A new collection of stories from Alice Munro is always an occasion for celebration. Her wry, conversational tales give us a slice of life, the life of someone previously unimagined by us but immediately welcome. Her women, men, children and teens mostly live in small towns or other semi-isolated places. Even when they venture into the city, as Ray does in “Leaving Maverley” to get care for his seriously ill wife, they remain within themselves.

I remember working on a dairy farm one year, when my friend’s father died and she had to leave college in our last semester to run the farm. When my classes were done, I went to join her, partly to help out and partly to learn about this way of life so different from my life in the city. What I discovered was the reason she sometimes went quiet, withdrawing into an impenetrable inner space. Once I learned to drive the tractor and use the milking machines, I spent hours in my own head, gazing out over the wide rolling fields or moving cows in and out of the stalls. My thoughts slowed to the pace of the rumbling tractor, and I found I could effortlessly turn off the chatter that used to interrupt my attempts at meditation. I learned to move through emptiness with the cool confidence born of habit.

Munro challenges her characters’ self-sufficiency with forays into emotional connections. In “To Reach Japan” Greta hires a sitter for her young daughter and attends a cocktail party for writers to meet an editor visiting Vancouver. She is uncertain how to talk to the strangers at the party, so indulges in a couple of unexpectedly strong drinks. Quickly finding herself too tipsy to do more than sit on the floor, she is rescued and driven home by a writer in town from Toronto. Afterwards, she does not know what to make of this experience. The plot continues to twist in its quiet way and delivers an unexpected ending. In “Amundsen” Vivien Hyde goes to work as a teacher in a sanatarium far out in the Canadian woods, where she begins to develop relationships with a young girl and the director. Both relationships stutter along, jumping about, keeping Vivien and us wondering how they will turn out. Again and again in these stories, Munro looks at that first moment of contact and what intimacy may or may not evolve as a result.

The real bonus in this collection, which I received as an advance review copy from the publisher, are the last four pieces. Munro says in a note that they are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, entirely so in fact.” Yet they form a consistent picture of a girl growing up on a farm in rural Ontario during the 1930s and 40s. These are a child’s perceptions filtered through an adult mind. At first they seem haphazardly thrown together, and the author denies employing fiction’s structural tricks, saying of a man mentioned once that “he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.” Yet they do function as stories, each building to a quiet revelation that the author—a trickster under her quiet demeanor—might turn around and deny in the last paragraph.

Like the best fiction, Munro’s stories take us into the heads of the people our lives brush up against and help us better understand and appreciate them. What is your favorite Munro story?

When I heard the title of this book mentioned during Tóibín's appearance at a local college last week, I knew I had to have it. I first encountered his work at a used tool and book sale in a small market town in the Midlands. Rows of long tables filled the town hall, stacked with old saber saws and wrenches, as well as piles of well-thumbed books. I picked up a copy of The Heather Blazing, intrigued by the title, and devoured it that night. I liked it so much that I made my book club read it, and they too thought it one of the best books we'd read. We're all Tóibín fans now and have gone on to read together The Master and Brooklyn.

I have heard Tóibín speak three times now, and each time been impressed by the gravity, thoughtfulness, and generosity that he brings to his art and craft. These qualities are apparent in the essays collected in this book, all of them previously published in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and other journals and anthologies. As a long-time LRB subscriber, I recognised some of the essays, but within the context of this book found their significance changed slightly, becoming deeper and widening through association.

In the prologue “Jane Austen, Henry James, and the Death of the Mother”, Tóibín introduces the approach used in this collection. He refers to a book I found useful: Ruth Perry's Novel Relations, in one chapter of which she describes the curious lack of mothers in eighteenth-century novels and posits both literary expediency—a protagonist will not be interesting if rendered powerless and submissive by the protection of her mother—and “existential necessities”—the absence of the heroine's source leaving her disconnected and alone. I first came across this idea of motherless children in Adrienne Rich's essay “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman” in Ms in 1973; to my joy, the article is referenced by Perry. Tóibín says that “the novel is a form ripe for orphans . . . mothers get in the way in fiction.” It is the development of the individual that novels explore, “when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no one to advise her, and no possibility of this.” He goes on to explore Austen and James's novels in terms not only of separation from the birth family, but in later works, the struggle within a marriage.

