Authors Books

Just ordered this and awaiting it anxiously. I have just finished two later collections The Hill Bachelors and Cheating at Canasta (the title story in the latter is heartbreaking and just a perfect piece of writing). I also immediatley ran out and bought After Rain and A Bit on the Side. I had overlooked Trevor for years. I now fully acknowledge that in doing so; I deserve to be tried for crimes against humanity! Being from Ireland and living here, I also live with the constant knowledge that Trevor is a god and part of the literary furniture. Somehow, strangely, I just took him for granted and never read him. I had also wrongly assumed that Trevor belonged to that somewhat stuffy Irish "big house novel" literary tradition (if one can call it that). By chance, I picked up The Hill Bachelors and have found literary salvation! He is utterly brilliant and consistently so. 12 collections and counting. Nearly every collection consists of 12 stories, each about 20/22 pages long, divided in to 5 or 6 scenes. His structure is so simple and within it he performs miracles, over and over again. It is also wonderful how his stories alternate between a story set in Ireland and a story set in England, the country that he has lived in since his 30s. I adore short stories and all the great North American and Irish writers in the genre: Hemingway, Carver, Wolff, Munro, Joyce and McGahern. But I think Trevor is now my literary hero - plus he's a first rate gentleman (not always so with literary geniuses). Although now 80 let's hope for a new collection from the master in about 2010 and God help him, maybe more after that.

If you enjoy consummate skill in the written word you will treasure this book. It is the most beautifully crafted collection of short stories I have ever encountered. The characters are powerful, endearing, heartbreaking, loving, loathsome, self centered, generous, and sometimes frightening - the scope of this work is breathtaking. It is unfortunate that a book perfect for "dipping into" is so large and heavy - a reissue in rice paper would halve both (The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918 has 1166 pages and fits quite comfortably in a coat pocket!) William Trevor is a genius - if you buy his book you will not be disappointed. Dr Peter J Kirby.

It took me a couple of months to make my way through these 85 stories and it was definitely worth the time I spent with them. Trevor's prose is always simple and clear, yet his range of characters and plots is astonishing because of their superbly captured detail and variety. Most of these stories deal with Irish and English characters, and many swirl around the realities or possibilities of extramarital affairs. "In Isfahan," one of Trevor's best stories, a married middle-aged man carries on an impromptu affair with a young woman he meets while in Iran; in "Lovers of Their Time," another top-notch story, a married man carries on a long-term affair with a shop girl by meeting her in a hotel's second-floor public bathroom. Trevor is also quite adept of presenting the romantic yearnings of women. In "The Ballroom of Romance," a country girl's dreams and consequences are highlighted in her trips to the local dance hall; in "Afternoon Dancing," a middle-aged married woman dallies with the idea of an affair with her dance partner after the death of her close friend. Like Chekhov, to whom Trevor is often compared, this writer also has an admirable sense of comedy. "Mulvhill's Memorial" finds an unlikely pornographic set-up within an office; "The Trinity" has a couple booking a vacation to Venice and ending up in Switzerland. Accidents spiral out of control in "The Penthouse Apartment," and in "A Complicated Nature," a man is forced to help his upstairs neighbor when her suitor unexpectedly dies. Another one of the best stories of this collection is "Broken Homes," where an elderly woman suffers the indignities of having her kitchen painted by a team of indifferent youths. Other first-rate stories include "The Smoke Trees of San Pietro," where a boy's sickness propels his mother into an affair, and "Death in Jerusalem" where a mother dies while on vacation.

Someone else here refers to the problems of 'star' hyperbole. He's right. The five stars Trevor deserves must be especially large and dazzling.
He goes wrong, just a little, once in a while. So did every truly great writer we know. Most of the time he opens a door on the world of two or three people, and shows us the universe in the process. He is a breathtaking artist. Witness 'Another Christmas' - in a dingy living room and armed with no one but an aging Irish couple, he brings home the Troubles in Ireland in epic, heartbreaking scope. And 'Torridge'...a girl said to me when this story first appeared in The New Yorker that it was like Beethoven's Fifth; you can't imagine it not having been around before. It's that good.
Readers! You can do no better than to get to know what this man can do with a pen.

