I Just Read… Too Much Money by Dominick Dunne

--by Hanje Richards
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As a fan of Dominick Dunne for many years, I was saddened by his death last August just before his 84^th birthday. He did leave us one last gift with his final novel, Too Much Money. In addition to the 11 novels and books of nonfiction that he wrote, he wrote for many years for Vanity Fair and appeared regularly on television discussing the rich and famous and their crimes.
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Famous trials that Dunne covered included those of O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, Michael Skakel, William Kennedy Smith, and the Menendez brothers.
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Another City, Not My Own: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir - Gus Bailey (Dominick Dunne’s alter ego), journalist to high society, knows the sordid secrets of the very rich. Now he turns his penetrating gaze to a courtroom in Los Angeles, witnessing the trial of the century unfold before his startled eyes. As the infamous case and characters begin to take shape, and a range of celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Heidi Fleiss share their own theories of the crime, Bailey bears witness to the ultimate perversion of principle and the most amazing gossip machine in Hollywood — all wrapped in a marvelously addictive true-to-life tale of love, rage, and ruin. . . .
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An Inconvenient Woman - Jules Mendelson is wealthy. Astronomically so. He and his wife lead the kind of charity-giving, art-filled, high-society life for which each has been carefully groomed... until Jules falls in love with Flo March, a beautiful actress/waitress. What Flo discovers about the super-rich is not a pretty sight. And in the end, she wants no more than what she was promised. But when Flo begins to share the true story of her life among the Mendelsons, not everyone is in a listening mood. And some cold shoulders have very sharp edges. . . .
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Justice: Crimes, Trials and Punishments - For more than two decades, Vanity Fair has published Dominick Dunne’s brilliant, revelatory chronicles of the most famous crimes, trials, and punishments of our time. Here, in one volume, are his mesmerizing tales of justice denied and justice affirmed. Whether writing of Claus von Bülow’s romp through two trials; the Los Angeles media frenzy surrounding O.J. Simpson; the death by fire of multibillionaire banker Edmond Safra; or the Greenwich, Connecticut, murder of Martha Moxley and the indictment— decades later — of Michael Skakel, Dominick Dunne tells it honestly and tells it from his unique perspective. His search for the truth is relentless.
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Mansions of Limbo - Dominick Dunne has met them all — stars and slugs, criminals and victims, the innocent and the hideously guilty — and now his two provocative collections of Vanity Fair portraits are in one irresistible volume. From posh Park Avenue duplexes to the extravagant mansions of Beverly Hills, from tasteful London town houses to the wild excesses of million-dollar European retreats, here are the movers and shakers — and the people who pretend to be.
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Filled with pathos and wit, insight and sass, Dominick Dunne gives the reader an extraordinary peek into the rarefied world of the rich, the royal, and the ruined. For he is the man who knows all their secrets — and now those secrets are out.
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Season in Purgatory - They were the family with everything: Money. Influence. Glamour. Power. The power to halt a police investigation in its tracks. The power to spin a story, concoct a lie, and believe it was the truth. The power to murder without guilt, without shame, and without ever paying the price. They were the Bradleys, America's royalty. But an outsider refuses to play his part. And now, the day of reckoning has arrived.
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Too Much Money - Dominick Dunne revives the world he first introduced in his mega-bestselling novel People Like Us, and he brings readers up to date on favorite characters such as Ruby and Elias Renthal, Lil Altemus, and, of course, the beloved Gus Bailey. Once again, he invites us to pull up a seat at the most important tables at Swifty's, get past the doormen at esteemed social clubs like The Butterfield, and venture into the innermost chambers of the Upper East Side's most sumptuous mansions. Too Much Money is a shrewd comedy of Manhattan’s elite in the time of Bernie Madoff.

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Two Mrs. Grenvilles - When Navy ensign Billy Grenville, heir to a vast New York fortune, sees showgirl Ann Arden on the dance floor, it is love at first sight. And much to the horror of Alice Grenville — the indomitable family matriarch — he marries her. Ann wants desperately to be accepted by high society and become the well-bred woman of her fantasies. But a gunshot one rainy night propels Ann into a notorious spotlight as the two Mrs. Grenvilles enter into a conspiracy of silence that will bind them together for as long as they live.