From here Tóibín examines the family dynamics of a variety of authors. While the second half of the book focuses on writers from around the world, such as Mann, Borges, and Baldwin, the first half of the book concentrates on Irish writers, such as Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Roddy Doyle. This layering of the Irish experience brings in influences beyond the extended family of parents, aunts and uncles to include Irish political figures and the fatherland itself.

I'm currently reading a novel set in Ireland in which a man talks about growing up among the elderly veterans of the 1916 uprising and Civil War. He finds it hard to believe that these quiet men and women puttering among their roses once raised fierce and courageous arms to reclaim their country. The best novels help us comprehend these individual journeys. At the same time, novelists are driven by their own concerns, creating “a metaphor for what is essentially a private ache”, as Tóibín says of Sebastian Barry. Tóibín makes suggestions but draws no easy roadmap, cautioning that “all fiction comes from a direct source and makes its way indirectly to the page or the stage. It does so by finding metaphors, by building screens, by working on half truths, moulding them towards a form that is both pure and impure fabrication.”

When the title of this book was mentioned last week, the audience laughed uneasily, and Tóibín drily agreed that it was not the best marketing ploy. I, however, thinking immediately of Rich and Perry and my own struggles to wrench free of controlling parents, wanted to purchase it on the basis of the title alone. Luckily I enjoyed the entire book. For me, these essays accomplished the highest purposes of such writing: they made me want to reread authors whose work I know well; they pushed me to explore the work of authors new to me; and they gave me insights that I can use in my own work.

Songs are stories, too, even when there are no words. Thanks to my friends for all the great music and for all the sweet dances.

Moon River, Frank Sinatra
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Edith Piaf
La Vie En Rose, Edith Piaf
Rose of Sharon, Jacqueline Schwab
My Wild Irish Rose, Keith Jarrett
Mcferrin: Stars, Yo-Yo Ma, Bobby McFerrin
Morricone: The Mission – Gabriel's Oboe, Yo-Yo Ma,
Lately, Aengus Finnan
Black Is The Colour, Aengus Finnan
Mandalay, Jeff Warner
Botany Bay, Kate Rusby
Arthur's Rose, Walt Michael & Company
Helpless, Neil Young
Remember Me, Willie Nelson
Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain, Willie Nelson
Blue Moon With Heartache, Rosanne Cash
Across The Blue Mountains, Suzannah & Georgia Rose
The Collier's Daughter, Schwab/Risk
Mad Robin, Bare Necessities
Bonny Cuckoo, Bare Necessities
Urge for Going, Tom Rush
No Regrets, Tom Rush
A Love Before Time (Mandarin), Tan Dun & Yo-Yo Ma
Bach: Orchestral Suite #3 In D, BWV 1068 – Air, Yo-Yo Ma, Bobby McFerrin
Adagio, Ludwig Spohr, Grande Duo Op. 11
Purcell: King Arthur Or The British Worthy, Wynton Marsalis

It was Atom Egoyan's film of The Sweet Hereafter that first brought me to Russell Banks. Those of his books that I've read capture that side of New England I came to know well when I lived in Worcester: the long winters, the gritty effort to get on. With this novel, we enter a different world. As it opens, wealthy Dr. Cole, his wife and adopted daughter Vanessa are celebrating the Fourth of July with their friends at the Cole's camp in the Adirondacks. The camp, of course, is a luxurious log home on a lake and is part of the Reserve, “a forty-thousand-acre privately owned wilderness” containing a number of such camps as well as the Tamarack Country Club.

The party is disrupted by the noise of a plane that appears over the lake, transgressing all the rules of the Reserve, and settles down on its pontoons at the Cole's dock. The pilot is famous artist Jordan Groves who has been invited by Dr. Cole to see his collection of paintings. Vanessa, famously beautiful but considered to be wild and quite spoiled, takes Jordan under her wing. Jordan too is wealthy, living on a three-hundred-acre spread not far away with his wife and two sons.