Had never heard of the guy - got it at a bookstore because it had 1200 pages (I needed a lot to read) and because it was written by an old guy (well, he's old now, at least - well- wrinkled but kind looking). So far I'm about a third of the way through it, but like everyone else has said, this book is great. Some writers get lazy and write the same story over and over. Not this guy - every character, every situation is unique. For people who like movies, read the one about Istafan and compare it to "Lost in Translation". The story about the swingers party is indescribably great also, just in the way he describes a man kissing a woman's hair or them barely dancing at all.

I read this one soon after it came out--and it informs some of my thinking about current events in and around the Persian Gulf. I'd encourage it for the non-Iranian American who lived through the 'Iranian hostage crisis' period especially. Poignant.

When searching for a book- for my cultural anthropology class, I found this incredible and extraordinary book. I am Mexican, and my boyfriend is Iranian. Hence, sometimes it was difficult to comprehend many things about his culture, but this book really helped me to understand and appreciate Iranian culture. He is more American than Iranian, but he has faced the ongoing negotiation between his past and present, his native home and his adopted home I will recommend this book to anyone who is interested in achieving a personal enrichment and wants to see our modern world with different eyes.

I am 1st generation American. I grew up drinking tea and hearing the stories of Ferdowsi but it didn't seem to capture me completely into my father's culture.

When I came across this book, I fell in love with my culture! I understand so much more of my father's past, his sorrows, his joys, and his beliefs. I also learned more about myself.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Iranian culture!

When searching for a book- for my cultural anthropology class, I found this incredible and extraordinary book. I am Mexican, and my boyfriend is Iranian. Hence, sometimes it was difficult to comprehend many things about his culture, but this book really helped me to understand and appreciate Iranian culture. He is more American than Iranian, but he has faced the ongoing negotiation between his past and present, his native home and his adopted home I will recommend this book to anyone who is interested in achieving a personal enrichment and wants to see our modern world with different eyes.

"A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans," edited by Persis M. Karim and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, is an excellent anthology which greatly enriches the world of ethnic American literature. The pieces in this collection deal with many issues: language, biculturalism and the anxieties of assimilation, family ties, male-female relationships, Islamic fundamentalism, the role of Zoroastrians as a religious minority, war and its aftermath, etc. Although many such issues are specific to Iranian-Americans, others are universal to all "ethnic" Americans. The stories take place in both Iran and the United States, and one even takes place in France.

Some of my favorite pieces in this book include the following: "Made You Mine, America," Ali Zarrin's joyful poem which invokes both Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes; Mariam Salari's humorous short-short story "Ed McMahon Is Iranian"; Ramin M. Tabib's story "Tuesdays," about two Iranian-Americans in the L.A. club scene; Nazanin Sioshansi's essay "The Suffocating Sense of Injustice," about Zoroastrians in Iran; and Siamak Namazi's fascinating essay "Finding Peace in the Iranian Army," about an Iranian citizen who returns to fulfill his military obligation after living in the United States.

"A World Between" really opened my eyes to some of the pain and beauty of the world(s) of Iranian-Americans. This anthology would be ideal both for classroom use and individual reading. For a fascinating complementary text, try "Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings," edited by Roberto Santiago.

This is a great sampler of all the wonderful poets of all times and represents all the different types of poetry. It is a journey into the past as well as the present. What a pleasure to read and share with others.

I personally prefer poem anthologies where the poetry is from a mix of poets, not just a collection of one poet's work. Americans' Favorite Poems will give you some very famous favorites, and also might surprise you with the works of lesser known (but still wonderful) writers.

