By Nava Atlas | On July 27, 2017 | Updated November 14, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the 1991 HarperPerennial edition of The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing: This story of a family, spanning most of the twentieth century, has its fulcrum in the sixties, that embattled decade about which argument becomes louder each day.
The use of that time, bursting the old bonds and demanding freedoms, were seen by some of their elders in a manner not at all as they saw themselves, as romantic idealists, but as deeply damaged people.
Old Julia, the clan’s matriarch, knows why. “You can’t have two dreadful wars and then say ‘that’s it, and now everything will go back to normal.’ They’re screwed up, our children, they are children of war.” Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 11, 2017 | Updated March 15, 2026 | Comments (0)
From the 1983 University of Nebraska edition of The Troll Garden by Willa Cather: Willa Cather’s first book of fiction, The Troll Garden (1905) is a collection of her earliest mature short stories. Well-crafted tales in their own right, they are important harbingers of her future novels and stories.
The precise language, profound psychological study, and finely honed plots that characterize her later work are prominent.
Some important themes are apparent here even more than in her later work: the conflict between East and West, art and the artistic temperament in America, the accommodations that the woman (or man) of sensibility must of does make with society and with idealism. The handling of these themes is as sophisticated and relevant today as ever. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 8, 2017 | Updated August 23, 2025 | Comments (2)
From the 2001 HarperCollins edition of Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States by Zora Neale Hurston. African-American folklore was Zora Neale Hurston’s first love.
Collected in the late 1920s, Every Tongue Got to Confess is the third volume of folk-tales from the celebrated author of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
These hilarious, bittersweet, often saucy folk-tales — some of which date back to the Civil War — provide a fascinating, verdant slice of African-American Life in the rural South at the turn of the twentieth century. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On June 27, 2017 | Updated November 6, 2022 | Comments (0)
The Moffats is a children’s novel by Eleanor Estes, the first of a series of four books about a fictional family. The four Moffat children — Sylvie, Joey, Janey and Rufus — live with their widowed mother in Cranbury, a small town in Connecticut.
Though the novel was published in 1941, the story begins in the World War I era. It’s notable for focusing on a family headed by a single, working-class, working mother. Mama, as she is called, is a dressmaker.
Rather than being plot-driven, the book is episodic, with each chapter containing a more or less self-contained adventure of the Moffat children. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On June 17, 2017 | Updated October 19, 2022 | Comments (0)
Romola (1862– 63) is today perhaps the least known, and thus, the least read of George Eliot‘s novels. Yet in her lifetime it enjoyed much critical acclaim, though it was not a favorite of readers even back then.
Its dense language has tested the patience of readers from the time of its publication. But the author herself said of it, “I swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood.”
The title character is the daughter of a scholar, and herself well educated, which was unusual for a women in the late 1400s and early 1500s, when the story takes place. Read More→
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