“Stone Animals” by Kelly Link - A Short Story - included in Magic for Beginners - 2006

 

“Stone Animals” by Kelly Link - A Short Story - included in Magic for Beginners - 2006

Kelly Link was a 2018 MacArthur Genius Grant winner.  The announcement on the MacArthur Website has a very good over view of her importance.

Website  of Kelly Link- Today’s story and several others are linked here.

My post from May 22, 2015 on “Valley of the Girls” by Kelly Link

Seven years ago i first read a story by Kelly Link, two years ago I read her “The Fairy Handbag”.  

“Stone Animals” starts out as a mainstream family life story.  A married couple, mid-thirties, with a two young children are preparing  to move from their apartment to their first house. The children are apprehensive, the adults excited. He works in real estate, she stays home. Things slowly get very strange.

The new house has two stone animals at the entrance.  The yard has a lot of wild rabbits.  You may never look at rabbits the same way after this story.

I just do not want go too much into this tremendously fun, thought provoking story.  The more I got into it, fifty four pages, the more intrigued I became and I want others to have this opporunity. 

I also read this month from the same collection, “Catskin”, which enthralled me.  A great Witch story. I still have six stories left to read in Magic for Beginners as well as eight in her second collection, Get in Trouble.

“Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter, dog, and chickens in Northampton, Massachusetts.” From Kellylink.net

Mel Ulm

“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Nikolai Leskov - 1864 - included in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Selected Stories by Nikolai Leskov - 2020- with an Introution by Donald Rayfield- translated by Robert Chandler

“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”  by Nikolai Leskov - 1864 - included in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and other Stories by Nikolai Leskov - 2020- with an Introduction by Donald Rayfield- translated by Robert Chandler 

Nikolai Leskov 

Born February 4, 1831 in Oryol Oblast, located in Western Russia 

Died March 5, 1895 in St. Petersburg, Russia 

He lived for eight years in Kiev where he began to write for Ukrainian and Russian publications.  His wife was born in Kiev.

The collection also includes The Enchanted Wanderer and The Steel Flea as well as three other works besides Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

“NOW AND again in these parts you come across people so remarkable that, no matter how much time has passed since you met them, it is impossible to recall them without your heart trembling. One such person was Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, a merchant’s wife who was once the center of a drama so terrible that our local gentry, taking their cue from someone’s lighthearted quip, took to calling her Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”

As Robert Rayfield says in his very well done introduction, Leskov, as did Turgenev, recast famous Shakespeare characters in Russia.

I was shocked by muderous brutality of the central female character in this story, a woman consumed by jealousy.  

Katrina is bored with her life as the wife of a lumber merchant, much older than herself. He is away most of the time.  She starts a romance with one of her husband’s workers. When Katrina’s father in Law later finds them in bed together, a fight ensues in which Katrina and the man kill him.  They bury him Right away so no one can see his wounds.  From this two more murders follow. Bringing about a trip to Siberia for Katrina and her lover.

Levkov vividly brings to the plot the pervasive corruption in Russia.  People are out for themselves only.

Chekhov and Tolstoy greatly admired the work of Leskov.

“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”  is a masterwork.  I look Forward to reading more by Nikolai Leskov.

Mel Ulm

 

Father by Elizabeth Von Arnim - 1931- British Library Women Writers Edition - 2020 with a Preface by Lucy Evans and an Afterword by Simon Thomas - 256 Pages

Father by Elizabeth Von Arnim - 1931- British Library Women Writers Edition - 2020 with a Preface by Lucy Evans and an Afterword by Simon Thomas - 256 Pages

“Part of a curated collection of forgotten works by early to mid-century women writers, the British Library Women Writers series highlights the best middlebrow fiction from the 1910s to the 1960s, offering escapism, popular appeal and plenty of period detail to amuse, surprise and inform.”  From The British Library

There are currently 15 works in the British Library Women Writers Series.  I am hoping to read through them in 2022. Most are fairly brief  and all include author bios and expert commentaries.  The Kindle Editions are under $4.00.

British Women Library Women Series Works I have so far read

Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes -1935

The Love Child by Edith Olivier - 1927

Tea is So Intoxicating by Ursula Bloom (writing as Mary Essex)- 1950

Father by Elizabeth Von Armin - 1931

Elizabeth Von Armin

Born: August 31, 1866, Kirribilli, Australia 

Moved with Family to London 1869, age three

She moved to The United States in 1939 at The Inception of World War Two

Died: February 9, 1941 Charleston, South Carolina,USA

Katherine Mansfield was her cousin.  Her second husband was the brother of Bertrand Russell.

