“Two soldiers, one white and one black, return to their home in a small, Southern town after fighting in World War II. After what they have seen in the war, skin color is the least of their concerns. But to their friends and family, race is still everything. Told through the voices of six characters, Mudbound is not only a novel that will keep your book group talking, it’s also one you’ll want to keep on your shelves.”
—Lindsey McGuirk
Bellingham
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| Hilary Jordan |
Two interviews with Hillary Jordan; first a video interview in which she discusses the connection between her most recent novel, When She Wokeand Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and a written piece in which she talks about her debut novel Mudbound, winner of the prestigious Bellwether Prize.
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| Hilary Jordan |
Hillary Jordan received her BA in English and Political Science from Wellesley College and spent fifteen years working as an advertising copywriter before starting to write fiction. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.
Her first novel, Mudbound, was published in 2008 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, HarperCollins Canada and Random House UK. It won the 2006 Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingsolver and awarded biennially to an unpublished debut novel that addresses issues of social justice. It also won a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association. Mudbound was also the 2008 NAIBA (New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Assoc.) Fiction Book of the Year and was longlisted for the 2009 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Paste Magazine named it one of the Top Ten Debut Novels of the Decade. It has been translated into French, Italian and Serbian. Swedish, Norwegian and Turkish editions are forthcoming in 2012.
Her second novel, When She Woke, was published in October 2011 by Algonquin and HarperCollins Canada and in April 2012 by HarperCollins UK. It has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Turkish and Chinese.
Hillary grew up in Dallas, TX and Muskogee, OK. She lives in Brooklyn.
As the McAllans are being tested in every way, two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not: charming, handsome, and sensitive to Laura's plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, comes home from fighting the Nazis with the shine of a war hero, only to face far more personal - and dangerous - battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. It is the unlikely friendship of these two brothers-in-arms, and the passions they arouse in others, that drive this debut novel. Mudbound reveals how everyone becomes a player in a tragedy on the grandest scale, even as they strive for love and honor."
BOOK JACKET.
Hillary Jordan's first novel, Mudbound, is a story of racism and well-kept secrets. Set on a desolate farm in the Mississippi Delta at the end of World War II, the novel explores the complex relations between two families: the owners of the land, and the sharecroppers who live and work on it.
Short-listed for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize
Long-listed for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021
It is a matter of historical record that in 1823 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston (active to this day) sought to commission Beethoven to write an oratorio. The premise of Paul Griffiths’s ingenious novel is that Beethoven accepted the commission and traveled to the United States to oversee its first performance. Griffiths grants the composer a few extra years of life and, starting with his voyage across the Atlantic and entry into Boston Harbor, chronicles his adventures and misadventures in a new world in which, great man though he is, he finds himself a new man. Relying entirely on historically attested possibilities to develop the plot, Griffiths shows Beethoven learning a form of sign language, struggling to rein in the uncertain inspiration of Reverend Ballou (his designated librettist), and finding a kindred spirit in the widowed Mrs. Hill, all the while keeping his hosts guessing as to whether he will come through with his promised composition. (And just what, the reader also wonders, will this new piece by Beethoven turn out to be?) The book that emerges is an improvisation, as virtuosic as it is delicate, on a historical theme.
Ophelia journeys beyond the grave, in a clever and affecting sequel using just the 481 words spoken by Shakespeare’s character
Lara Pawson
Friday 15 December 2023
In the mid-1990s, Paul Griffiths set himself a challenge. He would attempt to give new voice to Hamlet’s Ophelia using only the vocabulary scripted for her by Shakespeare in the original play. In 2008, 13 years after he’d begun, his novel Let Me Tell You was published. Among its admirers was Harry Mathews, the indefatigable North American writer and member of the renowned experimental literary group Oulipo, who described it as “beautiful and enthralling” and “a great success in Oulipian terms”. At the time Griffiths was curious to see if his chosen constraint might provoke another writer to take Ophelia further. Perhaps he got fed up waiting, for it is Griffiths who has produced an exquisite sequel.
Domestic objects lead to intimate memories and troubled histories in this glorious, genre-bending book
Sarah Moss
Saturado 27 January 2024
Spent Light is subtitled “A Book”. It’s not a memoir, but not really autofiction either; life writing, maybe, but the lives in question are not human. Pawson’s writing is prompted by objects usually considered inanimate but made and traded by people in systems that do harm. The book is among them, a physical object, in case you hadn’t noticed. (The book is interested in things you may not have noticed, or may have chosen not to notice.)
“Gray’s idiom may be modern, but it embraces many traditional things; not only autobiographical realism, but low comedy, afterlife fantasy, scattershot satire, nightmarish allegory, self-referential metafiction, tender eroticism, lunatic scholarship and profuse literary borrowings.”
—David Pringle on Gray’s debut novel Lanark: A Life in Four Parts (1981)
Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels (1988)
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Jonathan Russell Clark
19 December 2023
In 1951, the Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray published a short story in the now defunct British periodical Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls called “The Star,” in which a young boy finds the smooth spherical remnant of a falling star in his backyard and carries it around with him everywhere he goes, until one day in school as he sneaks a peak at the star during class, his teacher catches him and demands he give up his treasure.