Susan Orlean: Adventurer, Traveler, Writer and Chicken Lover

--by Hanje Richards
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Susan Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992 and has contributed articles to Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire and Outside. She is the author of several books, including The Orchid Thief, a profile of Florida orchid grower, breeder and collector John Laroche. The book formed the basis of Charlie Kaufman’s script for the Spike Jonze film Adaptation. Orlean was, in effect, made into a fictional character; the movie portrayed her as becoming Laroche’s lover and partner in a drug production operation in which orchids were processed into a fictional psychoactive substance.
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I follow Susan Orlean on Twitter and know her to be a wonderfully interesting woman who keeps chickens and recently rescued and nursed a chicken (Gerry) who had lost her way in New York City. Susan Orlean always seems to be ready for a new adventure; I hope you enjoy some of these stories of her travels.

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Adaptation - Twisty brilliance from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. Nicolas Cage returns to form with a funny, sad, and sneaky performance as Charlie Kaufman, a self-loathing screenwriter who has been hired to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into a screenplay.
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Frustrated and infatuated by Orlean's elegant but plotless book (which is largely a rumination on flowers), Kaufman begins to write a screenplay about himself trying to write a screenplay about The Orchid Thief, all the while hounded by his twin brother Donald (Cage again), who's cheerfully writing the kind of formulaic action movie that Kaufman finds repugnant. By its conclusion, Adaptation is the most artistically ambitious, most utterly cynical, and most uncategorizable movie ever to come out of Hollywood. Also starring Meryl Streep (as Susan Orlean), Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton, and Brian Cox; superb performances throughout.

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The Best American Travel Writing (2007) - Edited by Susan Orlean. “Travel is not about finding something. It’s about getting lost -- that is, it is about losing yourself in a place and a moment. The little things that tether you to what’s familiar are gone, and you become a conduit through which the sensation of the place is felt.” -- from the introduction by Susan Orlean

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George Saunders travels to India to witness firsthand a fifteen-year-old boy who has been meditating motionless under a tree for months without food or water, and who many followers believe is the reincarnation of the Buddha. Matthew Power reveals trickle-down economics at work in a Philippine garbage dump. Jason Anthony describes the challenges of everyday life in Vostok, the coldest place on earth, where temperatures dip as low as minus-129 degrees and where, in midsummer, minus-20 degrees is considered a heat wave.
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David Halberstam recalls how an inauspicious Saigon restaurant changed the way he and other reporters in Vietnam saw the world. Ian Frazier analyzes why we get sick when traveling in out-of-the-way places. And Kevin Fedarko embarks on a drug-fueled journey in Djibouti, chewing psychotropic foliage in “the worst place on earth.”

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Closer to home, Steve Friedman profiles a 410-pound man who set out to walk cross-country to lose weight and find happiness. Rick Bass chases the elusive concept of the West in America, and Jonathan Stern takes a hilarious Lonely Planet approach to his small Manhattan apartment.

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The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People -
Acclaimed New Yorker writer Susan Orlean brings her wry sensibility, exuberant voice, and peculiar curiosities to a fascinating range of subjects — from the well known (Bill Blass) to the unknown (a typical ten-year-old boy) to the formerly known (the 1960s girl group the Shaggs).

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Passionate people. Famous people. Short people. And one championship show dog named Biff, who from a certain angle looks a lot like Bill Clinton. Orlean transports us into the lives of eccentric and extraordinary characters — like Cristina Sánchez, the eponymous bullfighter, the first female matador of Spain — and writes with such insight and candor that readers will feel as if they’ve met each and every one of them.

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My Kind of Place: Travel Stories From a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere - Susan Orlean takes readers on a series of remarkable journeys in this uniquely witty, sophisticated, and far-flung travel book. In this irresistible collection of adventures far and near, Orlean conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois — and even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her hospitality.

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With Orlean as guide, lucky readers partake in all manner of armchair activity. They will climb Mt. Fuji and experience a hike most intrepid Japanese have never attempted; play ball with Cuba’s Little Leaguers, promising young athletes born in a country where baseball and politics are inextricably intertwined; trawl Icelandic waters with Keiko, everyone’s favorite whale as he tries to make it on his own; stay awhile in Midland, Texas, hometown of George W. Bush, a place where oil time is the only time that matters; explore the halls of a New York City school so troubled it’s known as “Horror High;” and stalk caged tigers in Jackson, New Jersey, a suburban town with one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile anywhere in the world.

