Authors Books

Maizenberg surprised me with his terse fiction stylings in the first story, "Smoking with Felix-the-Super." I didn't want to think it at first, because it's a dooming thought if tossed around hastily, but I was forced to relent and make the comparison--it's like Carver, only fresher than the thousands of other imitators out there. Honest. Real.

That's what Maizenberg is in all these stories: honest and real. And sometimes that gives us a queasy feeling, like in "Looking for Jojo," and sometimes it just washes over us in a tide of recognition, like in Play-Doh Pill/Lego Life"; we know these people--we are these people.

But he's versatile, too. The collection's best story is "Dotcomicon," a story I dreaded from the title. "Hip," I thought. "He's trying to be hip and 'Now'." And he is current, but what he's trying to do is write an allegory. He succeeds. This is one of the best modern allegories I've read in a while. And that title is one of the best titles I've seen, too, the kind that grows in depth each time you think about its connection to the story. A must-read.

Short, too-the-point but not in-your-face, Maizenberg hasn't redefined contemporary fiction, but he's certainly refreshed it. Keep an eye out for more by this author.

If you're looking for a familiar landmark to compare this book to, try George Saunders. Although Maizenberg's targets are more real and immediate than Saunders's, this author possesses a similar wit and dazzling capacity for self-revelation through seemingly mundane details. This book will haunt you.

But read the last two stories, and suddenly you are thrust deep within a character's spirit, where dreams are not empty but virile, and for better or worse take control. This collection yanks you on a bullet-train from dirty realism to surrealism in 137 pages flat. "Invitations to a Bridge Burning" will appeal to everyone who might feel his or her life is not quite settled -- not because Maizenburg reflects our yearning for more with a pandering wink and nod, but because he realizes our dreams exist to serve us, not vice versa. By the last page, you feel wrong has been made right.

Read this beautiful book of poems and I think you will know what Wilder means! This is a book both poetic and saintly, a book of vision. Pavel's crafted and gifted words opens eyes and opens hearts. A good, good book.

Pavel's work is lyrical and intensely personal. There are observations of the physical world included in the verse [including a delightful response to the goldfinch in " The Small Musician"] but most of the poems are spiritual landscapes - poems that speak of a lively mind's encounters with guilt, grace, God, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Observations of nature are essentially the beginnings of a spiritual insight so that a toad, a dragonfly, birdsong or storm becomes emblematic of a spiritual life that transcends the physical. In this sense, his work owes much to the nineteenth century Romantics; the same sense of the poet alone in the natural world characteristic of Wordsworth or Gerard Manly Hopkins pervades the poetry of Lion Sun.

Using simple verse forms, Chichikov brings a visionary style to the work. The poet's own voice is a constant feature of the verse. Many poems begin with and specificity the poet conveys. The weakness, perhaps, is that the poet may become baffling in the allusions spun. One sometimes leaves a poem curiously unsatisfied that the power of the message is lost when a crucial element is missed by the reader. There are few contexts in which to fix the poems. The works are largely undated and there is no introduction or biographical information in which to fix the work. Where the poems work well without contexts, they are powerful and winsome.

The spiritual landscapes drawn in the verse are often on the largest canvas. Saints and sinners, giants and angels, creation and redemption figure in the poems. Political features only intrude into the landscapes for their spiritual interest as in the sonnet The Voice.

Chichikov is at his best when he is most tender and personal, when the biggest allegories give way to the fine observation and instress, as Hopkins would have it. My favourite poem in the anthology is called Creation - a sonnet written for his wife Nancy. Like the person to whom it is dedicated, the poem is gentle, subtle and intelligent

The book is stunning in its design with an exquisite typeface and display. The illustrations by Eric Young are lively and attractive. This is a book that will puzzle, charm and inspire and deserves a wider readership than poetry usually commands

Perhaps the best way to read Pearce is to begin with Literary Converts and then read his biographies on single subjects like Belloc, Chesterton, and Tolkien for more detail. Once you read one, I think you'll come back for more.

This volume of letters enables the reader who has already read other versions of the Nin-Miller story to form additional conclusions about what might actually have happened. Because the letters were sent into the possession of others, they were less subject to the constant revision and reinvention that bedevils all attempts to determine objective facts about the mercurial Nin.