Circumstances change dramatically when Dr. Cole dies later that same evening, removing his flimsy constraints on Vanessa's behavior. The time is 1936, during the run-up to the Second World War. Jordan, a Hemingway-esque figure, loves to go adventuring to far corners of the world, but feels pressure to stay home with his family instead of joining the Air Force. The story circles around Jordan and Vanessa as they dance forward and away from each other, while suspicions grow about Dr. Cole's death and the country barrels towards war.

Interspersed with their story are short, italicised chapters relating events that initially seem to have nothing to do with the main story. Eventually, of course, all becomes clear. I'm generally not a fan of such mash-ups and loathe reading more than a paragraph of italicised text, so I was a little irritated by these chapters. However, I loved the descriptions of flying. I also enjoyed several of the minor characters, such as Hubert St. Germaine, a local guide, and Russell Kendall, the manager of the country club. I was far more interested in the lives of the locals than the shenanigans of the rich, but that probably says more about me than the book. I appreciated the parallels between the self-destructive course the main characters choose and the descent of the world into war.

I'd like to hear about other reactions to this book or to any of Russell Banks's novels.

I have often said that I was born with “the happy gene”. Other than during adolescence, a difficult time for most everybody, I have generally maintained a cheerful outlook. When bad things happen to me, rather than cursing my luck or sinking into depression, I usually think first of practical ways to ameliorate the situation. If that proves impossible, I tend to start thinking of what I can learn from the experience. Of course, I get outraged by injustice or dishonesty and am saddened by the trials of others or the loss of friends. I can also be quite grumpy if I haven't gotten enough sleep. But overall I'm pretty even-tempered. This attitude isn't the result of any skill or effort on my part. As I say, I just seem to have been born happy.

So I was surprised near the end of Benton's memoir to come across the same diagnosis: she too says that she was born with “the happy gene”. Diagnosed at five with Gaucher's disease, a genetic disorder that affects the liver, spleen, lungs, and bone marrow, Benton's life has been one of great physical pain and increasing disability. At 44, she was also diagnosed with Young-Onset Parkinson's disease. Blows such as these seem like a recipe for bitterness and depression, but Benton decided at a young age that she would “make the best of a bad situation; put a smile on my face, be cheerful and in good spirits.” Judging from this book, her efforts have been successful.

Her illness plays a very small role in this memoir. Rather, it acts as a backdrop to a series of gentle, mostly humorous anecdotes about everyday life. For example, she tells the story of meeting her future husband when, having torn his trousers just before an important meeting, he happens to duck into her office in search of a sewing kit. Some years later at the beach when she and their daughter became caught in a rip tide, he dives in fully clothed to rescue them. A perhaps not-uncommon experience, but she relates the story and her other anecdotes in a warm and charming voice. Although her subject matter is different, the tone of the book reminds me of All Creatures Great and Small. Rather than the experiences of a country vet, Benton writes about a woman's experiences—a “magic laundry basket” that refills no matter how often it is emptied or puzzlement over “one size fits all” clothes—and life events that we can all relate to such as the birth of her daughter and the loss of her father.

I was especially taken with the combination of humor and sadness in the description of the descent of her once strong and capable mother into dementia. She tells of her mother trying to change television channels with the cordless phone and repeatedly bringing in loads of laundry and rehanging them outside. I think this chapter appealed to me because a dear friend is going through the same thing with her mother just now and not letting her sadness prevent her from laughing at the often absurd goings-on.

When Benton does mention her diseases, she generally uses a comic approach. For instance, she describes the many bizarre uses she finds for the IV stand on wheels that she has at home to deliver the medication for Gaucher disease: holding ironed shirts on their hangers, drying laundry, carrying strips of quilting fabric attached with clothespins. She parses the the papers that come with her prescriptions, wondering if the caution to avoid operating heavy machinery could be used to persuade someone else to do the family laundry. She also finds a peculiar warning, that the medication could cause “obsessive compulsive shopping tendencies”, and concludes that it constitutes an excuse for a new pair of shoes.

Benton's purpose in writing this book is to challenge the stigma of disability. Too often, people seeing her in a wheelchair speak in loud, overly enunciated voices as though she were deaf or mentally deficient. Sometimes they speak about her in the third person to her companion. There is also the assumption that she must be miserable or angry because of her physical disability. Just because she suffers great pain or needs crutches or a wheelchair, she is no less a person with the same joys and sorrows as anyone else. The truth of this statement is amply demonstrated by her pleasant book. It is a light read, but I enjoyed the time spent in her company.