What I also loved about this treasure of a book was the comments. Robert Pinsky compiled the poems that people from around the US sent him and printed their comments as to why each poem was their favorite. Reading the comments of all these people - firefighters, students, forest rangers, doctors, homemakers, basically people from all walks of life - is often very moving, entertaining, or surprising (you'll see some of your best loved poems from new and delightful angles). You get a feel for why people love poems as they explain that love, that attachment to a particular poem, in their own words.

Americans' Favorite Poems is an amazing book. It is the result of the "favorite poem project" held across the nation. The poems in the collection are real Americans' favorites along with their own comments on why they chose that poem as their favorite. The compilation is great for the obvious. The poems selected come from everywhere (many different cultures and different styles of poetry are present), and they are outstanding. The thing that sets Americans' Favorite Poems apart from other collections is the commentary from regular people. The comments are at turns hilarious and moving. They are always profound. They show the real greatness of good poetry: it has the ability to relate to a person's life experiences and really touch that person.

I must say that my favorite selection in the book was "I May, I Might, I Must" by Marianne Moore mainly because of the reason behind its selection. The only complaint (it isn't much of one) I have about the book is that my favorite "I Thank You God for Most This Amazing" by ee cummings didn't make it, but hopefully, there will someday be a Americans' Favorite Poems Volume II, and it will.

I wonder. I doubt it since Maya Angelou isn't included. She's one of the most visible poets in America today and very much loved. It's not that she's little known because she was America's Poet Laureate a few years ago -- so why leave her out? And why only one poem by William Stafford? Also, clearly one of the universal favorites of Robert Frost's is "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and it's not here, either. (That one shows up in almost any discussion of poetry.)And, only one poem by Robert Penn Warren, another former USA Poet Laureate?
[sigh]

I'm also suspicious of a "project" that doesn't seem to have been announced widely before it began -- it can't be representative of ALL Americans since all Americans obviously didn't know about it.

All that said, it's a great collection. Through it I met several new poets (new to me)and I certainly enjoyed the ones I was already familiar with. It made me curious, too, about just what the American taste in poetry truly would be. I suspect it would include Ogden Nash and Edgar Allen Poe.

No. I don't think it's representative of the poetic taste of the American public and I don't think it should claim to be so, but I do think it's a great overview of popular poets and a superb collection of poems.

Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, founded the Favorite Poem Project. Since its inception, the Project has been dedicated to celebrating, documenting and promoting poetry's role in Americans' lives. During a one-year open call for submissions, 18,000 Americans wrote to the project volunteering to share their favorite poems - Americans from ages 5 to 97, from every state, of diverse occupations, education and backgrounds. The Project's first anthology, "Americans' Favorite Poems," consists of 200 of the submitted poems, along with readers' comments about their attachments to the poems. The selections are by poets from all over the world, poems written centuries ago alongside contemporary poems, poignantly sad poetry, as well as spiritually uplifting works, and humorous poems. Many are translations.

I found so many of my own favorites in this extraordinary collection. I was also introduced to many wonderful new poems, I might never have read. And some of the comments from the folks who submitted the poems, are as moving as the poetry itself. The book emphasizes the pure joy of reading poetry. And poetry appreciation is alive and well in America!

There is Anna Akhmatova's "The Sentence," submitted by a woman from Georgia who remembers her brother "who returned from Vietnam, a broken man of 21," when reading this poem; and Margaret Atwood's "Variation On The Word Sleep," "the most beautiful love poem I have ever read," writes a woman from Queens, NY; Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky" is included, with the comment, "Where else can you find a tale of danger, adventure, triumph, and jubilation - all so utterly wrapped in nonsense?" There are wonders printed here, by Ranier Marie Rilke, Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas and Allan Ginsberg...and so many more. It must have been a difficult task, indeed, to select 200 poems from so many worthy submissions.

I recommend this anthology to poetry lovers everywhere, and also to those who do not care for poetry. This collection may change your mind.

When I turned to the last page of "Crazy Love" I immediately turned back to page one and had to read it again -- I just could not get enough of this heart-warming, honest story. Reading this book was the highlight of my day and I couldn't wait to get home from work to see what Bear and KattieDid were up to. Along with "The Crying Heart Tattoo", "Crazy Love" has become one of my top 10 books.

