10/07/2004
	Elfriede Jelinek, wins the Nobel Prize, "... for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". http://nobelprize.org/

Books Released in 2004 by our Guest Writers and Faculty

MARGARET DRABBLE, October 2004. "THE RED QUEEN" ........... "It is a complex, deeply satisfying novel about death and rebirth, memory and immortality. It is also richly and surprisingly sensuous... Drabble is invariably perceptive and wise about her characters, gently undermining their pretensions and self-importance with irony and delicacy... Carefully wrought and beautifully written as it is, THE RED QUEEN is another fine edition to the Drabble oeuvre." Christopher Hart, LITERARY REVIEW "Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives." KIRKUS REVIEWS "The interplay between the two women‘s existences, and the presiding theme of the dead finding living voices, or victims perhaps, to retell their stories, brings this complex and satisfying novel through to its conclusion. ... Drabble has produced a finely enjoyable work." FINANCIAL TIMES "As luridly eventful and as stylistically rich as any Jacobean tragedy, shows Drabble in brilliant form." Francis King, SPECTATOR "The life-story of Lady Hong is so extraordinary, and Drabble‘s fascination so infectiously conveyed that it cannot fail to absorb the reader." SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

CHRIS BOHJALIAN, October 2004 "BEFORE YOU KNOW KINDNESS" A Booksense Selection, October 2004...... "Bohjalian [is] America's answer to Joanna Trollope . . . Suavely perceptive . . . The finely drawn scenes and characters here will suck in all but the hardest-hearted. Pretty much irresistible." Kirkus Reviews "Elegant, refined . . . A triumph." Booklist (Starred Review) "Nifty. . . Bohjalian has built a rich and complex family drama around a knotty, unanswerable set of questions." Entertainment Weekly "Bohjalian has had much success in the past, including a selection as an Oprah Book Club author. Before You Know Kindness is better than anything he's written before." The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Before you finish reading Before You Know Kindness, its most important character, 10-year-old Willow Seton, will become a member of your family. This decent kid struggles with an almost impossible dilemma, and Chris Bohjalian's new book is one of those deliciously compelling novels whose characters enter your consciousness like blood kin. In spite of how harrowing it is to read, you don't want it to end." David Huddle, The Burlington Free Press [A] many-faceted satire. . . Bohjalian excels at getting inside each character's head with shifts of diction and perspective. . . his skillful storytelling will engage readers." Publishers Weekly "Bohjalian's character depictions are strong and complex, and readers will find themselves caring about the Seton clan. . . Before You Know Kindness is an engrossing story that entertains while making you think." Bookpage "Chris Bohjalian's many fans will be glad to know he's back on the high wire, expertly balancing topical issues with the more timeless concerns of the human heart. His well- drawn, sympathetic characters deepen and intensify the novel's gripping plot rather than simply serving it. Before You Know Kindness is smart, first-rate storytelling." Richard Russo, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "Once again, Chris Bohjalian dares to tackle the complexities — and complacencies — of modern society at its most vulnerable spot, where the personal clashes with the political, where the private is forced to go public. And once again, he forges a drama that will keep his readers on the edge of their seats . . . perhaps their conscience as well." Julia Glass, Winner of the National Book Award "Chris Bohjalian's magnificent new novel, Before You Know Kindness, is the best work of fiction I've read about an American family since Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. It is one of the funniest, best-written, most compassionate, most engaging, and flat-out most enjoyable novels I've ever read." Howard Frank Mosher, Winner of the New England Book Award

DAN CHAON, April 2004 "YOU REMIND ME OF ME" "You Remind Me of Me is one of the strangest, most beautiful, most compelling books I’ve read in a long time. Unnerving and real, intricately plotted, wonderfully written, it’s a Chinese box of a novel, full of hidden pleasures and surprises." —ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN, author of The Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again "[A] piercingly poignant tale of fate, chance, and search for redemption." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "One of Dan Chaon’s many gifts is his ability to probe deeply and delicately into sorrow. This gift serves him beautifully in You Remind Me of Me, a novel about adoption, about the quiet sadness that lies at the bottom of all his characters’ troubles." — JANE HAMILTON, author of A Map of the World "Dan Chaon’s beautiful, effortless prose commands the reader from sentence one, steering us from prickling unease to wrenching pathos, tunneling inside his characters’ minds and worlds with such authority that everything else seems to disappear. It’s almost frightening to be in the hands of so gifted a writer." — JENNIFER EGAN, author of Look at Me and The Invisible Circus "Beautiful, painful, and sure footed, You Remind Me of Me tracks the delicate connections between a handful of lost and poignant lives, in the process giving them the radiance of a stained-glass window. What a writer. Dan Chaon is going to have a breathtaking literary career." — PETER STRAUB, author of lost boy lost girl "Dan Chaon’s novel, You Remind Me of Me, is nothing short of brilliant. The novel is haunting me, and I can’t stop thinking about it—both as a reader and as a deeply admiring writer. I wish I had a better adjective than superb." — CAROLINE LEAVITT, author of Girls in Trouble

