Jenny McPhee

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Photo courtesy of a young friend and her phone

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The Isolated Protagonist: Three Novels by Orhan Pamuk, Jenny McPhee, and Laura Stevenson by Emily Grosholz THE PROTAGONISTS OF THESE THREE RECENT NOVELS are people who live in the periphery of society, and so seem also to live on the outskirts of their own lives, observing, commenting, never really engaging---with one exception. Though there is …

Continue reading "In Good Company at The Hudson Review"

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In my pantheon of favorite writers, Clarice Lispector is right there at the top.  She's a writer, like Muriel Spark or Thomas Bernhard, who always make me ask when reading their work: Is this allowed? Sometimes her prose has such power I am made to wonder if I have the strength and stability to keep reading. Championed by Elizabeth Bishop …

Continue reading "Two Stories by Clarice Lispector Translated by Elizabeth Bishop"

When film blogger extraodinaire Self-Styled Siren heard that Dino De Laurentiis had died on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 she immediately thought of the above clip from Bitter Rice--one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. De Laurentiis produced this film starring his bride-to-be Silvana Mangano. It was while viewing Bitter Rice for the first time that a tiny seed of inspiration was …

Continue reading "Dino De Laurentiis, Silvana Mangano, Lalli Kamenetsky, and My Novel"

Click here to play I came across this BBC interview with Muriel Spark on the magnificent Maud Newton's website. By way of self-justification for the theft, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, "Mediocre bloggers borrow, great bloggers steal." Dame Muriel is at her wry, witty, and subversive best here as it is obviously the only way to respond to her priggish …

Continue reading "Muriel Spark “I Accept Everything About Myself.”"