Description Brings the Past to Life

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

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…

SILENCE by Jane Brox

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

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

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

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

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…