By Anna Fiore | On August 22, 2017 | Updated November 18, 2022 | Comments (0)
The original edition of Birds of America by Mary McCarthy describes it as “the story of Peter Levi, an innocent abroad, who is Ms. McCarthy’s Candide. In the fall of 1964, he arrives in France to do his junior year at the Sorbonne after spending a bizarre holiday in New England with his enchanting mother.”
Mary McCarthy (1912 – 1989) was an American author, drama critic, and political activist. During her lifetime, she authored more than two dozen books, and gained attention as a cutting critic who argued for the need for creative liberty that transcended ideology.
Her work is known for its precise prose and intricate blend of fiction and non-fiction. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On August 19, 2017 | Updated November 18, 2022 | Comments (0)
The Trouble I’ve Seen: Four Stories from the Great Depression by Martha Gellhorn (1936) is a book of four linked stories based on the author’s firsthand observations of the Great Depression.
They capture the emotional, financial, and spiritual devastation wrought by the financial collapse in America in the 1930s.
Unemployment, loss of hope, and abject poverty are captured by a woman who would go on to become one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On August 17, 2017 | Updated November 18, 2022 | Comments (0)
During World War I, Enid Bagnold was a member of the British Women’s Services. She served for about a year and a half in the V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment), as a nurse’s aide.
Her duties were to attend to the non-medical needs of wounded British soldiers recovering from wounds in the Royal Herbert Hospital, just a few miles southeast of London. Some of the injuries she witnessed were absolutely horrific.
A Diary Without Dates was written almost as a dreamlike prose-poem, portraying the suffering of soldiers, many of whom faced mutilation, wrenching pain, and death. Thus, it became a timeless commentary on the traumas of war. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On August 15, 2017 | Updated October 8, 2022 | Comments (1)
National Velvet by Enid Bagnold is a classic 1935 novel telling the story of fourteen-year-old Velvet Brown, the daughter of a working-class family in England.
Velvet is so horse-crazy that she indulges in both fervent and pedestrian fantasies — going on horseback journeys, leading horses to pastures, and simply grooming them.
“Oh, God, give me horses, give me horses!” Velvet prays early on in the book, “Let me be the best rider in England!” Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On August 5, 2017 | Updated December 29, 2024 | Comments (2)
From the original review in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August, 1935: Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart looks a wistful way back to the time of the horse and buggy, when some men and some women loved deeply and truly, made themselves miserable, and were attached to their misery.
Small towns, no less than Vienna and the Paris Left Bank and a Greenwich Village as dirty and noisy then as it is now, had romances of which they had a right to be proud.
It was long before Theodore Dreiser made every young couple paddling a canoe upon a freshwater lake American Tragedy conscious … it was a time when the rich Harry Gordon might mark Lucy for his own, because he knew she would do him honor is the wife and his home and because he loved her. Read More→
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