I couldn't put it down. First my husband read it in 2 days and then I read it in 2 days. David Martin is an awesome writer.

I really don't know where to begin to write about this book. I received it as a gift and from the moment I opened it, I could not lay it down. It is truly one of my all time favorite books. It is so different in so many ways. It is a love story yes, but so much more. I laughed and cried through the whole story. It makes you stop and really think about man's relationship with animals and man's inhumanity to man. It is magical. I can only say that if you want a book that you will remember over the years and cherish as one of your favorites, this is it. Please read Crazy Love. Your heart will love you forever.

I was unable to put this book down and read it in a single day. It's a great read, describing the love between two seemingly polar opposites. I truly fell in love with Bear and the other characters like the vet and even the animals. Like one reviewer said, I'll never look at animals the same way again. Beautiful love story with a sad, yet touching ending. I suggest reading this book.

This is a wonderful book about people's relationships with animals, other humans and themselves. Bear's compassion comes through in his many adventures in this book. I was particularly impressed with the scenes of him talking to Red Cow, his old cow, and the hedgehogs. It is easy to suspend belief because Bear may or may not be a tad "touched
in the head."

WARNING- don't read further if you don't want the ending spoiled.

I was actually moved to tears at Bear's eulogy. His death hit full force. Martin just dumps it on us, a basic "he had cancer. He died." Bear feared only a few would show up for his funeral. The service was heart-breaking, warm and sad. The baskets from the barely people was brilliant.

Beautiful writing. A modern fairy tale. I don't read romance novels, but this one is a keeper.

This is the first book I read that was set in Australia and I got a lot more from it than just the wonderful story of the lead characters and the interesting people around them. There was not really any permanent villain, each characters whether they started as bad people had their reasons for their actions and you don't really grow to hate them even towards the end unlike the typical villain. What I love is the author had done an extensive research about the history of Australia from the convict days and the life of the Aborigines that were forced to live with the European immigrants. The heroine was a very adventurous woman who was seeking her mother's early childhood memories that cost her grandparents their lives and her mother having an amnesia of her early years of life. I could not put this book down and read it in two days. The ending was not as great as I expected because the Woods left a lot of the characters behind and I did not know what happened to them. Additionally, the main characters were not reunited in person in the end after the lead character discovered where Kara-kara is located (the place that she's been searching from the beginning of the novel). I don't want to give away too much so just pick this book and you won't regret it!

I highly recommend this book to those who love Australia, are fascinated by the good and the bad of its history, and the mysticism of the Aborigin culture. It is a wonderful read for those who just want to read and be entertained; but it has much more to offer and is deeper than your normal page turners. It explores the personal development of a number of characters as well as provides a gentle critism and depiction on a human level of some of the unpleasant sides of Australia's fronteer days and of the beauty of a culture that was trampled on.

This is a wonderful book about the Australian outback and the myths and legends connected with the native peoples. It is a story about a young woman who goes in search of the cause of her mother's nightmares and of her own fears about her heritage. It was a wonderful book.

I needed something to read and purchased this book because I loved "The Thorn Birds" and was hoping this would be on a par. Needless to say, it was. I especially loved this book because it explores the world of the tribes of Australia and other things that The Thorn Birds missed out on. I would love to see this book made into a film. This was just the first of many Barbara Woods novels I've read. I read the book in one sitting. I highly recommend "Green City In The Sun" a great book about Africa that I can see Sean Connery playing the lead male role in. "Domina" another great Barbara Wood book that shows the role of women in medicine when women weren't allowed to be a part of that world. "Virgins Of Paradise" where Barbara does it again! This book will open your eyes to the roles of women in a country where women are considered "property". AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ, and "The Prophetess"...an incredible book that keeps you on the edge of your seat with suspense and excitement, yet explores religion through a completely new set of eyes and shows us how much we are all alike despite our "beliefs" A page turner that you can't put down till the end. I LOVE BARBARA WOOD. The Dreaming is just one of many of her books you'll love too! *"CHILDSONG" is another book of hers, a very early one, that will make you think twice about a lot of things in life. I certainly hope you can find some of these fine novels still in print and enjoy them as I have and many of my friends.