She was a prolific highly regarded very succesful author.

Father centers on two oppresive domestic relationships.

Jennifer Dodge, 33 and a spinister is totally dominated by her widowed father, Richard Dodge.  The father is a well known author, notorious in rural England for his anti-clerical views.

The father is very selfish and sees it as Jennifer’s duty to cater to his needs while looking down on her as a burden.

“it was every woman’s duty to make the best of herself, and Jennifer’s not doing so no doubt accounted for the fact that she was still on his hands. Off those hands she ought, of course, to have been long ago; yet if some man had reft her from him before he was ready, as now, for her to go, it would have been extremely awkward, father knew; he couldn’t have run his house without her; his work would have suffered considerably; In fact he was unable to imagine what would have become of him.”

Then a shocking event occurs, her father marries a 19 year old girl. Jennifer, having an annual income from her mother on  which she can get by, moves out when her father is away on his honeymoon.

Jennifer, after a hilarious misadventure, it may not sound like it but Father is very funny in sad way, rents a cottage from a mild mannered vicar, James Ollier.  He is totally dominated by his older spinister sister Alice.  After accepting six months rent in advance, Alice begins to worry that her brother may fall in love with Jennifer.

There are numerous very surprising plot twists.  Things you never expected happen, lives change forever.  

I throughly enjoyed this book.  The account of marriage of Richard Dodge from the point of view of his 19 year old bride, told on a visit to Jennifer, is pretty shocking for 1931.

Next I will read O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith.

Mel Ulm

 

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades -2022- A Novel - 224 Pages

 I first encountered the work of Daphne Palasi Andreades in The Best Short Stories 2021- The O. Henry Prize Winners - guest edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  Her debut novel Brown Girls has it origins in her Short Story of that name included in this collection.

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades -2022- Her Debut Novel - 224 Pages

I first encountered the work of Daphne Palasi Andreades in The Best Short Stories 2021- The O. Henry Prize Winners guest edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  Her debut novel Brown Girls has it origins in her Short Story of that name included in the collection.

Website of Daphne Palasi Andreades - contains a link to her Short Story “Brown Girls”

Set in Queens, New York, a city with a highly diverse population of first and second generation immigrants from places once colonies of western powers.  The bond among the immigrants is the relative darkness of their skin, they call themselves “Brown Girls”. They come from India, Chad, the Phillippines, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, China.  

Brown Girls is narrated in the first person plural, by a collective voice of “Brown Girls”. We follow them from six to sixty plus.  They speak English and often interpert for their parents.  We see The Brown Girls roaming the city, singing the songs of Mariah Carey, developing crushes and trying to be the good  daughters their mothers want.  Their mothers work as health providors, maids, factory workers.  Their fathers are construction workers. We see the Brown Girls getting Phds, becoming teachers, attorneys and doctors, married to White Boys, living in White neighborhoods. Some are Gay. Some stay close to their parents, others go years with little contact.

We travel to their home Lands with them. They feel they do not truly belong anywhere but in the Union of Brown Girls.

Brown Girls is an exquiste work, as much a long prose poem as a novel. I see it as high art.

“Daphne Palasi Andreades (she/her) is the author of the debut novel, Brown Girls, which published in the U.S. on January 4th, 2022, with Random House, and in the UK and Commonwealth with Fourth Estate. International editions of the book are also forthcoming in Germany and France. Daphne is a graduate of CUNY Baruch College and Columbia University’s MFA Fiction program, where she was awarded a Henfield Prize and a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. She is the recipient of a 2021 O.Henry Prize, and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, where she won the Voices of Color Prize, and other honors. Her fiction often explores diaspora, immigration, and the far-reaching effects of colonialism and imperialism. She is at work on several projects, including her second novel, short stories, and a few multidisciplinary/multimedia works. She lives in New York City.” From https://daphnepalasiandreades.com/bio/

Mel Ulm.

Hemingway’s Girl by Erika Robuck - A Novel - 2012- 338 Pages

 

Hemingway’s Girl by Erika Robuck - A Novel - 2012- 338 Pages

Hemingway’s Girl, a marvelous work of historical fiction, is set in The Florida Keys and Bimini from 1935 to 1961

This is fifth work by Erika Robert I have so far read.

