Malla Nunn
A brief but revealing Q&A with Malla Nunn, author of A Beautiful Place to Die, the first in a new series set in 1950s South Africa starring Detective Emmanuel Cooper.
Kate DiCamillo
Kate DiCamillo and Yoko Tanaka, the illustrator of The Magician's Elephant, discuss the writing and illustrating of the book. In a separate Q&A, Kate discusses The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.
Brigid Pasulka
Brigid Pasulka explains why she wrote her first novel, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, which is set in Poland during World War II, and in Kraków 50 years later.
A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl -- her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house -- is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.
From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together -- their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.
Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.
Book Reviews
Richard Russo
Kent Haruf's new novel Plainsong is nothing short of a revelation. I don't expect to read a better novel this year. Or next, for that matter.
Beverly Lowry
I read Plainsong in one sitting, unwilling--unable--to look up until I'd finished. Kent Haruf has given us a pure blessing of a book a novel of such sheer sweet amplitude, grace and humanity.
Howard Frank Mosher Plainsong is the marvelous story of how seven extraordinary members of a tiny prairie community--two dedicated teachers, two young boys wise beyond their years, a pair of wonderfully idiosyncratic rancher brothers and a pregnant high school girl--come together, in the face of great difficulties, to form the most appealing extended family in contemporary fiction. With Plainsong, Kent Haruf has written an American masterwork a profound, witty, warmhearted and tough-minded account of a place where family and community still come first. Plainsong is the best new novel I've read since Cold Mountain.
James Crumley Plainsong is a beauty, as spare and heartbreaking as an abandoned homestead cabin, always tough but humane, never sentimental. I loved the prose, as bright and hard as the winter sun sparkling off a sandy snowbank, and the characters, scrubbed to their essentials by the extremes of the Great Plains weather. It's a story that draws the reader like a heat mirage.
A spellbinding novel that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.
A novel on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.
Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle was "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly). Now, in Half Broke Horses, she brings us the story of her grandmother, told in a first-person voice that is authentic, irresistible, and triumphant.
A gripping and fascinating adventure of one young girl's obsession with knowing who her parents really were/are. The delving into the idea of ...
read more
I borrowed Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell from the library, hoping it would be a lively story of two feuding wizards. Instead, the author spends ...
read more
Borders to close 200 Waldenbooks outlets(Nov 06 2009) As Barnes & Noble prepares to close all but two of their B. Dalton mall stores by January 2010, Borders announced that they will close about 200 of the...
Full Story
NPR & ABA Partner to Share Book Coverage(Nov 05 2009) In a joining of like minds, NPR and ABA have partnered to provide thoughtful bestsellers and unique book coverage to readers, both on NPR.org and...
Full Story
Plainsong
Richard Russo
RSS feed