I'm taking a break from books this week to participate in the Next Big Thing Blog Hop. It is a chance for authors to tell you what they’re working on. The author answers 10 questions about their next book, and tags the person who first tagged them, plus at least 5 other authors.
I was tagged by Christine Stewart whose novel, Rose and Jesse, is based on a true family story. Check it out: www.therealwriter.com

Here are my answers to the questions:

What is the working title of your book?
Under a Pigeon's Wing. The epigraph is from Elizabeth Bishop: “Winter lives under a pigeon's wing.”

Where did the idea come from for the book?
A young friend of mine shared her plans to live simply—and I do mean simply—in order to have more funds to donate to worthy causes. While I admired her heart, I recognised that putting other people's needs/desires before our own is a common issue for women. Since my character is struggling to get out of poverty and has a child, her decisions have life-or-death consequences.

What genre does your book fall under?
Literary Fiction

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I never think about this! Hmm. Maybe Dakota Fanning, Sarah Shahi, Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Harmon, Helen Mirren, Linda Hunt.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Cat Kelly, a young, single mother, longs to escape the dangers of a life of poverty in a dead-end mill town but can't resist sacrificing her dreams to help others.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Not sure yet.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Still working on it.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Ladder of Years, by Ann Tyler; Abide with Me, by Elizabeth Strout; Affliction, by Russell Banks; Empire Falls, by Richard Russo

Who or What inspired you to write this book?
As a former welfare mother, as described in my memoir, Innocent, I continue to be drawn to stories that tell the truth about poverty, avoiding the saccharine Horatio Alger myths or the hurtful stereotypes. I want to celebrate the courage and persistence of the people I know who are just barely making it from check to check.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Humorous bits and eccentric characters lighten the drama as Cat tries to keep her new job, her tiny step forward, from being eliminated. When you're poor, even a small setback can be disastrous. Cat is lucky to be able to call on the help of her friends as she confronts one crisis after another. Then, unexpectedly, love comes knocking at her door.

More links to the next chain of bloggers/writers coming soon!

Kirra Antrobus's Thoughtful blog

This novel begins with 19-year-old Richard Issych waking up from a suicide attempt, his brain still fogged from the pills he took. With powerful prose the author takes us directly into Richard's mind, awhirl with disconnected thoughts, memories and worries. Gradually the haze diminishes and he realises/remembers that he is in a psychiatric hospital, persuaded by his parents to sign himself in. Everything about the place drives him crazy: the absurd rules, the nurses who talk to him in condescending baby-talk, the scary patients like Eugene who hears the angels and Joey who constantly paces and moans.

Most of all Richard hates being imprisoned. At first he is not allowed to leave his room. Then when he can venture out, he must eat his meals in his room. The nuances of life in a psychiatric hospital come at us through Richard's eyes. Frantic to erase his existence, he is stymied by the stainless steel mirrors in the bathroom, the absence of belts, the locked doors and constant surveillance.

Eventually he begins to make a place for himself, helped by the friendship offered by his roommate and hindered—he believes—by the visits of his willfully blind mother. Like a meandering trail of acorns, we find pieces of the lonely and isolated life and the barriers between him and his parents. In the hospital, Richard cannot remain isolated. He must learn how to forge relationships, not only with the doctors and inmates, but also with his mother and father.

Teen angst is not something I would normally seek out, but the power of Jacoby's prose and the emotional truth of Richard's journey are irresistible. As a debut novel, there are some structural weaknesses. Also, the stream-of-consciousness prose, used primarily in the beginning and then tapering off as Richard moves forward, may not be for everyone, but I think it works given the boy's fractured consciousness and difficult emotions.

Full disclosure: I met the author at a writing workshop a few years ago and am reviewing the book at his request.

If you liked Girl, Interrupted and wondered how a boy would feel in that situation, this is the book for you. The emotional journey of this shy and sensitive young man is leavened with humor and beset by fear, but in the end holds a powerful truth.

