Category: Fiction
-
#2 – Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen – 2022 Best Reads
Audacity. That’s the word that came to mind as I gawked my way through Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Crossroads. The man has no compunctions about burrowing straight to the heart of characters like a Navajo man wary of visiting do-gooders to the reservation and a mid-life woman trying to put together her previous life and…
-
#3 – The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell – 2022 Best Reads
Maggie O’Farrell’s breakthrough novel, Hamnet, which was named a New York Times ten best in 2020, didn’t do it for me. I appreciated the gorgeous details of life in Shakespeare’s England, but the connection to Shakespeare himself seemed tenuous at best. However, The Marriage Portrait, O’Farrell’s follow-up novel, hit the sweet spot, even though she…
-
#4 – Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby – 2022 Best Reads
This is the first crime thriller I’ve ever put in the Top Ten, but I got hooked on S.A. Cosby this year. His books are crackling page-turners filled with similes and energy. And, o yes, violence. There’s a lot of that, too. Cosby attracted my attention because he’s a Virginia native and aspires to the…
-
#7 – Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty – 2022 Best Reads
So much has gone wrong on the Penobscot reservation in rural Maine. Read these fictional short stories by Morgan Talty and it’s hard to get past the poverty and pain along with the sense that the whole place is so marginal as to seem the backside of nowhere. But the place is haunted by things…
-
Glorious Excess: S.A. Cosby and the Future of Southern Fiction
S.A. Cosby knows that he’s prone to excess. He told The Guardian as much in an interview last year: “I write long sentences. I like similes (maybe too much, according to some reviewers). I like to write esoterically. I pontificate and wax poetic in the middle of gunfights. That’s my style.” –S.A. Cosby In his…
-
The Audacity of Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads
It’s hard to know where to start when talking about Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads. Do you start with the audacity? Franzen ripping across the page, delving into the minds of female and Native American characters with abandon and heedless of the caution so much of contemporary literature has fallen prey to? How about the…
-
#1 & a Recap:The Heartlands Best Reads of 2021
George Saunders is our first time two-time recipient of the much-coveted Heartlands Best Reads award. Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo haunted and charmed back in 2017, but it was his master class on storytelling that captivated me this year. Saunders is a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University and he has influenced a generation…
-
#3 – My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson – 2021 Best Reads
Moving back to my old hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2021, I was aware that a lot had changed since I left 16 years ago. No book chronicled and processed those changes better than the debut collection of stories by Charlottesville writer Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. My Monticello, particularly the included novella with…
-
Who Needs Shakespeare? Hamnet Surely Doesn’t
The buzz over Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague has been wildly positive. The New York Times declared it one of its 10 best of 2020. The National Book Critics Circle named it the best work of fiction of the year. I’m not here to say they’re wrong about the quality of the…
-
Carson McCullers at 104
“Mick is perhaps the most outstanding character in the book.” Carson McCullers is describing a central character in her remarkable debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. “At the beginning of the second part of the work she steps out boldly—and from then on, up until the last section, she commands more space and…
Heartlands 