If you are not already an amateur historian of literary trends of the 1930's, fear not. The letters are worth reading as an introduction to Anais Nin and Henry Miller as well, for they depict a real-life romance conducted by two who absolutely relished the game and were highly articulate in dramatically different ways.

Nin and Miller met in Paris in 1931. Miller, an aspiring novelist, wanted to meet the banker's pretty wife who had sung the praises of D.H. Lawrence and whose books had been deemed "pornography" outside of France. Neither Nin nor Miller, at that point, had published much. Their mutual interest, as they freely admit, was in sex and in each other and, consequently, they began a long affair.

It was during this affair that both Nin and Miller produced their finest writing--the writings that would eventually become Nin's two diaries and her novel, House of Incest, as well as Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring. Each believed in, and nurtured, the others genius and Miller wrote that Nin's diary would take its place "beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Abelard, Proust and others."

Miller, only forty-one, but already somewhat down-and-out, fascinated the twenty-nine year old Nin, whose vague yearnings filled the many pages of the diary she had been keeping since the age of ten. "He's a man who makes life drunk. He is like me," she mused. Nin and Miller, however, were not alike. One of their most essential differences was a difference typical between men and women--Nin censored herself, while the world censored Miller.

Published in 1963, Nin's diary caused a literary sensation. It was begun as a letter to her father, a man who abandoned the family when Nin was only ten, and it remained intensely private. Revised into frequent distortions, the diary was a record of a compulsion to conceal as much as of a quest for feminine fulfillment. A mixture of fact, fantasy and calculated lies, Nin's editor asserts that the diary nevertheless presents a "psychological" truth. Kate Millett hailed Nin as "the mother of us all" and the women's movement immediately embraced her writings. Author Erica Jong said that no woman had told "the story of women's sexuality" more honestly than had Nin.

Despite the praise, if we read between the lines, while still observing Nin's frenetic whirl from bed to bed, we come to realize that she was really never satisfied. Her insatiable appetite aside, Nin was, at heart, a prudish libertine. Her childhood molestation by her father, whom she, herself, seduced as an adult a year after meeting Henry Miller, seems to have contributed greatly to her private inhibitions. Although she flitted from bed to bed she sadly confessed, "I am hellishly lonely." Instead of sex, Nin longed for "what I give Henry: this constant attentiveness."

In the "Black Lace Laboratory," as Miller's apartment was dubbed, Nin and Miller conducted literary and erotic experiments, prompting Nin to write him a thinly disguised warning to herself, "Beware just a little of your hypersexuality!" Toward the end of his life, unable to write about women except as prostitutes, Miller claimed not to know what the sexual revolution was about, saying that he had always loved and honored women. Nin agreed, saying that Miller was a romantic, rather than a rake. At eighty, Miller confessed that far too many people engaged in sex without love.

Basking in the warmth of Nin's caresses, her skilled editing of his work, and the material possessions she lavished upon him, Miller wrote prolifically and with a rare genius. Eventually, his romance with Nin faded (or warmed) into friendship, but the legacy of their literary teamwork remained: In 1974, Nin was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Los Angeles Times names her Woman of the Year in 1976, the same year Henry Miller received France's Legion d'honneur. The 1990 movie, Henry and June is a chronicle of Miller's affair with Nin, which later became a triangle involving Miller's wife, June.

Nin and Miller have become cultural icons. Nin is the focus of women's study courses as well as being included in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Miller and his work need no comment. Although both Nin and Miller were pioneers of free speech and sexual freedom, and both helped to forge a new literature and a new culture, the ultimate emptiness of their lives, with its attendant lack of depth and meaning point to the futility of their attempt to wrest security and happiness from sexuality alone.

With insight and humor but without self-pity, she tells of the challenges she faced at school, including bullying, as well as the relief when she was put in a sight-savers class and at last found a place where she was "normal" - like the other children in her class - and had teachers who understood her needs.

Against all odds, Little decided to go to university. The book ends as she works as a teacher and writes her first book - one inspired by the need of her disabled students to read realistic stories about children like themselves. After reading this book, I know understand how she writes so knowingly - it's because she has lived many of her stories.