I picked up this novel about the three Andreas sisters, daughters of a professor whose specialty is Shakespeare and has named them after heroines from the master's plays for three reasons. I myself am one of three sisters and am curious about the shifting alliances and effects of birth order on these relationships. Also, like the Andreas family, I believe that solutions to all problems may be found in books. Finally, least in importance but first in capturing my eye, the cover features an attractive graphic and clear text, though I was a little put off by the title.

Weird here carries its ancient meaning of fate, and underlying the rather frivolous story of romantic and familial relationships are questions of destiny and choice. The oldest sister, Rose (short for Rosalind), still lives in the rural college town of Barnwell, Ohio where her highest ambitions are to marry her sweet fiancé, teach math at the same college where her father holds forth, and help her absent-minded parents. Bean (short for Bianca) lives a fast life in New York City, having gotten as far away as possible from sleepy Barnwell. The youngest, Cordy (short for Cordelia), drifts around the country following bands or simply the wind, part of today's youthful tribe of travelers.

The sisters are brought home by their mother's illness and by their own sense of having failed in creating their own lives.

Weighing the things I liked about the book against those I didn't like, I conclude that it is a good light read, certainly appropriate for the insomniac wee hours I spent reading it. I enjoyed the family's literary wordplay and apt quotations from the bard, though some people may find them a bit much. I liked the prickly relationship between the sisters: much more like my experience than those saccharine sisters in some novels. On the other hand the characters are rather stereotypical and the plot a bit predictable. Humor and some interesting minor characters keep the story from bogging down.

Brown employs a peculiar point of view in this book: a collective voice for the sisters. Hence, a good part of the book is narrated in first person plural: “How can we explain what books and reading mean to our family, the gift of libraries, of pages?” Even when we go into a close third person to delve into one sister's story, the collective voice sometimes offers commentary. Like a chorus in a Greek play, the collective “we” interrupts the story, interpreting what's happening, providing background information. This unusual choice is intended, I assume, to remind us that even as the sisters seem to be shooting off in opposite directions, they remain tied together.

For me it had a distancing effect. Just as I would start to get involved in one of the sister's problems, the voice would pull me out, hauling me up to the clouds where I could observe like an Olympian but not actually care very much. Still, it is an interesting experiment, and as I say, I stayed with the book to the end. Have you ever read a book using this point of view? What did you think of it?

Memory certainly works in mysterious ways. I was reading Abide with Me, by Elizabeth Strout, author of one of my favorite books, Olive Kitteridge. Abide with Me follows Tyler Caskey, the minister of the small, New England town of West Arnett in the winter of 1959. Burdened with grief, he lives with his young daughter, Katherine, in a farmhouse a little ways outside of town while his younger daughter, Jeanne, lives with his mother in the nearby town of Shirley Falls. Katherine has barely spoken since her mother's death and is struggling with school.

With a deft touch Strout draws the complex and shifting relationships of small-town life, alliances made and abandoned, even as she makes the reader feel the isolation of a New England farmhouse. I love the quick details that paint a character—a red knit dress, pink walls like Bazooka gum—and her descriptions of winter:

It was still October when the first snow fell. It came in the afternoon, light as white dandelion thistles being dropped from high in the sky. They took their time reaching ground, so light and sparse they floated. But there was a quiet steadiness to the snow, and by late afternoon, a soft covering lay over places where the ground swelled.

I've known snows like that. Strout's perception of her characters and her grave and steady use of the scalpel to reveal them rivals Anne Tyler. One of the interesting touches is the voice that starts the book and returns occasionally. It is the voice of a storyteller, some unnamed local person, who is telling you, the reader, about what happened to Tyler that winter. It shouldn't work, but it does. This is a wonderful book that I highly recommend.

Reading it, I thought, as I mentioned, of Anne Tyler. Because it was about a minister, I thought about Marianne Robinson's Gilead and Home, although this book is less about religion and faith than those two books.

And I thought about Ethan Frome, a book I haven't read since middle school. I remembered being bored by it then and dismayed by the unrelenting New England winter so vividly portrayed, not that that stopped me from later falling in love with New England winters myself. But I remembered the book being about a grizzled and cantankerous old man holed up in an isolated farmhouse with his young daughter, a bit like Tyler and Katherine.

