lives across the street from his divorced daughter. The families in Tower's stories are — if not so much like our own — like those we recognize all around us.
Tower's writing has already garnered significant praise, including two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. Although some of these short stories originally appeared in the likes of The New Yorker, Harper's, and McSweeney's, "a number have been extensively revised" for this book. Tower's stories are gems as individual pieces, and they come together here to form a dazzling crown of a collection.
Tower's writing style is fast-paced and funny, but a dark undercurrent runs beneath even the lighter, laugh-out-loud moments. No one walks away unscathed from his or her predicament, as the collection's title story "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" suggests. In this, the book's final story, readers may at first think the shift away from modern American lives to the stuff of Old Norse legends represents something vastly different.
But in fact, we find Tower's Viking characters, Gnut and Djarf and Haakon, slugging it out on the tiny island of Lindisfarne with the same urgency of those living in present-day Manhattan or Charlotte or Mendocino. In "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," we see how people have struggled from the beginning of time to balance their desire for the so-called "mainstream domestic groove" with their want of the reckless freedom that accompanies the sight of "land scooting away with every jerk of the oars."
The most out-there story in terms of time and place, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" nonetheless brings this book's themes together. The story's narrator embarks on a bloody assault of a nearby clan, only to return home with the understanding of "how terrible love can be." He lies awake in bed with his wife, fearing for "those people" — his loved ones — and "the things the world will do to them." Each story in this collection bears witness to those "things," and yet we see Tower's characters — from ridiculed pre-teens to ailing fathers to carnival ride operators — marching forward in their midst.
James A. Levine's standout debut novel, The Blue Notebook, is a difficult kind of fiction. It's the kind of fiction that reveals a truth so painful you hope it remains within the book's pages. It's the kind of fiction that convinces you of a disturbing reality that exists beyond the story itself, even though you wish it didn't. This kind of fiction isn't the kind you can easily walk away from. But maybe that's exactly the effect Levine wants to have on his readers, and for good reason.
This book's author is an internationally renowned Mayo Clinic doctor, who toured the slums of Mumbai with a UN officer and a policeman. There, he witnessed first-hand the atrocities of child prostitution and saw one young girl-the inspiration for this story-writing in a notebook.
The Blue Notebook's subject matter is unsettling, and Levine draws readers into the dark world of sexual slavery by giving voice to a fifteen-year-old girl named Batuk who lives caged within Mumbai's infamous "Street of Cages," where child prostitutes are displayed by their keepers.
Batuk is a bright young girl from rural India who has been sold into sexual slavery at the age of nine by her own father. As she learns the way of her life in Mumbai, Batuk writes in a journal that she keeps stuffed in the mattress in her cage. The Blue Notebook tells the story of Batuk's life through the words she writes in her journal, so the voice of this story is-powerfully and hauntingly-her own.
By writing her thoughts and the story of her life, Batuk finds hope and records the beauty in her life even under the most harrowing of circumstances. When the story beings, Batuk is fifteen and has already been working on the "Common Street" in Mumbai for six years. Batuk manages to acquire a pencil that has fallen from the ear of Mamaki Briila, who takes on the role of a mother-figure despite being Batuk's keeper.
Batuk has learned cunning ways of getting what she wants, and she acquires a sharpener for her pencil by catching the gaze of a young man and asking him to retrieve one for her. Once he brings it to her, she kisses him and then never speaks to or acknowledges him again. But to Batuk, this way of behaving is "disgraceful," even though it allows her the simplest pleasure-writing-in a life she lives at the mercy and whims of others.
In The Blue Notebook, readers will come to understand Batuk's life within the Street of Cages and her personal history through the details she records in her journal. The fact that she can write and read at all may seem surprising, but Batuk explains the anomaly by telling about a time when she was sick as a child and sent to live in a hospital. Her caretakers nurse her back to health but also educate her in the process, sending her back into the world with these skills that she otherwise likely would not have.
Despite the brokenness Batuk experiences repeatedly in this life, she is able to hold on to her writing no matter what others take from her. Batuk imagines that words remain with her even in her darkest moments, saying that inside of herself, she can "hide an army of whispering syllables, rhythms, and sounds. All you may see," she says, "is a black cavity that fills a tiny girl, but trust me, the words are there, alive and fine."
Some readers may struggle under the emotional weight of this story, but it is a story that needs to be told until those like Batuk are no longer in a position to tell it. The narrative is so beautiful and sad and wonderfully written that readers may find themselves having a hard time putting it down, and a harder time forgetting it when they are through.
In the end, Levine's story in The Blue Notebook is not a redemptive one, and near it's conclusion, Batuk writes: "All that is left of me is ink." In a fictional sense, her statement is true, because it is this character's journal we're reading, but The Blue Notebook's author, James A. Levine, demonstrates tremendous courage and artistic talent in bringing her story alive.
Dr. Levine is donating all of the US proceeds from The Blue Notebook to the international and national centers for missing and exploited children.
Here you'll meet the best of famous authors like Truman Capote, Hemingway, Susan Sontag, Nelly Harper Lee, Colmin Toibin, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Maupassant, O. Henry, Clarice Lispector, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Kerouac, and many, many other writers. Also you will watch videos with musics of The Beatles, Paul McCartney, Sepultura, Amalia Rodrigues, Taiguara, Iron Maiden, etc. and other videos.
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A fly by imagination
And life passes so quickly...
Because literature is part of our history.
The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination. I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.