I read this novel while I was in Australia last month - my first trip there. Ironically, I purchased the book several years ago, but never read it. Now, I am glad that I read it when I did, because it made Australia come alive
for me, rich with history, culture, geography, economics, etc, more than even just being in Australia on vacation. I especially found fascinating the embedded information about the Aboriginal culture. I went to Uluru (Ayer's Rock) shortly before I neared the end of THE DREAMING and felt much more connected to the spirituality of the land because of B.Woods' invocation of the spirit of Aboriginal life. My last day in Sydney, I went on a walkabout in the Blue Mountains, led by a guide with Aboriginal ancestors. Reading the novel gave me a different appreciation of my experience. Then I went on the Indian Pacific Railway for 24 hours, through mostly desert, and I felt as though I were a character in Woods' novel. I would have enjoyed this novel even if I read it elsewhere than in Australia, but I would encourage anyone planning to travel there to buy this book and read it if you really want to understand Australia better. Barbara Woods is an author, yes, but really she is a born teacher, because she made me hungry for more information about all the subjects she touched upon. (I was also reading Bill Bryson's excellent humorous travel narrative DOWN UNDER. He treats many of the same subject but with non-fiction humor. If you go to Australia, you should definitely read both of these books.)

The book contains three introductory biographical essays by Hass, that help to place the masters in a historical context and help to understand the development of their styles.

so refreshing to learn
many Issa's haiku
were quite bad

It also contains several poetic prose fragments by all three poets that put their haiku in context of their journeys and events from their lives. The last part of the book includes fragments of Kyorai's "Conversations with Basho." It is always a treat for me to be provided with some insights about an artistic process. Needless to say, the book is full of pearls, diamonds and snowflakes. Translations (or their "versions," as Haas would say) are exquisite and very poetic; it was enough for me to read a few to feel inspired. A truly a marvelous book.

I love this collection of haiku. I've marked several favorites with Post-It flags and thumb through it often. I recommend it to anyone, especially people who are knew to haiku, because it includes a variety of themes and the poems were all written by true masters of the art. It's simply wonderful.

I am new to haiku and was looking for a few books to give me an idea of the traditional haiku. The translations in some books made me think that haiku is not for me. However, this book is amazing. Not only does the editor select the most representative of Basho, Buson, and Issa, but the translations make poetic sense. There is additional material, such as a short biography on each poet and some exerpts of their prose (such as Issa's "A Year of My Life" and coversations with Basho). Five stars without hestitation.

I fully believe in the translating philosophy that poems should be rendered in the most contemporary language possible. Translating archaic language with archaic equivalents doesn't necessarily convey what it was like for contemporary audiences of the originals to read and experience them.

And that is what I like most about this collection. Robert Hass decided to use contemporary language for these haiku, and in this case, his contemporary language: American English. The haiku are highly readable and accessible. I've read criticisms to the contrary, namely that he loses the tone of the originals and takes some liberties with meaning. While I think it may be helpful to point this out, I don't think it is fair criticism, per se. There had to be a compromise, and Robert Hass consciously made a decision and consistently stuck to his preferred style. These aren't academic translations, and thank goodness. As a result, we have fresh translations of wonderful classics.

I bought this book over ten years ago on the recommendation of a professor. At the time, I was translating haiku from Japanese, and he suggested I take a look at Robert Hass' style of translating. It was timely advice for a fledgling translator. Hass' haiku renderings sometimes stray a little too much from the original meanings to satisfy the needs of scholars, but they are always clear, always graceful, and- after ten years of continually returning to the book- always fresh. I think part of the success of these translations comes from their colloquial language. There is nothing awkward about them, nothing in the language to draw attention to it as a translation. And aren't the best translations like that?-- unobtrusive, inconspicuous, almost like dopplegangers of the original. I believe so, and I believe these translations will have quite a long shelf life.