My first four were 

The Invisible Woman - 2021 - set largely in occupied France during World War Two

Sisters of Night and Fog -2022.  Set also largely in France during WW Two

Fallen Beauty - 2014. Set in upstate New York in the 1920s and 1930s - focusing in part on the poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay

Receive Me Falling. - 2009- Set mostly on the Sugar Cane Plantations on the Caribbean Island of Natal.  Shifting from the 1830s to the 1990s.

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961) won The Nobel Prize in 1954.  He was married to Pauline Pfieffer from 1927 to 1940, she has a central role in Hemingway’s Girl. In the 1930s he lived mostly in Key West, where his fame and powerful personality made him into a local celebrity  and a tourist attraction.  

Key West in 1935 was in the Middle of

the impact of The Great Depression, a ten year down turn in America. Jobs were very hard to get.  Maribelle is about 16 when we meet her.  Her father was very recently killed on his fishing boat.  Her mother was Cuban.  Her mother Eva is emotionally distraught.  Maribelle supports her and her two much younger sisters through work as a waitress and other various jobs.

Through a contact she gets a job as a maid for the Hemingway family.  There is also a cook and a governess for two young sons.  Mrs Hemingway is very much in charge as well as being quite possessive of her husband.

Hemingway, portrayed as ultra-macho, invites her to go to Sloppy Joe’s Bar with him.  She begins to become infatuted.  Her mother warns her.  Much of the story line follows Maribella’s developing relationship with him, his wife, and others in the Hemingway household.

In the mean time she meets a World War One Veteran, Gavin, working on the highway linking the Keys. He falls in love with her.  This relationship is kind of in competition with the one with Hemingway.

There are exciting developments in every chapter.  The depiction of the 1935 Hurricane that killed thousands is very powerful.  Anyone who ever lived through a powerful tropical storm will be mesmerized, as I was.  

There is a fishing trip to Bimini which was a lot of fun to read about.  There are Prize fights, lots of heavy drinking, exciting fishing episodes, great food, unexpected romances and much more.  Key West in the 1930s is vividly brought to life.

Hemingway’s Girl is a fast moving work.  The charaters are very brought to life..  Hemingway readers will have their own reaction to his depiction.

There is great emotional depth in Hemingway’s Girl.

Erika Robuck is the national bestselling author of The Invisible Woman, Hemingway’s Girl, Call Me Zelda, Fallen Beauty, The House of Hawthorne, and Receive Me Falling. She is also a contributor to the anthology Grand Central: Postwar Stories of Love and Reunion, and to the Writer’s Digest essay collection Author in Progress. In 2014, Robuck was named Annapolis’ Author of the Year, and she resides there with her husband and three sons.

I hope to read her The House of Hawthorne in June.

Mel Ulm

Educated by Tara Westover- A Memoir- 2018. 381 pages

 

Educated by Tara Westover - 2018- A Memoir - 381 pages

A New York Times Bestseller 

Over four million copies sold

“NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • BILL GATES’S HOLIDAY READING LIST • FINALIST: National Book Critics Circle’s Award In Autobiography and John Leonard Prize For Best First Book • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award • Los Angeles Times Book Prize”

Educated way exceeded my very high expectations.

Tara Westover was born into a family of survivalists in Idaho who believe a civilization destroying apocalypse is imminent. They see anything connected to government as part of a conspiracy to enslave the population.  They do not trust doctors.  Tara did not set foot in a public school until she was 17.

Her father totally dominated the family.  He was a self appointed preacher.  Their isolation meant there was no one to protect her from the violence of one of her brothers. When another of her brothers gets into college, there were seven children, Tara begins to work to get herself into Brigham Young University.  (Her family were Mormons.)

From here we follow Tara’s incredible journey onto Cambridge University where her brilliance wins her a scholarship and eventually a PhD in history.  Tara shows us her difficulties fitting into college society.The family becomes quite wealthy through the mother’s sale of herbal medicine.

There are numerous terrible accidents from working in the father’s businesses and driving in the snow.  The father sees any interaction with non-survivalists as contacts with what he calls the “Illuminati”. 

It must have taken a lot of courage to tell this story.

