Molly Peacock's "The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72" is more than a great biography about an 18th century woman. It's a meditation on late-bloomers and the significance of choices made throughout one's life. Molly Peacock is an award-winning poet, and her "leaps of the poet's mind" transport us into wonderful places, real and profound.
Month: June 2012
18th century greed and utopia
In 1992, Michael Ondaatje won Britain's top literary prize, the Booker, for "The English Patient." But he didn't win it alone -- he shared the prize with Barry Unsworth's "Sacred Hunger," an involving novel about the British slave trade in the 1700s. The author's death last week brought the epic to my attention for the first time, a masterpiece likely unknown to many of us. Here's what we've been missing.
The nature of extremity
In Jennifer Miller's debut novel, a biology teacher instructs his students how to think for themselves, using information about extreme-loving microbes called extremophiles. These microorganisms become a sort of metaphor for what happens in this literary mystery that takes place in a fictional preparatory school in NW Massachusetts. "The Year of the Gadfly" keeps you wondering and page-turning to the very end.
The Longest Chapter 