Imagine my surprise when I started rereading Ethan Frome to find out that it is not the book I remembered! Frome is indeed grizzled, though only 52, and he does live in an isolated, New England farmhouse. The story also shares Strout's voice of being recounted by someone years after the events of the story, though here the narrator is identified: a visitor to the town of Starkfield.

However, it is not the story of a man and his daughter, but rather of Ethan and his wife, Zenobia, called Zeena, and her young cousin, Mattie Silver, who comes to live with them almost as a servant after she is left penniless and alone. Young Ethan meant to leave Starkfield behind, taking a year-long course at a technical school in Worcester, MA, but his father's death brought him back to the hard-scrabble farm and mill. His mother gradually drifted into dementia and his cousin Zeena came to help him with her.

It's a story of wanting more than you have, seeing your dreams just out of reach but grasping for them anyway. Although I prefer Strout's cautious optimism to Wharton's inevitable tragedy, I am glad I reread this book.

I recently started a novel with a lovely and intriguing cover, an interesting title, and glowing blurbs. Before I'd read even twenty pages, though, we were on our third time period and third set of characters. Maybe my attention span has gotten shorter, but that just required too much up-front work from me, and I discarded the book without going further.

I think this is one reason why I like mysteries: they stay closer to the classical unities than most novels. There is one main action: solving the murder. Mysteries usually are centered on a limited number of settings: a police station or detective's office, the scene of the crime, the den of the prime suspect. And they normally cover no more than a few days. Now, I'm not a stickler. I love P.D. James's books which sometimes don't get around to the murder till halfway through the book. I expect the detective to range far and wide during the investigation. I welcome flashbacks and the layering of past and present. But I want to invest myself in characters whom I'll be able to accompany for the whole journey. A series, like James's Dalgliesh series, offers an even wider scope for the journey and an immediate commitment to familiar characters.

This 1999 book is the first in Nadel's series set in Istanbul featuring Çetin Ikmen, a police inspector who smokes and drinks brandy steadily throughout the day leaving a trail of nasty overfull ashtrays and empty bottles littering his office. His sergeant Mehmet Süleyman, a pretty boy who is trying to resist the marriage arranged by his overbearing mother, tries to tidy up after his boss but only succeeds in making a bigger mess. They are called in to a particularly brutal murder in an impoverished section of town. The gruesome details of the murder of an elderly Jewish man have neo-Nazi overtones, a shocking development in Istanbul's relatively tolerant culture.

Much of the story follows Robert Cornelius, an Englishman teaching in a local school. Cornelius reminded me of the acronym from Old Filth: failed in London; try Hong Kong. The students in his Istanbul classroom may be bored and lazy, but at least they are not vicious like the British schoolboys who sent him packing. Cornelius is walking home from his classes when he spies his bafflingly remote girlfriend sneaking out of a building, the building which he later learns is the scene of the murder.

This is Nadel's first book, so some awkwardness in the writing and pacing may perhaps be forgiven. The Istanbul settings are vividly drawn, the author having spent much time in Turkey. There are plenty of plot twists, the last one being a bit too far-fetched for me, but not impossible. Nadel has gone on to write 14 more books in the Ikmen series, along with five other books in two more series, all of which seem to be quite popular, so clearly she has perfected her craft. And even with this first book, hey, I finished it!

Yes, I was sufficiently engaged to stay with it, although I did not find Ikmen appealing and was dismayed about halfway through the book to find him turning to mysticism for answers. What interested me about him were his family. His devotion to his wife, Fatma, pregnant with their ninth child, at first seems incomprehensible given her coldness and constant disapproval, but later scenes reveal a tenderness between them that touched me. Ikmen's father lives with them, angry and complaining most of the time, but helping with the children when asked and revealing a wealth of knowledge when consulted by his son. Their mutual respect amid the difficulties of old age and relative poverty is brought out with great subtlety.

Will I read more books in the series? Perhaps. I certainly enjoyed the settings, having gone through a little Istanbul phase a few years ago. The next time I discard a disappointing novel, I will be happy to turn to a book like this.