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The Orchid Thief - From Florida’s swamps to its courtrooms, Susan Orlean follows one deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man’s possibly criminal pursuit of an endangered flower. Determined to clone the rare ghost orchid, Polyrrhiza lindenii, John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, along with the Seminole Indians who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean — and the reader — will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion.

Friday Fiction: Lorrie Moore

--by Hanje Richards

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Lorrie Moore is an American fiction writer known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories. She writes frequently about failing relationships and terminal illness and is known for her acerbic wit and pithy one-liners. Her stories often take place in the Midwest.
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Moore is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was awarded an O. Henry Award in 1998 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2004 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.
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Anagrams - Gerard sits, fully clothed, in his empty bathtub and pines for Benna. Neighbors in the same apartment building, they share a wall, and Gerard listens for the sound of her toilet flushing. Gerard loves Benna. And then Benna loves Gerard. She listens to him play piano, she teaches poetry, and she sings at nightclubs. As their relationships ebbs and flows, through reality and imagination, Lorrie Moore paints a captivating, innovative portrait of men and women in love and not in love. The first novel from Lorrie Moore, Anagrams is a revelatory tale of love gained and lost.
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Birds of America: Stories - A collection of 12 stories notable for their verbal wit and range of intellectual reference. Moore's most typical characters are women in retreat from disappointing relationships or in search of someone or thing to relieve their solitude.
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One example is the eponymous protagonist of “Agnes of Iowa,” an unhappily married night-school teacher whose longing “to be a citizen of the globe!” is not assuaged by her brief encounter with a visiting South African poet.
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Another is the “minor movie star” of “Willing,” whose involvement with an auto mechanic can’t repair the unbridgeable distance she's put between herself and other people. Or, in a story “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens,” there’s the housewife who mourns her dead cat, is chastened by her husband's understandable exasperation, yet is still gripped by “the mystery of interspecies love.”
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Moore writes knowingly about family members who tiptoe warily around the edges of loving one another in “Charades,” who discover vulnerability where they had previously seen only dispassionate strength in “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People” or who learn to live, say, with the possibility of a baby dying in “People Like That Are the Only People Here.”
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Moore’s characters are likeably tough-minded and funny, they invariably manifest a feeling that life is passing too quickly and that we haven't made all the necessary arrangements.

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Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.

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As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer, has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, and Simone de Beauvoir.

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Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.
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Like Life: Stories - In these eight stories, Lorrie Moore’s characters stumble through their daily existence. Lile Life's men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can’t quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned, or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.

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Self-Help: Stories - In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.
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Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? - A disillusioned, middle-aged woman's remembrance of an ephemeral teenage friendship is triggered by eating cervelles in a Parisian restaurant…

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While vacationing in Paris, narrator Berie Carr, whose marriage is stuck in a bleakly funny state of suspended collapse, looks back to her girlhood in Horsehearts, an Adirondack tourist town near the Canadian border. There, in the summer of 1972, she was a skinny, 15-year-old misfit who rejected her parents and idolized her sassy, sexually precocious friend Sils, who played Cinderella at a theme park called Storyland where Berie was a cashier.

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In a series of flashbacks, Berie recounts stealing into bars with Sils; sneaking cigarettes in the shadows of Storyland rides; and how, midway through the summer, she was shipped off to Baptist camp after filching hundreds of dollars from her register to pay for an abortion for Sils. Moore's bitterly funny hymn to vanished adolescence is suffused with droll wordplay, allegorical images of lost innocence and fairy-tale witchery, and a poignant awareness of how life's significant events often prove dismally anticlimactic.

Friday Fiction: John Updike -- Prolific and Diverse

--by Hanje Richards

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Completely coincidentally, I find myself writing this blog post on John Updike’s birthday. He was born March 18, 1932 and died January 27, 2009. The actual inspiration for selecting Updike for "Friday Fiction" this week was a collection of short stories that was published after his death: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories.

