Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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Book Marks logo Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Nicholas Dames on Rachel Cusk’s Parade , Chelsea Leu on Akwaeke Emezi’s Little Rot , Sasha Archibald on Francine Prose’s 1974 , Ron Charles on Julia Phillips’ Bear , and Chris Power on María Bastarós’ Hungry for What. Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Parade Cover “After reading Parade , you might be tempted to imagine the history of the novel as a cyclical battle between accumulation and erasure, or hoarders and cleaners. For the hoarders, the ethos is to capture as much life as possible: objects, atmospheres, ideologies, social types and conventions, the habits and habitudes of selves. For the cleaners, all of that detail leaves us no space to move or breathe. The hoarder novel may preserve, but the cleaner novel liberates. And that labor of cleaning, of revealing the bare surfaces under the accumulated clutter of our lives and opening up space for creation and nourishment, is women’s work. Or so Cusk’s allegory invites us to feel … This is Cusk’s negative theology of the self, a desire to imagine lives perfectly unconditioned and undetermined, no longer shaped by history, culture, or even psychological continuity … What Cusk has relinquished, as if in a kind of penance, is her curiosity. Even at its most austere, her previous work displayed a fascination with the experience of encountering others … Too pallid … The problem is not that Cusk has trouble finding a language adequate to her theory of the burdens of identity—the problem may be instead that she has found that language, and it is clean indeed, scoured so free of attachments as to become translucent. Parade wants to replace the usual enticements of fiction—people and the story of their destinies—with the illumination of pure possibility. As such, the novel seems designed to provoke demands that it won’t satisfy.” –Nicholas Dames on Rachel Cusk’s Parade ( The Atlantic ) Little Rot “There’s an art to depicting things going seriously wrong very quickly, and Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, Little […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
