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Brief lives, a family epic, and an indelible adventure.
Beginning with The Good Mother, Sue Miller has built a career on novels about female protagonists whose comfortable lives are upended by the turbulence, passion, and ambivalence lurking beneath the surface of domestic complacency. Her recent novel, The Lake Shore Limited, addresses similar themes as a headstrong playwright watches her latest drama unfold on and off the stage. This week, Miller recommends an eclectic trio of books that share an attentiveness to the tragicomic variety of human experience.
The Outermost Dream: Literary Sketches
By William Maxwell
"The Outermost Dream by William Maxwell is a delicious book, a series of short partial biographies of characters as diverse as E. B. White and Colette, as Eudora Welty and Lord Byron and Samuel Butler's godawful father. Elegantly written by Maxwell in response to his reading of biographies, collected letters, memoirs, or diaries, these accounts of mostly literary lives are completely engaging on one level, probing and thought-provoking on another."
By Richard Hughes
"Cross a wacky seafaring adventure--Conrad gone awry via inept piracy--with an exploration of the consciousness of a child as radical and insightful as that provided by Henry James in What Maisie Knew, and you have A High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes. The tone is sui generis and always surprising--here lingering desultorily on the slow delights of a Caribbean childhood, there dispensing with the accidental death of a child in one short, shocking sentence. By turns funny, ironic, and brutally sad, this is a complex and astonishing novel."
By Helen Garner
"The Children’s Bach by the Australian writer Helen Garner is a family saga told in 96 brilliant pages. There is real drama here--illness, infidelity, abandonment, despair--but almost none of it is explicit. Garner's compressed, elliptical style brings us life as it's lived in those small moments that by implication reveal the larger story. As a writer, I'm amazed by this book every time I read it. And that's often."
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When a hard-drinking Sri Lankan sportswriter faces liver failure, he decides it's finally time to track down once-great cricket star Pradeep Mathew. Shehan Karunatilaka's big-hearted, madcap novel reverberates with echoes of A Fan's Notes and Netherland. A Discover Great New Writers selection.
His subjects range from the suicide note as literary genre to the theme-parking of the Holocaust. But though Mark Dery's "drive-by essays" are sure to court controversy, the writer's commitment to entering intellectual no-fly zones make this collection a daring, bravura work of cultural criticism.
With dates announced for his upcoming Old Ideas concert tour, we celebrate the inimitable Leonard Cohen: bard, survivor, legend. His most recent album is a return to form for the balladeer, exploring signature themes of lust and longing, spirituality and struggle, all overlaid with a droll sense of humor as familiar as Cohen's prophetic voice.
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