Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a timeless classic for many reasons. Twain’s wit and humor surpass almost every other American author. His moral clarity about America’s enduring troubles about race still instruct today. For these reasons, it continues to be taught in American high school classrooms. However, the story is told from the perspective of Huck, a white person, someone with inborn privilege. What would the story look like when told from…
This book shares two Chinese tales of romance, placed in the setting of the Boxer Rebellion in the early 1900s. Western concepts of love were just starting to take root then in China’s artistic community, and these novels portray the first attempts to integrate these foreign themes in Chinese society. At the time, marital love, based in centuries of Confucian thought, was grounded in families, not individual feelings, so Western concepts stirred the cultural pot.…
Sarah Morris faces a problem: After working for decades with one publishing company, she’s reassigned to work with lesser responsibilities. Instead of editing books, she’s merely tagging them – boring, repetitive work. Unfortunately, this reassignment corresponds to a weakening of the country’s economy and of the wider publishing industry. She has no way to go; she’s trapped. Her friends with whom she has labored in the trenches for years are now losing their jobs. Most…
Catalina is born into privilege as a daughter of the president of Guatemala about thirty years after the Spanish invasion. However, she does not fully embrace that identity since her late mother has native blood. Catalina’s promise to her dying mother was to preserve the Popol Vuh, a collection of native Mayan writings describing their spiritual conception of the world. Her father has ruled as a moderate who seeks peace between the native tribes and…
Claire Keegan’s tightly constructed short stories never cease to enthrall me. This collection poses no exception. Each story takes its own life. They do not take long to read, but oh, they take long to ponder! A couple of these stories are in other collections, but each one provided a treat at the end of a workday. My favorite in this anthology is the last story: “Night of the Quicken Trees.” It tells of two…
I have recently fallen in love with Claire Keegan’s short stories! This collection contains her earliest published works. Some of the stories are strange and leave me wondering what the point of such grotesqueness was. More than once, I flipped back through the story to skim it again so that I can understand the action better. Consistently, stories have a twist at the very end that makes each word of an entire meandering piece come…
Three friends get together to support their college friend Fern suffering from a seemingly incurable cancer. The friends, all writers, want to do all they can to support her, also a writer. Though Fern was the most financially successful among the group, they feel that certain negative comments from critics have shortchanged her literary career. As a parting present, they want to serve vindictive justice to her critics as a gift for Fern. What form…
Irish short story writer Claire Keegan here shares three succinct short stories to delight readers’ imaginations. Each of them bears her eloquent style with plot twists all the way until the last sentence. This collection has three stories about the tenuous relationship between women and men. “So Late in the Day” describes a romance as it evolves from courtship into engagement. In so doing, it comments on how the social mores in Ireland about marriage…
This short story tells a first-person account of an Irish child sent to live with relatives in the countryside. At the outset, she does not know whether she will ever return home again. She quickly discovers that her new guardians are kind and affectionate in a way that her parents never were. She grows to feel at home there… until something terrible happens to make her see her situation for what it is. Then her…
This tale, set in Paris, tells a sad story of an American man whose girlfriend is traveling on vacation in Spain. He meets an Italian bartender Giovanni and falls in love. At the time, such love is illegal in America, and while not illegal in France, it is culturally shunned. Renowned author James Baldwin captures what such social oppression can do to an innocent, loving relationship in that era. It ostensibly details a romantic tragedy…