I loved this story. I hope Emily Wu writes more about her life and what led her to America. This was a beautiful story about how the cultural revolution in China robbed people of there childhoods and destroyed families. I intend to read more from this author.

Emily Wu and Larry Engelmann book "Feather in the Storm", an amazing openess of Emily Wu's life and history of China during the Cultural Revolution. The events that unfold carries the reader from youth to adulthood during a time of hardship and struggle which reminds us why hope and love is so neccessary and reasons to allow history to not repeat itself...

Feather in the Storm is a heart-wrenching and deeply moving story of a childhood lost in the terrors of Communist China. The story opens as three-year-old Mao, as she is known by family and friends, meets her father for the first time - in a concentration camp. Moved from family to family and from city to village, little Mao finds herself striving to learn who she is and where she belongs. Fed by her starving grandmother and protected by her outcast parents, Mao attends school and performs her daily chores at home without complaint, maintaining her hope for a brighter future.

Mao's father, a university professor who studied in America, has been labeled as an extreme rightist by the communist party in China. Cast out of the university apartments, Mao's family is sentenced to live in a tiny village so that they can "learn from the peasants," becoming better citizens. Here, Mao and her family live in a tiny mud house which melts away in storms, leaving the family exposed to the elements. Forced to leave home as a teenager after high school, Mao is sent to live in a remote village on the top of a mountain where she falls in love with a young man she is forbidden to marry.

Throughout all of the trials and tribulations Mao faces growing up, and in every village and town she lives in, she is able to make friends and gain the respect of her teachers and neighbors. With an undaunted courage to survive, Mao teaches the reader that hope can be found no matter what the circumstances. Surrounded by death and destruction, Mao creates a life for herself and embraces those who struggle by her side.

Author Emily Wu expertly captures the essence of what life was like during this tremulous age, and helps the reader experience the drama from a firsthand point-of-view.

Armchair Interviews says: Stunning read.

"Feather in the Storm" is a fantastic book. It is well written, and enthralling. I rarely get attached to a story, but I read it through cover to cover with only one break. I couldn't put it down. I am looking forward to the sequel! It is depressing but enlightening. People are really terrible to one another. There is a whole generation lost to the policies of Chairman Mao in the chaos. This comes to light in this true life story of Emily Wu's struggle to survive.

My wife and I met Emily Wu at SIUE while on her book tour. Her story was amazing, so we had to buy the book to get the details.

It normally takes me about a year to read a book, but this one I devoured in a matter of days. The perspective of the book grows as she grows. In the beginning it is written as though you are only a couple feet tall - the details are in the words she hears, people's feet and the underside of cribs and tables. Later on she gets taller and you start to experience more of the people around her. But, like the limitations put on a pre-teen, she can only see so much and know so much, therefore her story is limited to just what she could see and understand. You feel as though you are a child right alongside her.

Often I found myself trying to figure out what things meant (names of Mao's movements and doctrine), but that just muddled the story. At times you feel like more should be written about the backstory of the Red Guard, but if you think about the fact that she didn't know much about them at the time it leaves it all in that child-like perspective. She writes about what she saw and read and experienced as a child, especially her reactions to how it changed the people around her.

The tempo is well-paced and manages to catch you off-guard. It covers issues like capping and de-capping, the invasion of the Red Guard at the Anhui University campus in Hefei, book burning, cleansing of the "Old" ways, living conditions, food, suicide, female infanticide, arranged marriage, bound feet, class struggles, child-on-child violence and much more.

When you are finished, you will view your life through a new pair of glasses. You won't be able to go 5 feet without finding 100 things to be truly thankful for.

