Writers Recommend: September 2008 Archives

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've asked our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. In our third installment of the series, we hear book recommendations from Valerie Martin, Chantel Acevedo, and John Wray.

• Valerie Martin has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kafka Prize, and Britain's Orange Prize:
    "I can't recommend Barry Unsworth's Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger highly enough. It follows the passage of a doomed slave ship from Liverpool to Guinea to a strange and wonderful Utopia on the Florida coast where women, for better or worse, briefly get to run the show. Unsworth's new novel, Land of Marvels, takes place in Mesopotamia just before World War I, when it has dawned on the West that the oil is in the Middle East. This novel is both a thriller and a timely cautionary tale; not to be missed.
    Of my own books I'd choose Property, a novel narrated by a slave-owning woman in Louisiana circa 1820. I like to describe it as a tour of hell with a guide who works for the management. I'd also choose Salvation, a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, constructed of visual scenes from the saint's life which travel backward in time from his macabre death to his delirious moment of 'conversion' as a young bourgeois in 13th century Assisi."

• Chantel Acevedo teaches English at Auburn University. Oscar Hijuelos called her first novel "enchanting:"
    "Marilynne Robinson's Gilead should be required reading among writers. This spare and graceful book set in the 1950's about a minister with a secret teaches us that a historic backdrop doesn't have to pound readers on the head. Rather, it can serve as a quiet and powerful canvas.
    My debut novel Love and Ghost Letters focuses on Cuba before Fidel Castro, a time fraught with political upheaval. While the characters are wholly wrapped up in their own complex relationships, the march of history impacts their lives, despite their desire to tune it out."

• John Wray was selected by Granta as one the twenty best American novelists under thirty-five:
    "While both of my novels could be considered historical, I think Canaan's Tongue might be most interesting in the context of this seminar, due to the extreme liberties it takes with its historical subject matter. Its ostensible subject– the outlaw James Murrel and his vast criminal empire– was for me, first and foremost, a way to write about current American politics. How well suited is historical fiction to social and political protest? How much room for experimentation do the confines of the genre permit?"

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've asked our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. In round 2 of this ongoing series, we hear book recommendations from Samantha Hunt, Megan Marshall, and KWLS board member Robert Richardson:

• Samantha Hunt is the author of two novels, numerous pieces of short fiction, essays, and a play about the life of Charles Babbage:
    "I recommend Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever– a beautiful book that skips through the centuries, where each story comes down to the passionate love of both science and the natural world. From my own work, I'd recommend, The Invention of Everything Else, which is a novel about Nikola Tesla, America's most forgotten inventor. The book is set at the Hotel New Yorker in 1943 but travels as far as Croatia in the 1850s, Colorado Springs in the 1890s, and even a little bit into the future."

• As a reviewer for the Radcliffe Quarterly, Megan Marshall had the chance to comment on recent works by three fellow Seminar speakers.
     About Geraldine Brooks's The People of the Book: "Brooks shows her respect for history not by preserving or even re-creating but by imagining, filling in gaps and silences, creating and solving mysteries, thoroughly informed by but never in thrall to fact."
     On Jane Kamensky's The Exchange Artist: "... In place of the Puritan 'city upon a hill" has risen a Boston of scheming businessmen whose paper-money trails Kamensky tracks with relentless cunning. A gifted storyteller, she employs every tool of the historian's trade ... to bring a lost building and its era back to life."
    And on Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: "... Above all, Horwitz is determined to confront the past in as material a form as it can be located in the present. In so doing, he gently reminds his readers how much of history is readily available to all of us, if we would only think to look and ask."
    Marshall herself is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, about which biographer and KWLS board member, Robert Richardson has written: "Vivid and well written, it combines domestic, cultural, and intellectual history with the skill of a novelist in a book that reads, at times, like an American Middlemarch."

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've asked our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. We begin this recurring feature with historians Eric Foner and Jill Lepore, and novelist and critic Thomas Mallon.

• Eric Foner has been president of each of the three major professional historical organizations: the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians. He told us about two of his books:

     "Number one: The Story of American Freedom (1999): The title is meant to imply that freedom is both an actual history and a mythology in this country (for what is a story anyway?), which links perhaps to the theme of history and fiction.
     Number two: Forever Free (2006): Because no period of American history is more mythologized or fictionalized in popular imagination than the Civil War and Reconstruction."

• Thomas Mallon is an Ingram Merrill Award winner, and a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. In our recent interview, he revealed his favorites by fellow Session 2 panelists William Kennedy and Gore Vidal:

     "Politics is done very badly– and not all that often– in American historical fiction. But William Kennedy's Roscoe (2002), all about long-ago municipal machinations in Albany, is a terrific novel, better and more layered than The Last Hurrah (written by Edwin O'Connor in 1956), which I suppose would be its closest cousin. And I think Lincoln (2000) is the most artful of all Gore Vidal's novels, a brilliant exercise in multiple viewpoints and tonal control. Vidal's contribution to this whole genre is quite crucial and under-credited. He brought wit into American historical fiction– a quality it had been devoid of throughout the first half of the 20th century, when most of it was elephantine costume drama."

• From Jill Lepore, chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program and a regular contributor to The New Yorker whose novel, Blindspot, written jointly with panelist Jane Kamensky, is due out in December, we learned about two of her history books:

     "The Name of War (1998) is a history of a seventeenth-century war that's also a meditation on how we write about war, scrutinizing what's at stake in how war stories are told, what truths those stories uncover, and what truths they mask.

     New York Burning (2005) is an inquiry into the 'Great Negro Plot' of 1741, in which New York City's slaves were tried, and burned at the stake. It looks at the asymmetry of the historical record. Can coerced slave 'confessions' be trusted?"