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As a Friend: A Novel

Forrest Gander

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Harvest Time 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

The other reviewer gets it right, though I would not call this a detective story it's clearly an experiment in mixing up genres and blending them together. Each of the novel's four parts has its own form, perhaps to lure you in, for they progress from the fairly traditional to the more and more difficult. I opened this book to around page 80 and nearly gave it up, convinced I wasn't even going to be able to penetrate it, but luckily common sense convinced me to start again this time from page one, and maybe that would be easier going. Sure enough, by the time I reached page 80 through this method I was on an endorphin high and I felt that the author was writing directly onto my brain.

The main character, a poet and land surveyor called Les, lives somewhere in the south, maybe Tennessee or Arkansas, where his dark and smoldering good looks make hopeless wrecks out of the men and women who can't help loving that man. Even though Les is fairly obscure someone is apparently making a documentary film of his life. It become clear that Les is living the "Captain's paradise" sort of lifestyle, he's married to one woman (Cora) while living with another (Sarah, a poet herself), but the hounds of hell lope after him as well. It's hard to write this sort of Byronic, doomed, charismatic character, and I have yet to work out exactly how Forrest Gander succeeds so splendidly, but part of it must be the choices he makes in his narrators and the focus he pays on the way they perceive not only his sensual attractions but the entire landscape and social milieu in which he dwells. In a way the book feels very private and raw, and in other ways it feels very public, because that's the double edge of the roman a clef, and AS A FRIEND is patently a novel inspired by the real life poet Frank Stanford (1948-78) and yet it isn't about Stanford entirely.

The opening scene is a graphic account of Les' birth, it is like something Steinbeck tore out of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, too vivid, too violent. Chapter two is told by Clay, Les' co-worker out in the muddy landscapes of south central Ozark country. Clay doesn't identify as gay but has to come to terms with the fact that he is finding his buddy almost terrifying attractive. His turmoil results in a shocking twist I won't spoil here but it is like a James Cain noir story of lives torn apart by a simple word spoken into the wrong woman's ear. I guess I keep thinking of 30s antecedents for Forrest Gander's novel, --maybe it's the WPA lifestyle these boys embody, in their rattletrap trucks and their smoky roadhouses and addiction to jazz music.

In part three Sarah, Les' love interest, gets to speak her mind in the months after a violent and devastating event. Not since Bessie Smith sang about those "Empty Bed Blues" have I listened to such a Biblical type of sorrow, studded with glimpses of the real and mirrored by a frightening absence.

All in all it's a fantastic book, though if Amazon is saying this volume is 192 pages they're overestimating it by 80 or 90 percent. And what about that clunker of a title? Wasn't there the editor at New Directions to take Forrest Gander out to lunch and tell him, "Änd as a friend, get a new f--ing title." But otherwise I expect you will be riveted as I was by this amazing and unexpected masterpiece.

Editorial Review:

An unforgettable, sensual novel by "one of the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation" (Mark Rudman). "Heroism is a secondary virtue," Albert Camus noted, "but friendship is primary." In his gem-like first novel, Forrest Gander writes of friendship, envy, and eros as a harmonic of charged overtones. Set in a rural southern landscape as vivid as its indelible characters, As a Friend tells the story of Les, a gifted man and land surveyor, whose impact on those around him (his friend Clay, his girlfriend Sarah) provokes intense self-examination and an atmosphere of dangerous eroticism. With poetic insight, Gander explores the nature of attraction, betrayal, and loyalty. What he achieves is brilliant in style and powerfully unsettling.

Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America

Jay Parini

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“These thirteen books must be seen as representative, not definitive, works. They are nodal points, places where vast areas of thought and feeling gathered and dispersed, creating a nation as various and vibrant as the United States, which must be considered one of the most successful nation-states in modern history, and a republic built firmly on ideas, which are contained in its major texts. Where we have been must, of course, determine where we are going. My hope is that this book helps to show us where we have been and engenders a lively conversation about our destination, which seems perpetually in dispute.”
—from Promised Land

Americans need periodic reminding that they are, to a great extent, people of the book—or, rather, books. In Promised Land, Jay Parini repossesses that vibrant, intellectual heritage by examining the life and times of thirteen "books that changed America." Each of the books has been a watershed, gathering intellectual currents already in motion and marking a turn in American life and thought. Their influence remains pervasive, however hidden, and in his essays Jay Parini demonstrates how these books entered American life and altered how we think and act in the world.

