Category Archives: Blog

Women & Other Animals, Including Mothers & Daughters, Bonnie Jo Campbell

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Ellen Akins

When I was doing a visiting semester (too many years ago to count) at Western Michigan University, Jaimy Gordon (who teaches at WMU) asked me to review Bonnie Jo Campbell’s first book of short stories, Women and Other Animals, for … Continue reading →

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It’s complicated

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Ellen Akins

In the New York Times Book Review‘s “Bookends” of August 25 two sharp critical thinkers, Zoë Heller & Leslie Jamison, talk about the value, or overvaluing, of difficulty in literature. Heller made this observation about the new, & newly fraught, … Continue reading →

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The Orphan Master’s Son

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Ellen Akins

There are so many books I have to read–for work, research, reviewing–that I tend to get a lot of extracurricular works on the fly, in audio form, that is, taken in while I walk or run or drive (or putter … Continue reading →

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Why great novels don’t get noticed now

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Ellen Akins

Why great novels don’t get noticed now Jane Davis’s interesting reflections on literary fiction on the Triskele Books blog steered me to this article in the (UK) Telegraph (14 March 2015), in which Gaby Wood wrote that, despite a raft … Continue reading →

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On Mentors, John Casey, Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Taylor

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Ellen Akins

Something now lost in the mists of memory made me think of Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps, oddly enough, a story just published in Narrative, “The Big Trip Up Yonder“–oddly, because when I tried to find a record of the incident that came to … Continue reading →

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