How Much of These Hills Is Gold
HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD C Pam Zhang juxtaposes nightmare with dream in her novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold. Her style is that of a dream, rising and falling in bubbling prose that percolates from page to page. The content, however, is something quite different—brutal, harsh, relentless, unforgiving. Reading How […]
Painted Horses
Painted Horses So many thematic threads appear in Malcolm Brooks’ novel, Painted Horses, so many ideas for mulling and musing. The romance of antiquity and of the old West, intersected by the reality of modernity and of industrialized progress. The scientific and emotional thrills of excavating and unearthing the past, balanced against the corporate sponsorship […]
Black River
A few months ago, Sunny posted companion musings where she and I both opined about the tempo and rhythms of Southern literature. At the time, I briefly suggested a comparison with the diction and syntax of prose from the American West, “where our cadence canters more crisply and our lingo rarely languishes at all.” Now I […]
The High Divide
Lin Enger sends The High Divide characters into a sequence of improbable, nearly impossible situations. The novel takes place in 1886, when the West was still largely unsettled and when a man might make something of himself, somehow, somewhere. On the first page of The High Divide, Ulysses Pope, married for seventeen years, father of […]