The thirteen "books that changed America":
Of Plymouth Plantation • The Federalist Papers • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Walden • Uncle Tom's Cabin • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • The Souls of Black Folk • The Promised Land • How to Win Friends and Influence People • The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care • On the Road • The Feminine Mystique

Promised Land offers a reading of the American psyche, allowing us to reflect on what our past means for who we are now. It is a rich and immensely readable work of cultural history that will appeal to all book lovers and students of the American character alike.

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History)

David Hackett Fischer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 86 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Indispensable for understanding the origins of the American Civil War 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

As someone with a keen interest in the American Civil War and its origins, I found Fischer's Albion's Seed to be extremely valuable. Although the period it describes is mostly colonial leading up to the American war for independence from England, the four folkways documented therein clearly delineate the religious, cultural, economic and even environmental forces that lined up to bring about that most seminal event for modern America, the war of 1861-1865.

The origins of slavery and why it took hold in tidewater Chesapeake areas and not Massachusetts are described by Fischer not only in terms of religious and social values but environmental as well in terms of differing mortality rates between African slaves in the two regions, thereby making slavery more economically feasible in Virginia. The regional culture of tidewater Chesapeake created slavery, not the other way around.

The controversy of territorial expansion of the United States in mid-nineteenth century, and whether these new lands would be slave or free, set the stage for the squaring off of the combined ideas of Puritan ordered liberty and Quaker reciprocal liberty (Lincoln was descended from both Puritans and Quakers) against the combination of hierarchical liberty of the tidewater cavaliers and the individualistic liberty of the people of the southern backcountry, who, although they owned few slaves, possessed an acute sense of personal honor and loved to fight.

It is a stretch to say that the American Civil War would have still happened without slavery. However, neither is it "Lost Cause" mythology to say that the North and South represented two distinct cultures, formed primarily by two each of the folkways of Albion's Seed. Had mid-nineteenth century America been one culture, then the slavery issue could certainly have been settled without warfare.

Editorial Review:

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. Itis a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.

Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Editions)

Joseph Conrad

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Fourth Edition is again based on Robert Kimbrough's meticulously re-edited text. Missing words have been restored and the entire novel has been repunctuated in accordance with Conrad's style. The result is the first published version of Heart of Darkness that allows readers to hear Marlow's voice as Conrad heard it when he wrote the story.

"Backgrounds and Contexts" provides readers with a generous collection of maps and photographs that bring the Belgian Congo to life. Textual materials, topically arranged, address nineteenth-century views of imperialism and racism and include autobiographical writings by Conrad on his life in the Congo. New to the Fourth Edition is an excerpt from Adam Hochschild's recent book, King Leopold's Ghost, as well as writings on race by Hegel, Darwin, and Galton.

"Criticism" includes a wealth of new materials, including nine contemporary reviews and assessments of Conrad and Heart of Darkness and twelve recent essays by Chinua Achebe, Peter Brooks, Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan, Edward Said, and Paul B. Armstrong, among others. Also new to this edition is a section of writings on the connections between Heart of Darkness and the film Apocalypse Now by Louis K. Greiff, Margot Norris, and Lynda J. Dryden.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 64 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

It'll make a city slicker out of the most ardent farm boy 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book will give you a reason to want to go visit the city, or to go out and get into the city you already live in. Her reference to the "ballet of the sidewalks" gives a whole new twist to what is going on in a busy downtown. City planners, take note!

Editorial Review:

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.

The Great Gatsby (Penguin Popular Classics)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Shines Brilliantly Like a Just-Discovered Piece of Cameo Jewelry from a Bygone Era 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

It's difficult to give any even-handed critique F. Scott Fitzgerald's standard-setting Jazz Age novel since it was required reading for most of us in high school. However, if you come back to it as a full-fledged adult, you'll find that the story still resonates but more like a just-polished cameo piece from a forgotten time. At the core of the book is the elaborate infatuation Jay Gatsby has for Daisy Fay Buchanan, a love story portrayed with both a languid pall and a fatalistic urgency. But the broader context of the setting and the irreconcilable nature of the American dream in the 1920's is what give the novel its true gravitas.

Much of this is eloquently articulated by Nick Carraway, Gatsby's modest Long Island neighbor who becomes his most trusted confidante. Nick is responsible for reuniting the lovers who both have come to different points in their lives five years after their aborted romance. Now a solitary figure in his luxurious mansion, Gatsby is a newly wealthy man who accumulated his fortunes through dubious means. Daisy, on the other hand, has always led a life of privilege and could not let love stand in the way of her comfortable existence. She married Tom Buchanan for that sole purpose. With Gatsby's ambition spurred by his love for Daisy, he rekindles his romance with Daisy, as Tom carries on carelessly with an auto mechanic's grasping wife. Nick himself gets caught up in the jet set trappings and has a relationship with Jordan Baker, a young golf pro.

