"Collision" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 16 Pages- Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 

"Collision" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 16 Pages- Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

Buriedinprint.com 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection, it is my hope to read and post on them all.

"In all of her fiction, Carol Shields excels at character creation. She conjures up a character in a few lines of dialogue, in a pungent authorial aside." Penelopy Lively from her introduction to Stone Diaries by Carol Shields 

"Collision" is the 31st story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted, it perfectly exemplifies Penelopy Lively's description.

"Collision" is an amazing story, not just two lives created in 15 pages but the history of how movements of continents create biographies.

I wish to quote enough from the story to give a sense of her wonderful prose.

""TODAY THE SKY IS SOLID BLUE. It smacks the eye. A powerful tempered ceiling stretched across mountain ranges and glittering river systems: the Saône, the Rhine, the Danube, the Drina. This unimpaired blueness sharpens the edges of the tile-roofed apartment block where Martä Gjatä lives and hardens the wing tips of the little Swiss plane that carries Malcolm Brownstone to her side. What a dense, dumb, depthless blue it is, this blue; but continually widening out and softening like a magically reversed lake without a top or bottom or a trace of habitation or a thought of what its blueness is made of or what it’s for. But take another look. The washed clarity is deceiving, the yawning transparency is fake. What we observe belies the real nature of the earth’s atmosphere, which is adrift, today as any day, with biographical debris. It’s everywhere, a thick swimmy blizzard of it, more ubiquitous by far than earthly salt or sand or humming electrons. Radio waves are routinely pelted by biography’s mad static, as Martä Gjatä, trying to tune in the Vienna Symphony, knows only too well. And small aircraft, such as the one carrying Malcolm Brownstone eastward across Europe, occasionally fall into its sudden atmospheric pockets. The continents and oceans are engulfed. We are, to speak figuratively...

Where else in this closed lonely system can our creaturely dust go but up there on top of the storied slag heap? The only law of biography is that everything, every particle, must be saved. The earth is alight with it, awash with it, scoured by it, made clumsy and burnished by its steady accretion. Biography is a thrifty housewife, it’s an old miser. Martä Gjatä’s first toddling steps are preserved, and her first word"

"

When We Flew Away' A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - by Alice Hoffman- 2024 - 192 Pages

 When We Flew Away :A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - by Alice Hoffman- 2024 - 192 Pages

Alice Hoffman works I have so far read:

The Marriage of Opposites- 2015

"Everything My Mother Taught Me" - 2016

"The Book Store Sisters" -2022

The Foretelling - 2006

"Conjure" - 2014

Aquamarine- 2001

The Ice Queen - 2006

Property Of -1977

Skylight- 2007

The Invisible Hour 2023

Rules of Magic- 2017

Practical Magic - 1997

Faithful- 2016

When We Flew Away' A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - 2024

The story begins in May of 1940. About to be eleven-year-old Anne is living in Amsterdam with her parents Edith and Otto as well as her 14-year sister Margot, and her grandmother 

 Her father had been a wealthy banker in Germany, but after the rise of antisemitism and the Nazi Party he moved his family to what they all thought was the safety of the Netherlands, one of the most tolerant countries in Europe. 

Anne and her sister attend schools that have both Jewish and Christian students and their lives are comfortable and happy. Margot is considered the beautiful sister (Anne doesn't mind) while Anne is the dreamer. As the Nazi Army begins its march across Europe, Otto regrets not sending the girls to England and is desperately trying to get visas for the family to go to America. But after the Germans invade the Netherlands, all hope of visas seems lost and there is no escape for the family. All Jews must now register with local governments, people they considered friends and classmates become enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi Party, men are being arrested and sent to concentration camps, and their rights are increasingly being taken away. Then the impossible happens. Nathan Strauss, Jr., an old friend of Otto's from New York City, writes to say all the paperwork for their visas in now in order. But once again their hopes for visas are shattered. There is some unexpected happiness for Anne as she meets a boy named Helmut, who's known as "Hello" because that's how he greets everyone. But Anne's happiness is short lived as Margot receives a notice that she's being called up for a "labor camp." The family has no choice, they leave under cover of darkness and go into hiding.

I was completely drawn into Hoffman's brilliant imagining of the life of Anne Frank Before she began her diary,  She loves to read, tries to keep optimistic and dreams of moving to California.

In a time when immigrants around the world are being vilified for all of societies problems there is a profound lesson in this wonderful book.

Alice Hoffman is the acclaimed author of over thirty novels for readers of all ages, including The Dovekeepers, The World That We Knew—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize—The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, Incantation, The Foretelling, and most recently, The Invisible Hour. Her previous novels for Scholastic Press are Aquamarine, which was made into a major motion picture, Indigo, Green Witch, and Green Angel, which Publishers Weekly, in a boxed, starred review, called “achingly lovely.” She lives outside Boston. Visit her online at www.alicehoffman.com.

Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings - 2020 -432 Pages

 Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings  - 2020 - 432 Pzge

March 16, Berlin, Germany 

February 17, 2006 - London, England 

Previously I have pasted upon two biographies of authors from Selina Hastings, on Rosamond Lehmann and also one on W. Somerset Maugham.

Both of the biographies are marvellous so I was delighted to find her latest work Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings available via Libby,

She had the bitter sadness of losing her much loved father when she was fourteen, and the misfortune to have to manage living with her mother Lisa,needy, selfish, anti-maternal, irresponsible, and later to be her carer before the drug-addicted Lisa was sent back to Hitler’s Germany for enforced detox treatment under the care of her own elderly mother, where she soon died. These difficult life circumstances deserve commiseration and sympathy.

 But throughout the rest of the biography Sybille turned into an amiable freeloading sociable partygoer, a growing authority on wine and an excellent cook and gourmand, who talked about writing a novel for twenty years before actually getting down to writing it.

As Sybille was so very, very fortunate in the friends who supported her throughout her life we have to assume that she was charming, delightful, fun and nice to have around. I can’t think that merely being an orphaned deserving cause would have been enough to warrant the colossal generosity and freely given accommodation, cheques and trips to and from the USA that so many of her friends bestowed upon She went through lovers like other women might go through hats or a pair of shoes, mostly women but a few men thrown in the mix.  

Hastings details the reasons for Sybille's hatred of her native Germany and her love for France.  Sybille in an arranged marriage, the himosexual groom was paid, was able to get a visa to England just before the Germans occupied Paris.  The account of her trip to Mexico was very interesting.  

Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, biographer of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Rosamund Lehmann, Sybille Bedford and, in The Red Earl, of her father.

She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize, the Spear's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.

The Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe —2009 - 252 Pages

The Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe —2009 - 252 Pages

Earlier this month a read a master work of narrative nonfiction  Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 

Through the Chicago Public Library I was able to borrow another work by Patrick Radden Keefe, The  Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream,focusing on the trafficking of Undocumented immigrants from China to the New York City..  The leaders in this enterprise are called "snakeheads"

"In this thrilling panorama of real-life events, the bestselling author of Empire of Pain investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown managed a multi-million dollar business smuggling people.

“Reads like a mashup of The Godfather and Chinatown, complete with gun battles, a ruthless kingpin and a mountain of cash. Except that it’s all true.” —Time" From the publisher Penquin Random House

 

Keefe reveals the inner workings of Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them. Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.

In 1993, a cargo ship called the Golden Venture ran aground on a sandbar off the Rockaway Peninsula in New York. The ship, which had set off four months earlier from Bangkok, had stopped in Kenya and rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach America. It carried a desperate cargo: 286 undocumented people from Fuzhou in China, who had made the voyage in the clothes they stood up in, without any kind of adequate sanitation on board, and little food or water. With the ship stranded offshore, most of the migrants, stick-thin and delirious, jumped into the freezing sea – it was 2am – to try to reach the promised land, the lights of Coney Island visible across the bay. Ten people drowned, the rest were picked up by the quickly scrambled authorities on the beach to be held in various prisons, some for four years, while they sought asylum. About half were eventually deported.

The Book goes back to Fuzhou China showing us why people would go into huge debt to try to get to America.  Keefe explains the complex international criminal conspiracies involved.  He follows the lives of the people who remained in America and those deported as well as Americans dedicated to helping them.

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter. 

Patrick started contributing to The New Yorker in 2006. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014. Say Nothing received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the “20 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Empire of Pain was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year. 

He is also the writer and host of WIND OF CHANGE, an 8-part podcast, which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and heavy metal music during the Cold War, and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly.  

Patrick grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts and went to college at Columbia. He received masters degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, and a law degree from Yale. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.  

Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2021- 633 Pages

  Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2021- 633 Pages 

"NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing." From 

After reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver set in Lee County Virginia during the opiod epidemic brought on by the actions of a pharmaceutical company owned by the fabulously rich Sackler family, I wanted to learn more about the causes and effects of the epidemic.

Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe provides in an epic work of narrative nonfiction is the essential work.

 

 The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Eventually most of these institutions removed the Sackler name from their walls not wanting to be associated with them.

Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.

The Sacklers spent upwards of a hundred million dollars in an attempt to discredit their accusers and avoid any personal impact.

We encounter people trying to help the victims of the Sacklers, ultimately about 600,000 deaths, employees of the Sacklers  (they did treat loyal employees well and top sales representatives making huge salaries). The Sacklers, through proxies, bought off Federal Drug Agency employees , offering government employees making $50,000 a year  ten times that to go to work for them if they would back away from legal pursuits of the family.

"PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing."  From Penquin Random House 

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio- 2020 -

 

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio- 2020 - 

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.

FINALIST FOR THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD AWARD • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, BOOK RIOT, LIBRARY JOURNAL.

According to recent data about 10.5 million undocumented migrants lived in the United States in 2021, which constitutes roughly 3% of the total US population . Despite undocumented migrants’ impact on US society and its economy (especially in the agriculture, construction, and service work sectors and by paying billions of dollars in taxes each year), their voices rarely receive a platform due to a mix of the need for protective invisibility as well as xenophobia and racism.

 Villavícencío begin with a gripping vignette set during the night of the 2016 US presidential election. The author powerfully declares that she “understood that night would be her end, but she would not be ushered to an internment camp in sweatpants” . The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency propelled Villavícencío to profile migrants in ways that would reflect her family who are more than either “sufferers or dreamers” . Stressing her collaborators’ precarity, the author elucidates her methodology for collecting others’ stories: she changed all names in the book, did not make voice recordings of conversations, and destroyed all notes and transcriptions . The end result is a work that skillfully mixes the genres of political testimonio, biography, ethnography, and memoir. Having lived as an undocumented migrant herself and not identifying as a journalist set Villavícencío apart from other authors, as she cannot help but get deeply involved and “try to solve shit the way an immigrant’s kids try to solve shit for their parents because these people are all my parents” . She is open about her own mental health issues.

The Undocumented Americans was a very revelatory work for me.  I had no idea Undocumented people, subject to deportation, were on the front lines in the clean up efforts at the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attack. In the author's account of the life of Undocumented immigrants living on Staten Island, I learned how vulnerable they are to exploitation by unscrupulous employers and how many were highly educated.  I was fascinated to learn that oatmeal, a staple of my diet, is considered as a sacred food by Vodou healers,  Villavicencio explains why undocumented Hatians spractice Vodou beliefs as part of an anti-colonial heritage.

In a chapter devoted to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan the author details how years of neglect and outright lies caused the many undocumented immigrants to be forced to drink water made toxic by lead pipes,  

Villavicencio focuses a lot on the heavy use of alcohol  by undocumented immigrants as a means of escape.  As a highly educated person many immigrants were leary about talking to her.  It was very gratifying to see how she developed close personal relationship among undocumented immigrant women.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans. Her work, which focuses on race, culture, and immigration, has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Elle, n+1, The New Inquiry, Interview, and on NPR.

The Book Lovers Library by Madeline Martin - 2024 - 396 Pages

 

The Book Lovers Library by Madeline Martin - 2024 - 396 Pages

The Book Lovers Library is the fourth novel  by Madeline Martin upon which I have posted.  

In December of 2021 I read The Last Bookstore in London by Madeline Martin, set in London during the Blitz years of World War Two. I loved this deeply moving vivid account of the impact of Germany's bombing of London on a small Bookstore.

Last year I read her The Libraian Spy set during World War Two in Paris as well as Lyon and Lisbon. Paris is occupied by the Germans. Portugal is neutral but in danger of being invaded. People come from all over Europe to Lisbon hoping to get a visa to go to America.

Last Month I read her The Keeper of Hidden Books, set, mostly in Warsaw during it occupation during World War Two by the Germans, centered on a library.

The Book Lovera! Library takes place in England during World War Two.  The library is a subscription based business.  I liked this book so much,  was drawn so deeply into the lives of the characters that I became afraid for them.

In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job. She and her beloved daughter, Olivia, have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she's left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots' Booklover's Library to take a chance on her with a job.

When the threat of war in England becomes a reality, Olivia must be evacuated to the countryside. In the wake of being separated from her daughter, Emma seeks solace in the unlikely friendships she forms with her neighbors and coworkers, and a renewed sense of purpose through the recommendations she provides to the library's quirky regulars. But the job doesn't come without its difficulties. Books are mysteriously misshelved and disappearing, and the work at the lending library forces her to confront the memories of her late father and the bookstore they once owned together before a terrible accident.

As the Blitz intensifies in Nottingham and Emma fights to reunite with her daughter, she must learn to depend on her community and the power of literature more than ever,

I really liked Emma's neighbours in the tenement house where she lived, her land lady Mrs Pickering with her adorable dog Tubby, the seemingly gruff older Mr  Sanderson, most of her colleagues at the ,library as well as some of the library  (I learned how a lending library worked, there is an explanation of them by the author)

You will love the ending.   One of the marvellous aspects of the work is all the novels mentioned, watching Olivia learn to love reading.  Ok and Tubby is a joy for dog lovers.

. Madeline Martin is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance with books translated into over twenty-five languages. She lives in sunny Florida with her husband (known as Mr. Awesome), two amazing daughters, and two very spoiled cats.