The setting of a novel or a short story often goes a long way in securing its readership. And the act of describing setting is an art form. Include too much detail and readers are, at best, overwhelmed and, at worst, bored. Include too little detail and readers are lost and confused. Finding the sweet spot when it comes to describing place and setting sets a good writer apart from a great one. Shirley Ann Grau is one of the greats.
Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein are considered by many to be the defining triumvirate of early science fiction. While the three of them, together, pushed the use of science and technology beyond their earlier status as mere narrative devices to a level on which they could set the parameters for high-minded thought experiments, Heinlein has always been somewhat of an outlier. He was, after all, the only one of the three with no formal scientific training. It is perhaps this fundamental truth about him, that writing was his primary concern and vocation, that enables him to cut to the heart of human truths in ways his contemporaries sometimes couldn’t. Nowhere is this fact better on display than in his magnum opus, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
When the New Yorker published John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” on August 31, 1946, nearly everyone was stunned. The issue sold out within a few hours. Albert Einstein himself ordered one thousand copies. Newspapers and periodicals everywhere requested permission to publish it, as did the American Broadcast Company. Even a theatre company wanted to adapt it for the stage. It had been a year since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and so little was known in the West about the aftermath of the fearsome new weapon. Then came Hersey’s extensive article, and people's eyes were opened.
“Hemingway Slaps Eastman in the Face,” read the New York Times headline on August 14, 1937. This famous spat happened one afternoon when Max Eastman—a prominent critic who wrote about politics, literature, and more—discovered that one of the subjects of his criticism, Ernest Hemingway, wanted to fight back. Hemingway, who was visiting New York at the time, walked into the Fifth Avenue location of publisher Charles Scribner & Son. There, in the office of editor Max Perkins, one of the most peculiar author exchanges of the century transpired.
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:
they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philosophy, in its purest form, should be about a love of wisdom. Unfortunately, it is often a field dominated by pedants, logicians, and empiricists. Yet we know life is scarcely described best through laws and technicalities. It is far too complex and marvelous for rigid deconstruction. Ralph Waldo Emerson understood this well. And he offered nearly two centuries of readers a loving interpretation of life, art, and the New World in which he lived.
Today, the state of the English language short story is too multifarious to pin down. We have the well-crafted and masterful stories of Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who drew from the great Henry James. There are the zany, first-person narrated stories of George Saunders and the frontier tales of Annie Proulx. Then there’s Charles Baxter, whose work tends to turn toward our quotidian relationships and the small interactions that make up a lifetime.
Kaye Gibbons's debut novel Ellen Foster (1987), which she wrote at the age of 26, opens with the sentence, "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." In a letter to her readers Gibbons explains, "Since Ellen Foster is autobiographical, it shouldn't come as a shock that when I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. My mother...became too sad and died when I was almost ten..." Back to the book, the fictional character, 11-year-old Ellen Foster says a few lines later, "But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death a year after the County moved me out." This raw, honest tone penetrates Kaye Gibbons' works, making them poignant reads and lenses into the power of writing through and about pain.
Most writers only dream of making the same lasting indent in American cultural consciousness that Joseph Heller did. Even famed novelist John Updike, who didn’t consider Heller to be a ‘top of the chart’ writer, deemed the author’s 1961 satirical behemoth Catch-22 to be “important.” ‘Importance,’ however, isn’t even the half of it. Heller’s inimitable brand of black humor, his keen eye for the absurdity of bureaucracy, and his deep antiwar sentiments combined to form a perfect storm of satirical perfection. Not only did he earn a place in the canon that stretches from Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut, but he must also be heralded as a guardian of the deepest absurdity and cynicism that belie the American experience. Here are five facts about him.
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." -Henry David Thoreau
Contemporary writer Annie Dillard draws great inspiration from legendary author Henry David Thoreau. Her crowning work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is often compared to Thoreau's Walden, for good reason. Here, we briefly explore Dillard's life and work to learn more about how she's both similiar to and different from Thoreau.
In Part I of our exploration of the history of Postcolonial literature, we focused on the rise of postcolonial theory and early postcolonial writers, such as Chinua Achebe and Nadine Gordimer, who set the stage for the international genre with their imaginative literature. Today, we shift our emphasis to contemporary writers of the postcolonial condition.