ALASDAIR GRAY AS A YOUNG MAN. PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR IN 2016.The Scottish writer Alasdair Gray died on December 29, at the age of eighty-five, four years after a fall from the outside steps of his house left him with a spinal injury that confined him to a wheelchair, and almost three years after I went to Glasgow to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with him for The Paris Review. Gray was a Whitbread Award–winning author, best known for the weird, speculative work, Lanark, an autobiographical tale in four out-of-order books (two of them nonrealist), and several volumes of short stories, but also for his painting, for illustrating his own work, and for cutting a wide and eccentric swath in the Glasgow arts scene. He was a socialist, an advocate for Scottish independence, a fierce proponent of friends’ work, and a tireless critic of the craven or pompous. Rereading my interview with him now, on the occasion of his death, I’m amazed by how cool and professional it is, and how much it leaves out, as I suppose it had to, of what Gray was really like, and what he meant to me.
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| Alasdair Gray |
Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie, Glasgow, on 28 December 1934, the son of Alexander and Amy Gray (née Fleming). He was evacuated during the war, then moved to Yorkshire where his father was working. He suffered his first asthma attack at this time and began writing. The family returned to Glasgow in 1946 and he attended Whitehill School where he won prizes for art and English. In 1952 he entered Glasgow School of Art and in 1954 began writing what would become the novel Lanark, the ‘big fantastical Glasgow story’ he had first thought about in 1951. He graduated from art school in 1957 with a diploma in Design and Mural painting. Over the next years he made his living from a combination of teaching, painting murals and writing plays for radio (many of them produced by Stewart Conn) and television.
A visual biography of the restless and revered Czech photographer reveals his affinity with the Roma people and his eye for haunting, unforgiving landscapes
Sean O’Hagan
Tuesday 2 January 2024
In 2008, I spent a few days with Josef Koudelka in Prague, the city he had immortalised in photographs 40 years previously as Russian tanks rolled into its streets on the evening of 20 August 1968. He had only recently returned to his homeland, and was about to be belatedly honoured with an exhibition of his photographs from that pivotal moment, a mere fraction of the 5,000 he shot in the first week of the invasion.
A sweeping but gossipy behind-the-scenes look at the off-screen dramas that made prestige TV
Rebeca Nicholson
Friday 24 November 2023
Peter Biskind is a cinema man. Best known for 1998’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and other books about the meaty, macho movie business, he has turned his attentions to the growth of streaming services and what might be the end of the current golden age of TV. The swaggering Pandora’s Box attempts to wrangle a complex tale into some sort of order, from the early days of prestige TV, to the high-stakes and seemingly bottomless business of “content creation”. But in the acknowledgments that conclude the book, Biskind still offers a secular prayer for the return of his preferred medium. “Movies, I hope, will one day make a comeback,” he writes. For now, television will have to do.
Jenna Gribbon looking at Huge gaze (homophone), 2023
“I kind of have a thing for fingers” confessed Jenna Gribbon as she stood beneath a larger-than-life painting of her body with her wife Mackenzie Scott’s finger placed delicately on her pubes. The Honeymoon Show!, a collection of king-sized paintings (and a few intimate postcard-sized frames to boot) will adorn the glossy Lévy Gorvy Dayan townhouse until January 6, 2024. The show brings us along their Thailand honeymoon, Scott reaching into a coconut, or wading nude through water, and then transports us home from post-nuptial bliss to the curtain-clad studio space that Gribbon describes as something “between a circus and late-night show.” Over the course of the show, Gribbon unspools the pleasure of watching, of being seen, and the Venn diagram where fact and fiction overlap. Since they met six years ago, Gribbon has been painting Scott and evaluating notions of muse and subject, especially the absence of representations of women who desire women therein. “I’m so compelled to make them that I have to do it” said Gribbon when asked of her impulse to depict such private scenes. Basking in the post-show glow, the artist talked to us about painting female desire, lesbians of the 90s, and a fortuitous encounter with Richard Prince.
In Outline, Cusk gets away from speaking for all women, and from the fashionable burden of relatability
Emily M Kelly
September 1, 2015
Rachel Cusk is used to the limelight. After her two memoirs, of motherhood and the end of a marriage, were torn to shreds in the British press, the Toronto-born UK novelist has returned to fiction with Outline, a peculiarly riveting book featuring a creative writing teacher working in Greece, trying, perhaps in vain, to get outside her experience of herself.
With his wildly popular autobiographical series My Struggle, the author breaks down the banal
Emily M. Keeler
October 24, 2014
“It doesn’t feel like a memoir to me, partly because it doesn’t reveal enough stories from my life,” Karl Ove Knausgård says over the phone. Considering how it clocks in at close to 4,000 pages in total, it’s hard to imagine that Knausgård has left anything out of My Struggle, his profoundly autobiographical novel that spans six volumes. “It’s much more like the process of a novel,” he says, “much more like an existential search for something.” Five years after the first book of the series was published in Scandinavia, Knausgård’s search continues.
"I still feel vulnerable and exposed, and I am even more mistrustful of our culture’s cult of celebrity," says the reclusive Virginia artist.
Emily M. Keeler
June 2, 2015
“I’m from the South,” Sally Mann says as she is handed a foamy cappuccino in a hotel cafe in Toronto on a recent afternoon. “I”m gonna need a lot of sugar.”
Ransom Riggs has recently followed up on his smash-hit first book – Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, a narrative shaped around old photos that Riggs collected – with a sequel called Hollow City. Here, he reflects on the influences that have shaped him as a writer.
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| Ransom Riggs and Tim Burton |
By Tim Lammers
Ransom Riggs certainly doesn’t mind being called a peculiar person, and not just for the fact that he wrote the novel “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” which spawned into a best-selling book trilogy. He’s peculiar in Hollywood, especially, because he’s a novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker, and not necessarily in that order.