While T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" is what he is most famous for, "The Four Quartets" merit much to reckoned with. I remember the first time I read "Burnt Norton". I was crashing at a friend of a friend of mine's place at UC Berkeley. I wanted to learn how to be poetic, and "Burnt Norton" was great help with such a matter. It is one of my favorite poems.

Even though Eliot's stock had dropped somewhat among academics in recent years this text will long be remembered for centuries to come. It is through this poem that Eliot heals the "soul disease" of the Wasteland. In our own hectic life where there is so little time for pause, so little time for reflection, Eliot reminds us of the experience had, but the meaning missed or misunderstood. Those isolated moments:the moment in the garden, the moment at the beach, or in a secluded chapel at nightfall, restore to us our spiritual humanity. Those who regard Eliot simply as a bitter and misanthropic poet should revise this opinion of him by reading Four Quartets to see that he was a very real man, a flawed man, struggling with the deformities of his soul.

The Four Quartets by TS Eliot is a classic and should not be missed. It is of the type of poetry that evokes meanings from their hidden places in us through the use of word trails that are only partially logical. Our own emotions connect things, so when it is read, don't approach it with the usual straining to decipher the meaning. The ring of a gong lingers after it is struck, something of a parallel to how the poem works. Fascinating, too, is its approach to understanding the elusive sense of time, but it is couched more in the sensibilities of the East than the West.

Among all these reviews, not one comes to terms with the very title of this opus: Four Quartets. When was Eliot anything but precise in his choice of word?

The inspiration for these poems -- or reflections -- are the late string quartets of Beethoven, those numbered from 12 through 16. It is the 5-movement No.15 in A Minor,Op.132, that seems to have exerted the strongest influence, with it's famous adagio movement, which Beethoven inscribed as the thanksgiving song of a convalescent.

Actually, No.15 was the 13th in order, but the Quartets were published out of sequence, which was not uncommon in Beethoven's time. The Late Quartets progress from the classic 4-movement No.12 and add a movement to each work up to the 7-movement Op.131 in C-sharp Minor. The 16th and final quartet returns to the classic 4-movement form. There is an expansion of form concluding with a contraction and return over the course of 5 works.

Like Eliot's Four Quartets, Beethoven's Late Quartets reflect upon time and faith -- and the 'speech' is often plain: repeated phrases that appear stuck in a groove, hammered chords, cheap tunes that seem to be lifted from a band in a local inn; from long-breathed melodies that look beyond what Wagner and Mahler will eventually bring to music, to cell-like motivs not heard again till Bartok and Webern.

The 'learned' aspect of Eliot's verse can lead us astray, so that we are forever parsing the meaning of the lines. I am taken with the sounds he makes as I read the poems aloud, and the sounds he chose to convey what the poems mean are, in a sense, the essence of meaning. From the first I was struck by the sheer sound of 'time' in the context of these Quartets, which are Eliot's swan song.

This is a tiny book, more like a pamphlet, only 58 pages long with large print and some blank pages as part of the design. But it is mighty in its impact. These "four quartets" are four of T. S. Eliot's poems meditating (among other things) on the nature of time - time past, time present, time future...If you are of my generation and have read the poems before, you might love carrying this little book around just to dip into it for a line or two, and maybe understand something you never understood before. (T. S. Eliot is not always an easy read.) If you have never read them before, I envy you!

I loved all of these stories. They're so well-plotted and written, and Karin does such a great job of conveying laughter and tears. There was tenderness and anguish and just the whole range of emotions.

As a woman of increasing years, my favorite was "Hot Flash." Hate them during, but after...things can be good.

This wonderful book contains follow-up stories to Karin Kallmaker's first 10 novels and reads like a labor of love for all her readers, and probably the author too.

This book is worth the price of admission if only for one beautifully written story that I re-read on a regular basis. `Wild Things Are Free' is a jewel. It is the most perfect short story I have ever read (and I minored in English is college and have been reading for 30 years). Not to give any of the story away it takes place 5 years after the last page of `Wild Things'. Each paragraph and each sentence is perfect. The emotions are so strong it is as if the reader were in the bodies of the characters.

