Miss Fuller
For anyone who loves nineteenth-century American literature, and I do, April Bernard’s Miss Fuller: A Novel catches the quasi-archaic tone perfectly. Bernard’s characters understand exactly how they’re supposed to write and think. One calls Margaret Fuller’s prose “somehow vegetal, vine-like, even mouldy,” then almost contradicts herself a few pages later when she responds to “the […]
date of disappearance assorted stories
Let me preface this review by saying that I’m not a great fan of short stories. That’s a result, I think, of teaching too many sophomore survey English courses where short fiction dominated every textbook every year. And too often they were the same stories—penned by Hawthorne and Hemingway and a handful of others—over and […]
A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses
This book, a mere 146 pages of text, is jam-packed with wonderfully offbeat information about a variety of American writers and their homes, now designated museums. Trubeck’s purpose in writing the book was to “expose not simply Whitman’s house, but all of the writers’ house museums as the frauds I believed them to be.” What […]