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John Updike was a very prolific writer, who wrote poetry, essays, novels, short stories and criticism of both art and literature. “Updike populated his fiction with characters that frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family, obligations and marital infidelity. His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail.” He is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time.

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Updike was the recipient of many awards for his writing, including the O.Henry prize (twice), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (three times), and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (twice).

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Today’s blog post features some of the John Updike titles in the Copper Queen Library's collection.

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Afterlife and Other Stories - An anthology of short fiction features twenty-two diverse tales that explore the magical fragility, memory, nostalgia, and translucent quality of life beyond middle age. After publishing more than 40 volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays, Updike concentrates on aging protagonists and the abundant evidence of mortality that surrounds them. In these mellow, reflective stories, where parents die and grandchildren are born, Updike's heroes are acutely aware of lost glory yet discover the strength to persevere.

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Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel - At this juncture of his life, "semiobscure" literary writer Henry Bech may be "at bay" -- attacked by fellow writers, sued for libel, derided by critics, consumed by worry about his place in the literary pantheon. In five interrelated sections that move backward and forward through time, from 1986, when the 63-year-old Bech is in Prague, to 1999, when he accepts the Nobel Prize with his eight-month-old daughter in his arms, Bech pursues his craft, an assortment of women, vengeance, and peace of mind, veering between misery and elation, bathing in self-doubt or preening egotistically.

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Brazil - They meet by chance on Copacabana Beach -- Tristao Raposo, a poor black teen from the Rio slums, surviving day to day on street smarts and the hustle, and Isabel Leme, an upper-class white girl, treated like a pampered slave by her absent though very powerful father. Convinced that fate brought them together, betrayed by families who threaten to tear them apart, Tristao and Isabel flee to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west -- unaware of the astonishing destiny that awaits them.. . Spanning twenty-two years, from the mid-sixties to the late eighties, Brazil surprises and embraces the reader with its celebration of passion, loyalty, and New World innocence.

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Centaur - In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lose touch with his life.

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Golf Dreams: Writings On Golf - Updike recounts his love affair with golf, which he began playing at age 25, through 30 pieces that originally appeared in magazines and novels. Among the highlights are "Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy," in which Updike lampoons golf instructionals with elaborate advice on how to hold a teacup, and "Farrell's Caddie," a delightful short story in which a curmudgeonly Scottish caddie gives his employer advice on far more than which club to use. Fans of the Rabbit novels will also enjoy "Three Rounds with Rabbit Angstrom," in which the oft-frustrated Rabbit finds little relief on the links.

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In the Beauty of the Lilies - The saga of one family's journey through the spiritual landscape of 20th-century America opens in 1910, just as Theodore Wilmot's father, a Presbyterian minister, suddenly loses his faith. His loss is visceral, and no amount of intellectualizing can deter him from his realization that he must leave the pulpit if he is to remain true to himself. Eighty years later, Theodore's grandson, a lost soul in the post-Vietnam War era who has found strange comfort in a radical religious cult, experiences his own catharsis, as the flames literally rage around him. In the intervening years, we follow the lives of Theodore himself, and his daughter, Esther, who becomes a modern-day sort of goddess -- a movie star. Updike is an astute observer of the American experience and in Theodore Wilmot has created a quintessential 20th-century everyman.

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More Matter: Essays and Criticism - Shrewdly admiring essays on American past masters such as Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Edmund Wilson, and Dawn Powell take their place beside penetrating assessments of contemporary peers and rivals -- John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Martin Amis. Here, too, are brilliantly original essays on religion and literature, lust and dancing, as well as a revealing selection of pieces about himself and his work. Whether he's writing about photography or film, golf or adultery, Bill Clinton's hair or the sinking of the Titanic, Updike never fails to dazzle or surprise. Generous, learned, and wickedly funny.

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Poorhouse Fair - At the County Home for the Aged, the inmates, having shed their cares and responsibilities, live out their remaining years. On the day of the Poorhouse Fair, the order is broken and the old people take charge. It is a day neither Conner, the poorhouse prefect, nor his charges will forget.

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Rabbit At Rest - In John Updike's fourth novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring, and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.

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Rabbit Redux - The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, sexy story. Harry Angstrom --known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters -- finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife. How he resolves -- or further complicates -- his problems.
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Roger’s Version - A born-again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle-aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who'd just as soon leave faith a mystery. Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert's wife -- and Roger finds himself experiencing deep longings for a trashy teenage girl.