In Every Port's story starts 23 years after the novel ended and is a real delight, I picked up so many special moments when reading it a second time.

Touchwood is my favorite Kallmaker novel and the story takes up 5 months in Louisa and Rayann's most happy future.

Paperback Romance picks up 9 years after the novel ended , I enjoyed the short story more the second time I read it. I think I needed more Carolyn and Alison when I first read it.

Car Pool takes place 10 years later and gives a nice dose of the humor and love that is shared by Shay & Anthea.

Painted Moon picks up 8 years after the last page and gives the reader a nice POV from Lee.

Embrace in Motion takes place 3 months after that story closed and gives us all the payoff (laughs and all) that we knew these characters deserved.

Making Up for Lost Time's story I enjoyed reading more the second time, I don't know what my expectations were but the story was a surprise and I liked it tremendously when I read it again.

Watermark's story was terrific - a real WOW. It picks up one year after the close of the book and really packs a punch.

We get a double story for Unforgettable. Cinny and Natalie were very strong in my mind at the end of the novel. Their story is picked up from Natalie's POV and had tremendous impact for me. We also have Angel & Rett 2 years later showing how perfect they are for each other.

Sigh ... just a wonderful collection that can easily be read without re-reading the novels.

The stories are a delight and the prose wonderfully fulfilling, no surprise there, it had been like this at the first.

karin kallmaker could not have picked a more appropriate title. as a huge fan of hers this book just made me want to reread all her other wonderful books. if you are a fan of hers this book is a must have or must read.

For those of you out there who are fans of Kallmaker's, you MUST read this book. It's so much fun to see where your favorite characters end up. If you haven't read any of Kallmaker's books yet, read the other ones first and then get this one.

These stories are not really sequels, but continuations of and additions to all of Kallmaker's novels published to this point.

Most of them give more information about what happened to the lead characters in the novels. The first exception is Come Here
which expands on the characters of Judy and Dedric who are adjunct characters in Touchwood and Watermark. An excellent piece of erotica. The other is Unforgettable, That's What You Are which fills in and continues the stories of Cinny and Natalie from Unforgettable.

All of the stories give us information about events that follow the end of the novels.

A second piece of erotica (different from the well written sex scenes in most of the pieces) is Smudges which helps us explore the continuing physicality of the relationship between Lee and Jackie.

If you've ever wanted to know "What's next?" after you've finished a novel, this is a book for you.

You can't make this stuff up! Or can you? I laughed until I had tears running down my face and my stomach hurt. Richardson has captured southern humor or any kind of humor at that! Reading this book made my day better and thankful that someone like her can find the good in just about anything.

A great read. Perfect for the multi-tasking woman reading on the go or filling rarely vacant snippets of time. Quick, humorous stories that satisfy the need to read without bogging a girl down in a plot line. You'll love it!

Lucy Adams is the author of If Mama Don't Laugh, It Ain't Funny

If you want to forget your problems and just enter funny land...then read this book. I seldom laugh out loud while reading books;...this one, though, has made up for all the others. It's really truly spittin' chucklin' good.

I read a few chapters each night so I could guarantee that I would go to sleep laughing. Georgia Richardson (aka Queen Jaw Jaw) has been through it all and came out writing so we could laugh with her. You may recognize yourself and wonder why you weren't laughing when it happened to you. Thank you, Queenie, for your unique and Southern perspective.

It takes a southern person, a female southern person at that, to come up with the side-splitting situation Georgia Richardson relates to things which happen to us all, but which Georgia finds hilarity in it. And writes about it . . . hilariously. I read this book with tears in my eyes, because of such topics as "Dreaming of Elvis, Mel Gibson, Bob Villa." Because my wife has cataracts, I read it to her. She cried also. From laughing. You want to see how everyday things and everyday situations can bring a smile, then a snort, then a guffaw, then uncontrollable laughter? By this book and find out why