On the Craft of Writing, for All Levels By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor INVENTING THE WORLD: THE FICTION WRITER’S GUIDEBOOK TO CRAFT AND PROCESS by Jack Smith (Serving House Books, 2018). 285pp, $15.95. Jack Smith’s essays on “the craft and process” of writing fiction have appeared since 2010 in either The Writer or in…
Category: prose book reviews
Book Review: Sweet Marjoram
Essays Inspired by Poetry By Joyce Peseroff, WTP Contributing Editor SWEET MARJORAM: NOTES AND ESSAYS by DeWitt Henry (Madhat Press, October 2018). 156pp, $21.95. I don’t usually write about prose, but Sweet Marjoram is an exception. In part, it’s because DeWitt Henry is a dear friend whose work I’ve read for decades. It’s also because…
Two Cosmopolitan Collections
Essay Collections in a Global Time By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor In the American Sixties, a writer’s “sense of place” usually referred to regionalism and immediately brought to mind Faulkner, Cather, and Frost. For English writers, the phrase suggested colonial displacements, such as E.M. Forster’s India or Joseph Conrad’s Congo. Since then, however, with…
A Special Sentence Structure
“Cumulative form fosters a rich, lovely, rhythmic prose style.” By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read by Brooks Landon. Plume: The Great Courses, 288 pp. Brooks Landon wants you to write longer sentences. His belief in them goes against decades of teaching…
Book Review: The Hidden Machinery
Ore in Every Rift of Livesey’s Apologia and Guide By Dewitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor THE HIDDEN MACHINERY: ESSAYS ON WRITING by Margot Livesey (Tin House Books, 2017). 301pp, paper, $15.95. MFA programs are descendants of the “how to be a successful writer” handbooks in the 1890s (see “Handbooks and Workshops” in Andrew Levy’s 1993…
Book Review: Heating & Cooling
Micro-Memoirs of a Life Lived and Imagined By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor HEATING & COOLING: 52 MICRO-MEMOIRS by Beth Ann Fennelly (W.W. Norton & Co, October 2017) 112pp, $22.95. Beth Ann Fennelly, poet, novelist, letter writer, and writing program administrator, tells a large story with her nuanced collection of “52 micro-memoirs,” some a sentence…
Book Review: Lonesome Lies Before Us
A Musician Finds His Voice By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor LONESOME LIES BEFORE US: A NOVEL by Don Lee (Norton, 2017). 336pp, $26.95. Don Lee’s fourth novel is a masterpiece, an anti-romance romance between a once-promising alt-country singer and song-writer and a once-promising photographer, both of whom have given up careers (and the lovers once…
Pain's Parallel Kingdom
Sonya Huber discusses her memoir Pain Woman Takes Your Keys By Richard S. Gilbert We are primitive in our methods, and the nervous system is a mystery. —Sony Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays From a Nervous System, Sonya Huber (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). 177 pp. $13.37.…
Book Review: In Sunlight or In Shadow
Writing Inspired by Edward Hopper By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor IN SUNLIGHT OR IN SHADOW: STORIES INSPIRED BY THE PAINTINGS OF EDWARD HOPPER, ed Lawrence Block (Pegasus, 2016). 288pp. $19.70. Mystery writer Lawrence Block had an idea. He had always loved Edward Hopper’s paintings. Why not solicit other popular writers to choose a Hopper painting…
Review: Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction
Traditional vs. Modernist approaches, Fine vs. Plain prose styles By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor LIVING BY FICTION by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial. 192 pages. The cultural assumption is that the novel is the proper home of significance and that nonfiction is mere journalism. This is interesting because it means that in two centuries our assumptions have…
Latest Read: Handling the Truth by Beth Kephart
The Medium and its Messenger by Richard Gilbert Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir by Beth Kephart. Gotham Books, 254 pp. Here’s three good reasons to read Beth Kephart’s book on writing memoir: her lapidary prose; her vision of memoir as an instrument of inquiry and transcendence; and her superb annotated list of recommended…
Review: Dani Shapiro's Still Writing
Memoir: the Personal vs. the Universal By Contributing Editor Richard Gilbert “Demons haunt your pages because they already exist.”—Dani Shapiro “Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”—Henry David Thoreau Neat sentiment, Henry David, and it seems apt for writer Dani Shapiro, who has…