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Man in the Dark
By Paul Auster
To be “in the dark” is to be ignorant and vulnerable. To lay awake and brooding in the dark is to suffer the miseries of insomnia. Both variations on the theme are at play in Auster’s latest astute and mesmerizing metaphysical fiction. Widower August Brill, a retired book critic crippled by a car accident, is living in a “house of grieving” with his divorced daughter and his college-age granddaughter, who is heartbroken over the death of her boyfriend.
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Story behind the Story: Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath
By Jennifer Mattson
A full-length fantasy may seem like a significant departure for an author known primarily for her picture-book texts, such as Bubba and Beau, Best Friends (2002) and Oh My Baby, Little One (2000). Appelt, however, sees her first novel, The Underneath, not as a separate path but as a convergence of previous ones.
For starters, the distinctive structure of The Underneath, with its brief, lyrical chapters, came as a direct outgrowth of Appelt’s prose-poem memoir, My Father’s Summers (2004). It’s a format that she says reflects her “natural tendency to write short” (a predisposition that goes back to her college days, when, as a rhetoric and composition major, she considered a speech-writing career). My Father’s Summers, Appelt says, “gave me the confidence that I could write a novel in small, essential scenes.”
Another pivotal moment came during Appelt’s work on a follow-up to her short story collection Kissing Tennessee(2000). Among the story drafts she sent her agent was one about a boy, a cat, and a shard of ancient Caddo pottery (an element inspired by a real pot Appelt saw on a Texas history Web site). Her agent suggested that she expand the story into a novel. Appelt says that novels had always enticed her, but that her previous attempts had been dustbinned because she “could never figure out how they would end.” With the short story’s ending as a template, she finally felt up to the challenge.
In between the finished novel and its original kernel, though, the book metamorphosed. The boy disappeared entirely. Perhaps more significantly, Appelt found herself writing a fantasy, one that not only featured anthropomorphic animals (“I never set out to write an animal story!” she muses) but also had strong elements of magical realism. Appelt’s intense fear of snakes, she says, may have led to her creation of the ancient, shape-shifting serpent Grandmother Moccasin. After all, as a longtime teacher of creative writing, she tells her students that fear (along with love) is one of the “twin motivators” of storytelling, driving the characters and the writer, too.
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When Mr. Penderwick gets a letter from his dead wife, telling him it’s time to start dating, his daughters decide to add a prohibitive postscript of their own. Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks on Gardam Street is just the sort of cozy fare that’s missing in today’s mean-girl world.
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The Crowd Sounds Happy
may sound like an anthropological journey into the stands at Wrigley Field shortly before the beer vendors retreat for the day, but Nicholas Dawidoff’s memoir actually details a life loving the Red Sox, which makes more sense: they’ve actually won the World Series in living memory.
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While it may be too late for a certain senator to learn from Lane Smith’s picture book Madame President, perhaps future hopefuls will take note of how best to leverage the elusive teddy bear vote, or just how deep one’s piggy bank needs to be to secure the nomination. More importantly, great pictures!
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Read-alikes: Victorian Mysteries for Youth
By Ian Chipman
The rain-slicked cobblestone streets of nineteenth-century England, with ominous strangers leering out among the shadows, grimy street urchins, and cunning sleuths unraveling plots as sinister as they are labyrinthine, have long provided timeless and appealing settings for mysteries. The books below use such atmospheric, evocative backdrops and trappings as the keystone for thrilling tales, gilded with touches of fantasy and adventure.
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