I'm fascinated by how a fiction writer empathizes with characters whose experience is beyond his or her own. I was raised mostly in California. My high school had a slim white majority, followed by Mexican-Americans, then by Samoans. My father was a Congregational minister. After Sunday services he gave over his church to Samoans, who had no church of their own. Treating people of differing cultures is indispensable, but as I have aged I've seen that in no way should I appropriate nonwhite experience. It's a contradiction: One cannot not appropriate the lives of others in fiction. Yet one must define oneself by empathy for them. The hard-fought solution to the contradiction is compassion.
A remarkable book by the classic American writer. It is a novel, yet presents itself as a collection of stories. Faulkner explores the white history of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, but also extends himself to explore the Black characters that figure into the history whose true experience he can only have imagined. There are Lucas and Molly Beauchamp of "The Fire and the Hearth," the "Nigger" in "Pantaloon in Black," the part-Indian in "The Old People," Boon Hogganbeck in "The Bear,'" Molly again, and the doomed Samuel Beautchamp in ""Go Down Moses." The book is dedicated to a real person, Mammy, Caroline Barr, of whom Faulkner writes, "Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calcuation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love."
âI believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.â âWilliam Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize
Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulknerâs mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.
As was the fashion of the time, George Eliot took on a male pseudonym, replacing her true name, Mary Ann Evans. Typically she extended her subterfuge by writing about male characters whose names figured into the titles of her novels, e.g. Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Felix Holt the Radical, and Daniel Deronda. She had strong female characters, too, but it wasn't until her penultimate novel, Middlemarch, that she granted a female character, Dorothea, the center stage. There are male characters in this book, too: Dorothea's husband, the pedantic scholar, Casaubon, the physician, Lydgate, and of course the man whom Dorothea marries once Casaubon has died, Will Ladislaw. This is a historical novel, some forty years removed from its publication date. In it, Eliot regularly crosses the boundaries between female and male characters.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'One of the few English novels written for grown-up people' Virginia Woolf
George Eliot's nuanced and moving novel is a masterly evocation of connected lives, changing fortunes and human frailties in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; Dr Lydgate, whose pioneering medical methods, combined with an imprudent marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamond, threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from hisâŠ
Desperate to honor his fatherâs dying wish, Layken Martin vows to do whatever it takes to save the family farm. Once the Army discharges him following World War II, Layken returns to Missouri to find his legacy in shambles and in jeopardy. A foreclosureâŠ
This could be any one of a number of books by Black authorsâCharles Wright, Ralph Ellison, James McPherson, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin.... Through such writers the experience of Black people is made available to those of us who are not Black. I've chosen Hurston's book because of the directness and rawness of her language and her use of scenes which bespeak the ability of a writer to transcend herself. Most memorable perhaps is the scene in which the abused and thrice married Janie is attempting to port her latest husband, Tea Cake, across a lake driven by wind. A bridge is fully occupied and of necessity they swim. Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog. He contracts rabies and dies.
Cover design by Harlem renaissance artist Lois Mailou Jones
When Janie, at sixteen, is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams, who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds ...
'For me, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought, but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling pieceâŠ
This is the story of the character in the title, Huckleberry Finn. He is escaping home, his cruel father, and his old friendships. Part way along his journey he is joined by the Black character Jim, who is escaping his enslavement. They travel along the Mississippi. While the book has as its protagonist Huckleberry, it seems that Jim is equally if not more important. He occupies the boundary Twain crosses as the book ultimately comes to revolve around Jim. In the end, it turns out that the woman thought to be his former owner has freed him of slavery.
The plan was insane. The trap seemed to snap shut on Bruce and Maggie Tate, an isolation forced on them by the pandemic and America's growing political factionalism. Something had to change.
Maggie's surprising answer: buy a boat, learn to pilot it, and embark on the Great Loop. With noâŠ
Perhaps Winter In The Blood is Welch's finest novel, though I hesitate to overlook Fools Crow. Like Hurston's work, the language in Winter In The Blood is raw, simple, and to the point. In this book, Welch offers a caveat to whites when he says, "I have seen works written about Indians by whites... but only an Indian knows who he is. If he has grown up on a reservation he will naturally write about what he knows. And hopefully he will have the toughness and fairness to present his material in a way that is not manufactured by a conventional stance. Whites have to adopt a stance; Indians already have one."
I love this book for its honesty generally and its gentle admonition regarding cross-cultural adventurism.
A contemporary classic from a major writer of the Native American renaissance â "Brilliant, brutal and, in my opinion, Welch's best work." âTommy Orange, The Washington Post
During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, Winter in the Blood, is one of his most enduring works. The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted byâŠ
The action of the novel takes place in the American West, but it is not a "Western." Though its central focus is the life of Adaline Carson, the half-Arapaho daughter of the frontiersman Kit Carson, it is also not a biography. It is set in the time of the California gold rush, and is a graphic elegy for America's wide open plains, rivers, and mountains, and the people who lived in them, both for the good and ill. It is a vision of how greed, love, frontier mastery, and the doomed Native Tribes contended for control of this immensity, and how one young woman and her father were taken up in the resulting maelstrom that has become the American heritage.
6-book series set in a haunted roadside inn in 1821 Alabama!
Cassie Fairhope longs for only one thing: to escape her motherâs tyranny. Her plan? Seduce the young man, who is acting as innkeeper while her father is away on business, into marrying her. But Flint Hamilton has his ownâŠ
Who Will Take Care of Me When I'm Old?
by
Joy Loverde,
Everything you need to know to plan for your own safe, financially secure, healthy, and happy old age.
For those who have no support system in place, the thought of aging without help can be a frightening, isolating prospect. Whether you have friends and family ready and able to helpâŠ