A Search for Meaning in Grief By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor Little Matches: A Memoir of Grief and Light by Maryanne O’Hara (New York: Harper One, April 20, 2021; $26.99; 351 pages; ISBN 978-0-06-302776-3). Maryanne O’Hara’s affecting memoir is both a work of life, and of art. The author tells us flatly from the outset…
Category: prose book reviews
Micro-fiction to Inspire Sleeplessness
Wit in Brevity By Gregory J. Wolos Insomnia 11 by Michael C. Keith (Cambridge, MA, Mad Hat Press, 2020; ~200 pages; $21.95). Each of Michael C. Keith’s pieces in his latest collection of micro–fictions, Insomnia 11, lingers like an amuse-bouche on the palate of the intellect. While some among his readers might find solace in…
Description Brings the Past to Life
“Simple Things Beautifully Described” By WTP Guest Reviewer Philip Lawton Telling Sonny: A Novel by Elizabeth Gauffreau (New York, NY: Adelaide Books, December 1, 2018; 340 pages; $22.30). In Telling Sonny: A Novel, Elizabeth Gauffreau brings her extraordinary gift of observation to the insular world of inland America in the mid-1920s. Faby Gauthier, the central character,…
The Town of Whispering Dolls
Finding Reality in Fiction By Dan Wakefield, WTP Guest Writer The Town of Whispering Dolls by Susan Neville (Tuscalossa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, March 2020; 216 pages; $17.95). Winner of FC2’s Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. We always hear that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Sometimes fiction conveys a deeper truth. That’s what happens…
A Novel as Riddle
Book Review: Sleepless Night By Lisa Zeiger, WTP Guest Writer SLEEPLESS NIGHT By Margriet de Moor, translated from the Dutch by David Doherty (New Vessel Press, 2019, $15.95, ISBN 9781939931696). Margriet de Moor’s novel, Sleepless Night, has triggered my relapse. When I say I used to read novels, I mean it in the way Proust…
DAD'S MAYBE BOOK by Tim O'Brien
On Fatherhood, and Lessons for Sons By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor Dad’s Maybe Book by Tim O’Brien (Houghton Mifflin, 2019. 382 pages, $28.00 hard cover, ISBN 978-0-618-03970-8.) Tim O’Brien is back in top form. His last novel, July, July, appeared when the author was fifty-nine. This new book, a nonfiction hybrid, is part journal about…
STRIKE THE EMPTY by Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart’s new book on memoir extends her ongoing conversation By Richard Gilbert, WTP Contributing Editor STRIKE THE EMPTY: NOTES FOR READERS, WRITERS, AND TEACHERS OF MEMOIR by Beth Kephart (Juncture Workshops, 2019). 185 pp, $12.00. Let’s start with the title, a very good place to start—bemused, as you are, by what “The Empty” is…
SILENCE by Jane Brox
Through Penitentiaries and Monasteries, A Meditation on Silence By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor SILENCE: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ONE OF THE LEAST UNDERSTOOD ELEMENTS OF OUR LIVES by Jane Brox (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2019). 310pp, $27.00 hard cover, ISBN 9780544702486. Jane Brox, like the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists, worries that we lose our best selves to the…
THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD by Jennifer Acker
Transcending Cultures and the Limits of Family By DeWitt Henry, Prose Editor THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD by Jennifer Acker (Delphinium Books, April 2019). 300 pp, $25.95. Jennifer Acker’s deeply considered and expansive novel focuses on love and family transcending races, cultures, religions, geography, and time, and calls to mind other recent cross-cultural novels (such…
Book Review: Inventing the World
On the Craft of Writing, for All Levels By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor INVENTING THE WORLD: THE FICTION WRITER’S GUIDEBOOK TO CRAFT AND PROCESS by Jack Smith (Serving House Books, 2018). 285pp, $15.95. Jack Smith’s essays on “the craft and process” of writing fiction have appeared since 2010 in either The Writer or in…
Book Review: Sweet Marjoram
Essays Inspired by Poetry By Joyce Peseroff, WTP Contributing Editor SWEET MARJORAM: NOTES AND ESSAYS by DeWitt Henry (Madhat Press, October 2018). 156pp, $21.95. I don’t usually write about prose, but Sweet Marjoram is an exception. In part, it’s because DeWitt Henry is a dear friend whose work I’ve read for decades. It’s also because…
Two Cosmopolitan Collections
Essay Collections in a Global Time By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor In the American Sixties, a writer’s “sense of place” usually referred to regionalism and immediately brought to mind Faulkner, Cather, and Frost. For English writers, the phrase suggested colonial displacements, such as E.M. Forster’s India or Joseph Conrad’s Congo. Since then, however, with…