According to her death certificate, my mother’s half-sister Bonnie died of diphtheria — “the deadly scourge of childhood” — at five years old, in a town not too far from Dallas. An aggressive vaccination campaign began in the region around the same time, but perhaps it took a while for word to reach the provinces, or maybe traveling for the . . .
In the London Review of Books this week, James Wood adjudged A.S. Byatt “a very ordinary grown-ups’ writer and a very good children’s writer” — a verdict which, notwithstanding her lapses into didacticism, I find ludicrous. My review of Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book, is at Barnes & Noble Review today. An excerpt: A.S. Byatt published her first novel . . .
The opening of Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums makes me want to read more.
Writer and critic Jürgen Fauth, co-creator of literary site Fictionaut, explains why anyone can sign up & publish fiction there.