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This edition of The Nightstand comes from Annie Gilson, who teaches Twentieth-Century British and American fiction and fiction workshops for the department. She is currently on sabbatical working on her second novel. You can see she is making good use of her sabbatical. I just finished rereading all of Alice Munro's books which I have to say are just fabulous (including Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You and Open Secrets). The stories are built around a cluster of themes that signal Munro terrain, but almost every story is interesting with fully-realized characters, quite an achievement, I'd say. And no one does relationships, in particular from a woman's point of view, like Munro. I also just finished Mary Gaitskill's new novel, Veronica, which is about Gaitskill's standard repertoire of subjects: sexuality, beauty, and the way these are commodified in our culture. The protagonist, an ex-model who is now ill and old(er), has some interesting insights to offer, but in the end the book does get repetitive. In part that's the point: we see her go through a string of messed up relationships and situations but I was still waiting for it to end. Bruno Schulz, Street of Crocodiles is for all of you hermetical neo-Platonic gnostics out there--the blurb says he writes like Kafka and Proust and it's true!!! Dreamy and strange, a Polish writer who stands on the border between the real world and the dream world. He was killed in WW II and after being rediscovered, influenced Cynthia Ozick, among others. Speaking of Cynthia Ozick -- The Puttermesser Papers, about a woman living in NYC who creates her own golem. The golem helps her to become mayor but unfortunately the golem also has an insatiable sex drive. And golems grow by the day once they're brought to life, which is a bit hard on the wallet when it comes to dressing them... This one makes a mean souffle though. Most recently: Coetzee's harrowing, morally-brave Disgrace still harrows me. I admire him for remaining so committed to a cause in which he passionately believes -- animal rights -- and bringing that cause into novel after novel, without sounding preachy. He makes it matter, makes one think about what our relationship to and use of animals mean to us as individuals and as members of human society. Finally, the wonderful book The Secret Lives of Puppets by Victoria Nelson, one of the most well-researched, erudite scholarly books (it won a bunch of prizes, among them MLA's top one) about the fantastic and our ideas of spirituality as they inhere in us, in objects, in the cosmos -- and she manages to do this by covering at least a millennium. It ends up talking about how our concern for the fantastic has had to go underground in North America, where it is alive and well in pop culture, e.g. movies, genre books, comic books, etc. Buy it if you're interested in the fantastic -- it's essential reading. Past Nightstand Suggestions...
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