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S S. is Sarah Worth - doctor's wife, North Shore matron, loving mother, and now (suddenly!) ardent follower of a Hindu religious leader known as the Arhat. As this brilliant and very funny novel opens, Sarah is fleeing the confinement of her suburban life to become a sannyasin (pilgrim) at her guru's Arizona ashram. In the letters and audiocassettes that Sarah sends to her husband, daughter, mother, brother, best friend -- to her psychiatrist and her hairdresser and her dentist -- John Updike gives us a witty comedy of manners, a biting satire of life on a religious commune, and the story -- deep and true -- of an American woman in search of herself.

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Seek My Face - This novel takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art. In the evolving relation between the two women, the interviewer and interviewee move in and out of the roles of daughter and mother, therapist and patient, predator and prey, supplicant and idol. The scene is central Vermont; the time is the early spring of 2001.

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Widows of Eastwick - After traveling the world to exotic lands, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie -–now widowed but still witches -– return to the Rhode Island seaside town of Eastwick, “the scene of their primes,” site of their enchanted mischief more than three decades ago. Diabolical Darryl Van Horne is gone, and what was once a center of license and liberation is now a “haven of wholesomeness” populated by hockey moms and househusbands acting out against the old ways of their own absent, experimenting parents. With spirits still willing but flesh weaker, the three women must confront a powerful new counterspell of conformity.

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Witches of Eastwick - In a small New England town in the late 1960s, there lived three witches: Alexandra Spoffard, sculptress, could create thunderstorms; Jane Smart, cellist, could fly; Sukie Rougemont, local gossip columnist, could turn milk into cream. Divorced but hardly celibate, content but always ripe for adventure, our three wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose hot tub was the scene of some rather bewitching delights.

Friday Fiction: Alice Munro, Short Story Writer

--by Hanje Richards

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During her distinguished career, Alice Munro has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize, three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England's W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States' National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.
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A frequent theme of Munro’s early work has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In her more recent work, she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone, and of the elderly. Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply, and effortlessly, evoke life.
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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories - In the nine stories that make up this short story collection, Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.
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A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best -- tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.
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Open Secrets: Stories - In these eight tales, Alice Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman's romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and lover in present-day Canada.
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Runaway: Stories - Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about -– women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children -– become as vivid as our own neighbors.
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Too Much Happiness: Stories (FIC MUNRO TOO) Ten new stories by Alice Munro, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.
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In the first story, a young wife and mother receives release from a surprising source from the unbearable pain of losing her three children. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion.
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Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky -- a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician -- on a journey that takes her from the Riviera, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
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Alice Munro renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