“Tara Westover is an American author. Raised in Idaho by a father who opposed public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her family’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that, she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. In 2014 she earned a PhD in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. Westover was Fall 2019 A.M. Rosenthal Writer in Residence at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. She was selected as a Senior Research Fellow at HKS for Spring 2020. Educated is her first book”. 

https://tarawestover.com/bio

Mel Ulm

The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck - A Novel - 2021 - 353 pages

The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck - A Novel - 2021 - 353 pages 

The Invisible Woman is largely set in France during World War Two

This is the fourth work of historical fiction by Erika Robuck I have so far read 

My prior works  by Erika Robuck read 

Sisters of Night and Fog -2022.  Set also largely in France during WW Two

Fallen Beauty - 2014. Set in upstate New York in the 1920s and 1930s - focusing in part on the poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay

Receive Me Falling. - 2009- Set mostly on the Sugar Cane Plantations on the Caribbean Island of Natal.  Shifting from the 1830s to the 1990s.

The Invisible Woman centers on Virginia Hall, an American woman working as an agent for the British OSS.  Her mission is to support French resistance fighters in German occupied France.  In addition to courage, loyalty, and endurance she has a prosthetic half left leg.  She is in her mid-thirties, speaks passable French and dresses as a much older woman in case her real pictures fall into German or Vichy hands.  Most of the resistance fighters are under twenty.  

Robuck vividly creates the terror of the war, the misery of wasted lives, the terrible cruelly of the Germans.  Virginia is involved in training the French fighters in sabotage and sneak attacks.  The numerous characters are very well developed.  Food is a very important concern.  There is an interesting romantic element.

Virginia’s activities can put her and others in danger if things go wrong.  There is a lot of tension in the events.  Virginia gets close to people even though this is contrary to OSS training. 

I found The Invisible Woman kept me more and more interested as I came to love the resistance and hate the Germans.

I endorse this book with no reservations to all into World War Two literature.

Erika Robuck is the national bestselling author of The Invisible Woman, Hemingway’s Girl, Call Me Zelda, Fallen Beauty, The House of Hawthorne, and Receive Me Falling. She is also a contributor to the anthology Grand Central: Postwar Stories of Love and Reunion, and to the Writer’s Digest essay collection Author in Progress. In 2014, Robuck was named Annapolis’ Author of the Year, and she resides there with her husband and three sons.

I hope to next read her Hemingway’s Girl.

Mel Ulm

 

The Book Woman’s Daughter by Kim Michelle Richardson - 2022 - 364 pages- a sequel to The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

 

The Book Woman’s Daughter by Kim Michelle Richardson - 2022 - 364 pages- a sequel to The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

I, along with much of the book blog world, loved The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

Set in the 1930s up to 1941 in the very impoverished Appalachian region of Kentucky, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek follows Cussy Mary, a packhorse librarian bringing books, newspapers and magazines to the often struggling to feed their families people of Troublesome Creek.  Through the WPA President Roosevelt the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project brought books and employment to mostly women riding often long difficult routes, Cussy rides a mule you will grow to love.  

The Book Woman’s Daughter begins in 1953.

Like her mother, Honey suffers from a genetic disease that can make her skin appear blue.  Many look with scorn on her as a “colored person” or a witch.  It was illegal for whites and “colored persons” in Kentucky in the 1940s to marry. When we meet the Book Woman’s daughter, at about age 14 her parents are in prison for an illegal marriage of a white and a blue, as Honey and her mother, were called.  Honey at 16 becomes a Book Woman, bringing material to people in very rural Kentucky on our favorite mule.

As she travels she becomes very good friends with a woman  fire ranger, a bit older than Honey, in a job normally held by men.  Honey is in danger of being sent to a home for orphans which is pretty much a prison until she is 18.  An older lady on her route is appointed by the court as her guardian saving her from this.

The savagery of life in the coal mines is made very real.  We see the brutal way the few women working the mines are treated.  Contrasted with this is the kindness of others.  As in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, Richardson marvelously describes the natural beauty of Kentucky.

The Book Woman’s Daughter is a master work, historical fiction at a very high level.  You should read The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek first if possible.

I found this book very moving.  It made me feel grateful to the near endless supply of books available to me and our three daughters.

NYT and USA TODAY and L. A. TIMES bestselling author, Kim Michele Richardson resides in her home state of Kentucky. She is the author of the bestselling memoir The Unbreakable Child. Her novels include Liar’s Bench, GodPretty in the Tobacco Field. The Sisters of Glass Ferry and The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Kim Michele latest novel out May 3.2022 is The Book Woman's Daughter, both a standalone and sequel to The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

You can visit her websites and learn more at:

www.kimmichelerichardson.com

Mel Ulm