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Books
Wrestling With Success
JOHN IRVING PINS DOWN HIS ROLE MODELS
ON M Y BOOKSHELF NATALIE COLE
Unbroken:
A Memoir
by
TRACY ELLIOTT
“I love ho w Tracy
recounts her
hardships growing
up, then turning
her life around
with help from
loved ones—and
the redemption
of God.”
Q&A
Q: In your new novel, LastNightin TwistedRiver,a young man
is lost in an accident while floating felled timber downstream.
I understand you’ve walked on floating logs yourself
A: I walked on logs as an experiment—the kind of thing teenagers do. River-driving was dangerous work—right up there with fire-jumping. So this aspect
of the novel is not autobiographical, except that I have friends and relatives
who were loggers, and they helped me with the book.
Q: As a child you spent a lot of time at the theater where your mother
worked as a prompter. Did this affect your storytelling style?
A: My first love was the theater. I thought I wanted to be an actor—a stage
actor, not in the movies. But at some point it occurred to me that if I became
a writer, I could be all the characters; I could play all the roles.
Q: You’ve often spoken of Dickens, Hawthorne, and Melville as influences.
What appeals to you about these earlier writers?
A: I am a New England writer, and I’m devoted to the old-fashioned, plot-driven
novel. Hawthorne and Melville are my ancestors. Melville wrote in Moby-Dick,
“Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!” I buy that. Melville and
Hawthorne are much more related to the writers of the English novel in the
19th century—Dickens, Hardy. Those are my heroes, my models of the form.
Q: What does “seeks to please rather than to appal!” mean in your own work?
A: Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don’t mean that you can’t also be
funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
—Daniel Stashower
Hot Reads
Laugh Lines Are
Beautiful: And
Other Age-Defying
Truths BY LEIGH ANNE
JASHEWAY-BRYANT.
Old age may be no
place for sissies, yet it needn’t welcome
the mirthless, either. Via clever pairings of
image and epigram, this fun frolic reas-
sures us: “Girlfriends are cheaper than
therapy,” “Elevator sex rarely lives up to its
reputation,” and “You’re only half
as old as your mother was at your age.”
Cheating Death
BY SANJAY GUPTA, M. D.
Advances in“resuscitation
science”—reviving patients
with no pulse, often the
victims of exposure and
hypothermia—are pushing
back the line between death and survival.
“When the heart stops beating, it’s not
the end,” writes Gupta in his freeform tour
of some experimental healing arts. “Death
is not a single event but a process that
may be interrupted, even reversed.”
Mentors, Muses &
Monsters: 30 Writers
on the People Who
Changed Their Lives
EDI TED BY ELIZABE TH BENE-
DICT. Mentors are mystics:
they see the talent in us
before we do. Here, popular authors evoke
the wise-eyed souls who set them on
the path they were meant to follow. Don’t
miss Alexander Chee channeling Annie
Dillard, ZZ Packer on James Alan McPher-
son, or Julia Glass on editor Deb Garrison.
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Genuine Genius
TOP LEFT: REMO CASILLI /CAMERA PRESS/RETNA; ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH TRENHOLM
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry
Teachout. An ex-bassist captures “the
greatest jazz musician of the 20th cen-
tury” in this almost note-for-note por-
trait. We get a consummate showman
with sharp edges: jailed
in 1930 for “muggles”
(marijuana), tussling
with Chicago mobsters,
and daring in 1957 to
denounce Eisenhower’s
foot-dragging on
school desegregation. ;
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