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Small things like these book review5/31/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() I personally didn’t find it heavy-handed or one-dimensional. I remember liking it during my initial read. I re-read this story in light of the comments above. ![]() I can’t wait! Please feel free to leave your comments below. Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human conflicts and the knowledge of how everything must end. When a shadow crossed, he looked out: a gulp of swallows skirmishing, high up, in camaraderie. A taste of cut grass blew in, and every now and then a warm breeze played with the ivy on the ledge. All morning, a brazen sun shone down on Merrion Square, reaching onto Cathal’s desk, where he was stationed, by the open window. On Friday, July 29th, Dublin got the weather that had been forecast. I’m okay if we get something similar here. This week we get “So Late in the Day,” a lovely title that would likely have also worked for Small Things Like These. I’m so glad to see more of her work in the magazine! Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was one of my favorite books of last year, and “Foster” is one of my favorite New Yorker stories. ![]()
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Marley by Jon Clinch5/31/2023 ![]() Years later, in the dank heart of London, their shared ambition manifests itself in a fledgling shipping empire. ![]() ![]() They meet as youths in the gloomy confines of Professor Drabb's Academy for Boys, where Marley begins their twisted friendship by initiating the innocent Scrooge into the art of extortion. But in Jon Clinch's masterly ( The New York Times Book Review) novel, Jacob Marley, business partner to Ebenezer Scrooge, is very much alive: a rapacious and cunning boy who grows up to be a forger, a scoundrel, and the man who will be both the making and the undoing of Scrooge. Marley was dead, to begin with, Charles Dickens tells us at the beginning of A Christmas Carol. The acclaimed author of Finn digs down to the bones of a classic and creates must-read modern literature (Charles Frazier, New York Times bestselling author) with this clever riff ( The Washington Post) on Dickens's classic A Christmas Carol that explores of the relationship between Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley. ![]()
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![]() “That’s it! We’re done!” They sounded off in a chorus of clucking hens. They’d stormed off the elevator as I tried to enter it, a flurry of daffodil-yellow silk, spouting and sputtering about their dear loved one, Tonya the bride. Her entire bridal party-her closest friends and relatives, mind you-had left her high and dry. ![]() An uneven script scrawled out “The Yellow Rose of Texas” across the top of her rump. The flag was distorted and stretched, as was the large yellow rose on the right cheek, both tattoos dotted with dimples and pock marks. The Texas-flag tattoo emblazoned across the left cheek waved at me as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. Definitely not ordinary, but not exactly what I had in mind. ![]() But as I stared at the rather ample naked derriere wiggling two inches from my face today, I realized I should have been more specific with my goals. ![]() “I’ve always said I didn’t want an ordinary life. ![]()
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My first summer in the sierra5/31/2023 ![]() Muir is touched by those wild animals’ vitality, valiancy, intelligence. The imagery in Muir’s work displays how animals and plants have a harmonious relationship with nature and reveals the beauty of nature by depicting these vivid pictures in the wilderness. ![]() Although he never explicitly states it, Muir tries to use the “wilderness” template - through using those linguistic devices - to reveal the beauty of nature and further convince the public to cherish the nature of wilderness. John Muir utilizes imagery, spiritual language, reference of deep thoughts of the wilderness, and diction emphasizing the insincerity of his companions and visitors from city in regard to the wilderness in his book. ![]() In John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra, the author uses “wilderness” template, describing the wilderness is open and boundless, to present his experience in the Sierra Nevada. ![]()
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The path to power by robert caro5/31/2023 ![]() ![]() "Turn every goddam page." Caro is a living national treasure and that's as close to a superhero origin story as you're going to get in journalism. Turn every goddam page." He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left. I responded with my usual savoir faire: "But I don't know anything about investigative reporting."Īlan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. "From now on, you do investigative work." "I didn't know someone from Princeton could do digging like this," he said. He motioned for me to sit down, and went on reading. ![]() Here he writes about what his editor told him at an early stage in his career: In this absolutely fantastic piece he wrote for the latest issue of the New Yorker, Caro details some of his thoughts and strategies about writing and research that have served him well as he's pursued the topic of power for more than 50 years. Johnson - the first volume is called The Path to Power. Since 1976, Robert Caro has been writing a multi-volume biography of former US President Lyndon B. ![]() |