David Macaulay: Author and Illustrator Who Explains Just About Everything

--by Hanje Richards
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David Macaulay is an award-winning author and illustrator whose books have sold millions of copies in the United States alone, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. Macaulay has garnered numerous awards, including the Caldecott Medal and Honor Awards, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, the Christopher Award, an American Institute of Architects Medal, and the Washington Post–Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award. In 2006, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, given "to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations." Superb design, magnificent illustrations, and clearly presented information distinguish all of his books. David Macaulay lives with his family in Vermont.
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Black and White - At first glance, this is a collection of four unrelated stories, each occupying a quarter of every two-page spread, and each a slight enough tale to seem barely worth a book -- a boy on a train, parents in a funny mood, a convict's escape, and a late commuter train. The magic of Black and White comes not from each story, however, but from the mysterious interactions among them that creates a fifth story. Several motifs linking the tales are immediately apparent, such as trains -- real and toy -- and newspapers. A second or third reading reveals suggestions of the title theme: Holstein cows, prison uniform stripes. Eventually, the stories begin to merge into a surrealistic tale spanning several levels of reality, e.g., Are characters in one story traveling on the toy train in another? Answers are never provided -- this is not a mystery or puzzle book. Instead, Black and White challenges the reader to use text and pictures in unexpected ways.
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Castle - The word itself conjures up mystery, romance, intrigue, and grandeur. What could be more perfect for an author/illustrator who has continually stripped away the mystique of architectural structures that have long fascinated modern man? With typical zest and wry sense of humor punctuating his drawings, David Macaulay traces the step-by-step planning and construction of both castle and town. Brick by brick, tool by tool, worker by worker, we witness the methodical construction of a castle through exquisitely detailed pen-and-ink illustrations. Children who love to know how things work especially appreciate Macaulay's passion for process and engineering. Moats, arrow loops, plumbing, dungeons, and weaponry are all explained in satisfying detail.
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Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction - Text and detailed drawings follow the planning and construction of a magnificent Gothic cathedral in the imaginary French town of Chutreaux during the thirteenth century. Cathedral starts in 1252, when the people of a fictitious French town decide to build a cathedral after their existing church is struck by lightning. We meet the craftspeople, examine the tools, study their cathedral plans, and watch the laying of the foundation. Week by week, we witness the construction of this glorious temple to God. Macaulay intuitively hones in on the details about which we are the most curious: How were those enormously high ceilings built and decorated? How were those 60-foot-high windows made and installed in the 13th century? And how did people haul those huge, heavy bells up into the skyscraper-high towers? Thanks to Macaulay's thorough, thoughtful tribute to the Gothic cathedral, not a stone, turret, or pane of stained glass is left unexamined or unexplained.
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Pyramid - Exquisitely crosshatched pen-and-ink illustrations frame the engaging fictional story of an ancient pharaoh who commissions a pyramid to be built for him. With great patience and respect for minute detail (not unlike the creators of the early pyramids), Macaulay explains the sometimes backbreaking tasks of planning, hauling, chiseling, digging, and hoisting that went into the construction of this awe-inspiring monument. Just when the narrative teeters on the edge of textbook doldrums, Macaulay brings us back to the engaging human drama of death and superstition. This respectful blending of architecture, history, and mysticism will certainly satiate pyramid-passionate children as well as their obliging parents.
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Rome Antics - A pigeon carrying an important message takes the reader on a unique tour through Rome. As we follow the path of this somewhat wayward bird, we discover that Rome is a place where past and present live side by side. It is a city that has been recycling itself for two thousand years, but unlike a museum, Rome displays its remarkable history without respect for chronology. A new electric bus travels over cobblestone streets just ten feet above the floor of an ancient stadium. Inscriptions from tombs and temples share wall space with neon. Every time a corner is turned there is a surprise, just as every turn of the page brings a new perspective. This juxtaposition of ancient and modern, as seen with David Macaulay's ingenious vision, gives the reader an imaginative and informative journey through this wondrous city.
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The Way Things Work - From levers to lasers, from cameras to computers, this 384-page volume is a remarkable overview of the machines and inventions that shape our lives, amusingly presented with a large dose of Macaulay's wit and personality. A book to be treasured as both a browsing item and as a gold mine of reference information Gorgeous line drawings in Macaulay's familiar style, enhanced with watercolors, combine with virtually encyclopedic coverage of how things work to create this absolutely captivating look at the world's technology. Subjects are arranged into four broad categories: units on mechanical devices (simple machines, friction); the use of the elements (wind, water, heat), waves (light and sound); and electronics include both the immense (space shuttles) and the miniscule (an automobile's thermostat).
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The Way We Work: Getting To Know The Amazing Human Body - This is an outstanding guide to the human body from one of the world's great illustrators! Ever wondered how we breathe, or why? Or what happens to broccoli once your teeth have finished with it? Or how your eyes turn at the same time and in the same direction? Most of us don't stop to think about the countless everyday tasks our bodies perform automatically while we get on with our lives. And yet of all the complex things we encounter as we go through life, our bodies are probably the most remarkable of all...Explore everything from bones to bronchioles, noses to neurons in this clear, comprehensive and utterly engaging guide to the human body from award-winning author-illustrator David Macaulay. David Macaulay's research took several years, during which he sat in on anatomy classes, dissections and numerous operations.

Friday Fiction: T. C. Boyle

--by Hanje Richards

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T.C. Boyle, also known as T. Coraghessan Boyle, earned a B.A. in English and history from the State University of New York at Potsdam in 1968. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 19th century British literature in 1977. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978.