These characters are inevitably led on a collision course that exposes the hypocrisy of the rich, the falsity of a love undeserving and the transience of individuals on this earth. The strength of Fitzgerald's treatment comes from the lyrical prose he provides to illuminate these themes. Not a word is wasted, and the author's economical handling of such a potentially complex plot is a technique I wish were more frequently replicated today. Most of all, I simply enjoy the book because it does not portend a greater significance eighty years later. It is a classic tale that provides vibrancy and texture to a bygone era. It is well worth re-reading, especially at such a bargain price.

Editorial Review:

Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach...Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Package 1 (Volumes A, B, C): Beginnings to 1650

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Seven years ago, W. W. Norton changed the way world literature is taught by introducing The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition. Leading the field once again, Norton is proud to publish the anthology for the new century, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Second Edition. Now published in six paperback volumes (packaged in two attractive slipcases), the new anthology boasts slimmer volumes, thicker paper, a bolder typeface, and dozens of newly included or newly translated works from around the world.

The Norton Anthology of World Literature represents continuity as well as change. Like its predecessor, the anthology is a compact library of world literature, offering an astounding forty-three complete longer works, more than fifty prose works, over one hundred lyric poems, and twenty-three plays. More portable, more suitable for period courses, more pleasant to read, and more attuned to current teaching and research trends, The Norton Anthology of World Literature remains the most authoritative, comprehensive, and teachable anthology for the world literature survey.

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2795 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

Collections of Nothing

William Davies King

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, December 2008: One of the oddest memoirs of the year may well be the best. William Davies King is a theater professor who over his fifty-plus years has gathered, in countless binders and boxes, a vast collection of things nobody else wants: cat-food labels, chain letters, skeleton keys, cereal boxes, chopstick wrappers, the "Place Stamp Here" squares from the corners of envelopes. It's an obsession you might think was inexplicable--least of all by the one obsessed--but in Collections of Nothing King makes his mania seem nearly rational, and the personal drama of it wryly fascinating. (Imagine if Henry Darger had written witty, self-aware essays that analyzed his obsessions without puncturing their mystery.) King is an academic and he's been through therapy, but he writes free of the clots and cliches of both of those disciplines, contemplating what he calls "the cumbersummation of me" with the myopic elegance of Nicholson Baker and a moving understanding that this strange, apparently worthless collection--and now this lovely and wise book about it--are what he has to offer the world. --Tom Nissley

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

Laura Miller

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

I paid to read someone else's biased opinions 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I felt trapped!! I'd used a gift card to purchase this book, so I was determined to see it through to the end. However, 3/4 of the way through I had to give up. What I thought was to be an historical, biographical analysis of the Chronicles of Narnia became a psychological profile of C.S Lewis and his colleagues from one who is not credentialed to psycho-analize anyone. Laura Miller is an author who primarily argues that, although a work of fiction, the Chronicales are somehow laden with latent and evil leanings due to Lewis's defects of character. While I might agree that many of the stories require, as do most works of fiction, the willing suspension of disbelief. One must read fiction with the understanding that although the author's skema will most assuredly influence the work, it is not true that the author is deliberately trying to trick (especially) little children into believing some pretty bizarre premises if one is to take Ms Miller's opinion seriously.
I did what I rarely do--I tossed the book aside unfinished with complete disdain. I didn't buy the book to read about someone's disappointments with life and religion. I didn't buy the book to read the author's take on C.S Lewis-I bought it thinking I was getting a genuine work in which the use of story in the Narnia books was used to captivate children (and adults) and why it is we all gravitate toward stories to explain life--both secular and religious. That Lewis was a Christian is a given--and yet Ms Miller seems to take umbrage with that alone. Every author, including Laura Miller writes from what he/she knows and believes to be true. Why she should expect anything different from C. S Lewis (and cop an atitude about it) is beyond me.

Editorial Review:

THE MAGICIAN'S BOOK is the story of one reader's long, tumultuous relationship with C.S. Lewis'The Chronicles of Narnia. Enchanted by its fantastic world as a child, prominent critic Laura Miller returns to the series as an adult to uncover the source of these small books' mysterious power by looking at their creator, Clive Staples Lewis. What she discovers is not the familiar, idealized image of the author, but a more interesting and ambiguous truth: Lewis's tragic and troubled childhood, his unconventional love life, and his intense but ultimately doomed friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien.


Finally reclaiming Narnia "for the rest of us," Miller casts the Chronicles as a profoundly literary creation, and the portal to a life-long adventure in books, art, and the imagination.