The prologue to Pamela Duncan’s Moon Women (Delacorte Press, 352 pp., $23.95) introduces the best elements of the story that follows–a little anger, a little humor and destruction, and a whole lot of family. It begins with Ruth Ann Moon, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, seething on her front porch in her nightgown, waiting for a cheating […]
Maria Hummel
Posted inArt
Entranced
On any one street near downtown Durham, you can glimpse many different kinds of thresholds: porches clustered with sagging furniture, neatly swept steps with red-painted doors at their summits, screen doors that flap in storms. Each one is a preview of the house inside–yet not exactly part of the house. Entrances stand on their own, […]
Posted inArt
A Christmas story and other selections by Jill Collins McCorkle
Considering the similarities between writers and criminals–they both refuse to work normal hours, both have psychological hang-ups, and both end up ultimately locked up alone in a room–it is not surprising that authors, like thieves and murderers, are often infected quite young with their particular predilection. Novelists such as Jane Austen, Lee Smith and F. […]
Posted inNews
Freshly Pressed
In T.R. Pearson’s Blue Ridge, an old man named Lyle calls every night into the Virginia woods for his dog: “Queenie! Come on here, Queenie girl!” When his new neighbor and the book’s protagonist, Deputy Sheriff Ray Tatum, heads over to help, he discovers that the dog has been dead for at least a dozen […]
Posted inNews
Freshly Pressed
“I could never live in a place where I couldn’t get decent olives,” an academic friend once told me, her mouth pursing at the thought of a life devoid of such delicacies. She was, in fact, islanded in a Southern college town with a lone Greek market that struggled to make its rent in a […]
Posted inNews
A buried life
“The home of every one of us is the future,” Thomas Wolfe once said. “There is no other way.” Asheville’s literary giant, who stood 6-foot-5 in his stocking feet and who wrote manuscripts of such bulging proportions that his editors at Scribner’s sent wooden crates in which to store them, Wolfe had staked his whole […]
Posted inGuides
Fall-ternative
For centuries, quilts were an artistic outlet for women who did not have the time or opportunity to pursue careers in painting or sculpture. Quilts told stories, preserved patterns from previous generations and brought women together into collaborations both memorable and fun. In the past few decades, quilts have been recognized for the art form […]
Posted inGuides
Fall-ternative
Celebrity came easily to Fanny Kemble, born in 1809 to the most famous theatrical family in all of Europe. The Kembles ruled the dramatic world in England, but in 1829, when her father’s theater was facing financial ruin, it was his lovely 20-year-old daughter who brought back audiences and became famous for her spirited performances. […]
Posted inGuides
Fall-ternative
Aspiring screenwriters take note! The 10-year contract for the Writer’s Guild of America expires next May, and predictions are dire–that no scripts will be available for most of 2001, and anyone who sells one will be considered a scab by the all-powerful WGA. Studios are scrambling to put films into production before a possible year-long […]
Posted inArt
Before the song ends
In the opening poem of Alan Shapiro’s newest collection, The Dead Alive and Busy, the speaker’s “half-blind and palsied” father stands over the toilet, ordering his penis: “Piss, you! Piss! Piss!” The image immediately plunges the reader into the book’s most resonant theme, dying–the axis between the poles of life and death, where the mind […]