The featured panel of this year’s LA Times Festival of Books was Gore Vidal interviewed by Richard Rayner.
This years Festival of Books’ logo was illustrated by Eric Carle who wrote The Very Hungry Catepillar.
Posted by Christine Palma |
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Filed under: Events
This was one of the finalists for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. It would have been my choice for winner. The writing is witty and funny and nuanced. Seven of these interconnected stories first appeared in The New Yorker magazine.
SYNOPSIS:
Ilka Weisz has accepted a teaching position at the Concordance Institute, a think tank in Connecticut, reluctantly leaving her New York circle of friends. After the comedy of her struggle to meet new people, Ilka comes to embrace, and be embraced by, a new set of acquaintances, including the institute’s director, Leslie Shakespeare, and his wife, Eliza. Through a series of memorable dinner parties, picnics, and Sunday brunches, Segal evokes the subtle drama and humor of the outsider’s loneliness, the comfort and charm of familiar companionship, the bliss of being in love, and the strangeness of our behavior in the face of other people’s deaths.
Posted by Christine Palma |
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Filed under: Book Reviews
Weighing in at over 600 pages, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is beautifully crafted, but in the end I had serious issues with the plot development; it simply goes nowhere. There are several story lines to follow, which start out promisingly, but fatigue the reader with the wait for a resolution. This style worked well for Johnson’s earlier book Jesus’ Son which was made up of smaller vignettes that played up a poetically sparse prose style. Tree of Smoke could definitely have been edited down 100 to 200 pages.
SYNOPSIS:
This is the story of Skip Sands — spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong — and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.
Posted by Christine Palma |
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