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Many of Boyle’s novels and short stories explore the Baby Boom generation — its appetites, joys, and addictions. His fiction also explores the ruthlessness and unpredictability of nature and the toll human society unwittingly takes on the environment.
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The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle - T.C. Boyle's first four volumes of short stories in one big book (as well as seven additional stories, two of which had never been printed before), this collection runs the gamut from hilarious to heartbreakingly real.

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Drop City - It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier — the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska — in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naïve optimism, the inhabitants of Drop City arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other young homesteaders. When the two communities collide, unexpected friendships and dangerous enmities are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment, and a roof over one’s head.
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East is East - A young Japanese seaman jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and washes ashore on a barrier island inhabited by a strange mix of rednecks, descendants of slaves, genteel retired people, and a colony of artists. The result is a sexy, savagely hilarious tragicomedy of thwarted expectations, mistaken identity, love, jealousy and betrayal.
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A Friend of the Earth - T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025, global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's private zoo when his second ex-wife re-enters his life.
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The Inner Circle - This novel makes use of Alfred Kinsey’s controversial studies on human sexuality — and the fascinating details of Kinsey’s life and those of the men who worked for him — to create an irresistible tale about the interaction between our human and animal natures. While The Inner Circle gives full play to this erotically charged material, it is at heart a moving and compassionate look at sex, marriage, and infidelity that will have readers everywhere nodding in recognition.

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Riven Rock - It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in love with Stanley McCormick, son of a millionaire inventor. The two wed, but before the marriage is consummated, Stanley experiences a nervous breakdown and is diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac. Locked up for the rest of his life at Riven Rock, the family's California mansion, Stanley is treated by a series of confident doctors determined to cure him. But his true salvation lies with Katherine who, throughout her career as a scientist and suffragette, continues a patient vigil from beyond the walls of Riven Rock, never losing hope that one day Stanley will be healed.
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The Road to Wellville - A snobbish wife and her henpecked husband travel to Dr. Kellogg's spa in turn-of-the-century Battle Creek, where the youth-crazed affluent succumb to quackery. Boyle takes on the national obsession with health and nutritional fads. Battle Creek, Michigan, 1907 — breakfast-food capital of the US. C.W. Post (Grape-Nuts) and the Kellogg brothers have already made their fortunes, but there's still a gold rush atmosphere in town. The inventor of the corn flake, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, now devotes himself to his Sanitarium ("luxury hotel, hospital, and spa all rolled into one''), where he denounces meat-eating, enforces a five-enema-a-day regimen, and keeps his wealthy patients busy with such wacky treatments as the sinusoidal bath.

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Talk, Talk - A tightly scripted page turner about the trials of Dana Halter, a 33-year-old deaf woman whose identity has been stolen, this novel is both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity.


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Tooth and Claw and Other Stories - Among the fourteen tales in this short story collection are the comic yet lyrical title story, in which a young man wins a vicious African cat in a bar bet; "Dogology," about a suburban woman losing her identity to a pack of strays; and "The Kind Assassin," which explores the consequences of a radio shock jock’s quest to set a world record for sleeplessness. Muscular, provocative, and blurring the boundaries between humans and nature, the funny and the shocking.
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The Tortilla Curtain - This novel examines America's guerrilla war between the haves and have-nots. While leading their lives in their gated hilltop community in Los Angeles, Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher accidentally meet Mexican illegals, and their encounter brings them together in a relationship of error and misunderstanding. A harrowing, even horrific, tale of an immigrant couple's venture into California, and the shockingly brutal reception they receive. A remarkable feat of imaginative empathy.

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Without a Hero: Stories - This collection of short stories brings together fifteen darkly comic tales about human frailty, including the title story about an ill-fated romance. In "Filthy with Things," a yuppie couple is forced to seek professional help for an "aggregation disorder" that has turned their suburban home into a warehouse of antiques and collectibles. The narrator of "Beat" recalls drinking Mogen David wine and listening to Bing Crosby records with Kerouac and Memere one Christmas in the 1950s.

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World’s End - This multi-generational novel ranges over the history of the Hudson River Valley from the late 17th century to the late 1960s with low humor, high seriousness, and magical, almost hallucinatory, prose. It follows the interwoven destinies of families of Indians, lordly Dutch patrons, and yeomen. (Winner, PEN/Faulkner Award, 1988)