Maureen Corrigan: “I have weeks, as a book reviewer, where I feel like Claire. Those are the weeks when it seems like every new book is a riff on Jane Austen, or a young adult vampire/warrior/shape-shifter fantasy, or yet another homage to dead dogs. And then a literary miracle like Beautiful Ruins appears, and once again I’m a believer.”

A dark and stormy night, an isolated manor house and a knock at the door all play a part in Sadie Jones’ delicious romp of a novel. Set in Edwardian England, it tracks a noble but cash-strapped family whose lavish dinner plans go awry when they’re asked to shelter a crowd of refugees.

When things get too comfortable and things get too safe, I get the feeling like I’m smothering. It’s like somebody’s burying me in feathers.

— Writer Harry Crews died on Wednesday at the age of 76. He had a hard life and didn’t made it any easier for the characters in his novels.

A long-lived relationship is about so many things. It is such a dense and complex process — always a process — and it’s not to be summed up. It’s not to be turned into some kind of vignette. If we are serious, we also have to recognize that even the longest and richest and densest relationship must end, and we see it around us. We see it in that inevitability of time’s power, if you will.

— Adrienne Rich, on relationships [the complete 1989 Fresh Air interview]

Once you’ve put yourself on record in an interview, and you’re sort of thinking fast and saying the first thing that pops into your mind, basically, anything to fill up the air time or the reporter’s time, it’s a little disconcerting, when you’re younger than I, to realize that these remarks which you toss off, once they’re in print, have an equal weight with all the words that you’ve labored to polish and make come out exactly right.

— John Updike telling Terry Gross why he once called interviews ‘a form to be loathed.’ [complete interview here]

Dirt is the price you pay for a place being interesting.

— Maureen Corrigan, Two Books That Delight in New York City’s Dirt

When I started publishing, I most definitely would have liked to have published Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald, but they were already published.

— Publisher Barney Rosset, who championed the works of beat poets and Samuel Beckett and who defied censors with the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, died on Tuesday. He was 89. He was on Fresh Air in 1991.

Helen Simpson once said that when it comes to short stories, “Something’s got to happen, but not too much.” Her latest short story collection, In-Flight Entertainment, may seem bleak and mundane — with subjects like mortality, infidelity and climate change — but it’s also bursting with British wit.

Every book better be fully intimate, it better be all you have. I’m obviously not shy because I’m going to talk your ear off today but I’m private, which is different. But the idea for me to be truly intimate – for me to be naked and raw – the fiction allows me to do what I need to do emotionally. And with this book, certain stories were looking at things – it was a change for me to look at things that were right there.

— Nathan Englander on writing fiction.

For every kid who’s ever been smothered by parental concern, there have always been plenty in America and elsewhere who’ve been left to fend for themselves. One cold consolation these kids have is that their stories usually make for better literature.

Tupelo Hassman’s debut novel stars Rory, a resilient-if-ragged life force raised in a Reno trailer park who adopts a tattered copy of The Girl Scout Handbook as her Bible. Rory endures sexual abuse, the death of loved ones, and everyday invisibility — all without playing for our sympathy.

Even less sexy to fiction than the topic of work is the topic of losing work. Being fired, losing homes to foreclosure, searching for a new job in middle age — these are the grim situations so many readers today are facing. The good news is that a few standout recent novels have ingeniously decided to tackle unemployment head-on. — Maureen Corrigan

Unemployed Graduates, 1956 (by Salem State Library)

I have a friend who reads the obituaries looking for fresh widowers before someone else gets to them. And all she requires is a penis and a pulse.

— Hilma Wolitzer’s finely observed comedy of manners follows the romantic misadventures of recently widowed 62-year-old Edward Schuyler, who reenters the dating pool with a splash.

doree:

Mom brought me some oldies but goodies

NPR’s children/YA book club on Tumblr.

nprbackseatbookclub:

February Book Picks: ‘Shooting Kabul’ And ‘The Hundred Dresses’

This month, NPR’s Backseat Book Club will read two books that explore what it’s like to try to create a new home while still missing the one you’ve left behind. Join us as we read Shooting Kabul by N.H. Senzai and The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes.

Join in with NPR’s book club (and the newest NPR Tumblr page!)

It’s impossible to imagine a non-Jew writing this novel even as it’s tricky enough, as a non-Jewish critic, to review it. If I like the book, I’m insensitive; if I say it’s in bad taste, I’m falling into the guiltily pious attitude toward [Anne] Frank that Auslander ridicules.

— Maureen Corrigan review Shalom Auslander’s comic novel about the Holocaust.