ANDRE CODRESCU, May 2004 "WAKEFIELD" WAKEFIELD zig-zags on wheels of comic brilliance, totally flattening a lot of useless architecture - physical and psychological - along the way. -- Tom Robbins Codrescu has written a tour de force comedy in which he proves--as did Dante and Milton and Goethe and Mark Twain before him--that Beezlebub is literature's best character. He also confirms the internationally agreed-upon notion that America is the devil's ripest ground. I laughed out loud. -- Mary Karr A brilliantly inventive cathedral of a book. No one--and I mean no one--is more deeply in touch with the zeitgeist of this obsessive, lunatic age than Andrei Codrescu. In our culture, in our literature, he is essential. -- Robert Olen Butler WAKEFIELD is a hilarious - and yet grievously sobering - road-trip told by a maniac and signifying everything. Codrescu made me laugh over and over again, while brilliantly excavating and revealing the dark and absurd underbelly of our crazy global landscape. -- Ariel Dorfman Perverse, romantic, profound, hilarious, cynical, moving, always surprising, and gorgeously written, "Wakefield" is hell-bent comic poetry, and the best kind of fun: the sort that forever changes the way you look at the world, from picayune details to the meaning of life. -- Elizabeth McCracken A dazzling book ... the reader emerges at the end of the journey with laughter in his heart and a revitalized sense of the astonishing mysteries of everyday life in the here and now. -- Jonathan Raban WAKEFIELD plucks you from the circumstances of everyday life and takes you on an exhilarating excursion through time and space, through memory and imagination, and he introduces you to unforgettable characters obsessed with singular follies. -- Eric Kraft Andrei Codrescu's WAKEFIELD is unremittingly coruscating and immensely subversive, in short, a brilliant comic novel that will give you a fresh look at the homeland. -- Jim Harrison Andrei Codrescu has joined classical writers Tirso, Goethe, Hawthorne, and Borges as the contemporary master of devil covenants. Like Sinclair Lewis before him, his mainstreet reveals a wildly corrupt, entertaining, loony Odysseus on his picaresque jaunt through popular world culture. Most poignant and darkly compelling in Wakefield is his admixture of madness, cunning, and the ultimate metaphysical sorrow of his journey, worth it, for what alternative exists in a world of diabolical tricksters? Yet life prevails over death, over any pact, in this laughing encyclopedia of Wakefield's wanderings. -- Willis Barnstone

CONNIE MAY FOWLER, January 2004 "THE PROBLEM WITH MURMUR LEE" The bestselling author of Before Women Had Wings spins a wild new tale about the strong bonds among a group of friends that loses its quirkiest member, Murmur Lee. Exploring new literary territory while keeping to her native Floridian roots, Fowler is here at her most original and entertaining. As a new year dawns over the island of Iris Haven, Murmur Lee Harp and her lover, Billy, go for a romantic sail without a care in the world. The evening comes to an abrupt halt when Murmur Lee discovers that she has drowned—but by whose hand?—in the Iris Haven river. Grief-stricken and haunted by the mysteries surrounding her death, Murmur Lee’s circle of friends sets out to discover what really happened to her, and in the process they learn as much about her failings and triumphs as their own. After years of self-exile in the North, Charlee Mudd returns to set her best friend’s affairs in order, only to confront her own ghosts. Edith Piaf, a former marine whose sex change at the age of sixty-two Murmur Lee supported unquestioningly, must find the confidence to carry on without the encouragement of her friend. Lonely widower Dr. Zachary Klein plummets into the depths of depression at the loss of the second woman he has ever loved. As for Murmur Lee—who lived her entire life on an island named by her great-great grandfather in honor of the Greek goddess who receives the souls of dying women—in death she experiences her own journey as she is plunged into her familial past and discovers the truth about who she really is. With poignancy and humor Fowler weaves the voices of Murmur and her friends into a compelling narrative. Part family saga, part murder mystery, The Problem with Murmur Lee is Fowler’s most rewarding and engrossing work yet. “The Problem with MurmurLee is a brave and beautiful book. It might be called a mystery, but the questions it asks are not who killed or even how or why. The questions Fowler asks are the ones we all ask: What is the meaning of one human life? How do we cope with loss, sorrow, or with our deepest fears? Where she takes us is not to mourning but to celebration. I loved Murmur Lee and will never forget her.” —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina Praise for Connie May Fowler “If writing is a gift, then Connie May Fowler must be endowed with the gifts of ten muses.” —Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Opposite of Fate “[Before Women Had Wings is] a thing of heartrending beauty, a moving exploration of love and loss, violence and grief, forgiveness and redemption.” —Chicago Tribune “Connie May Fowler writes with great sympathy and insight.” —Lee Smith, author of Saving Grace “There is no denying the depth of Connie May Fowler’s talent …” —New York Times Book Review “[Fowler’s] prose is never less than as sinewy as cypress trees and as right as Christmas cake … Few writers capture poverty’s weird chemistry of aching hope and grinding pessimism like Fowler.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

From Booklist *Starred Review* Fowler, a captivating and good-hearted satirist, exuberantly pays homage to and matches wits with Jane Austen in her most pleasurable novel to date by portraying six irresistible Californians who meet once a month to discuss Austen's six novels. Coyly shifting points of view, Fowler subtly uses her characters' responses to Austen as entree into their poignant and often hilarious life stories. The book club is Jocelyn's idea, a fiftysomething gal who seems to prefer the company of her show dogs to men. She has known Sylvia since grade school, and even used to date Sylvia's husband, who has abruptly moved out, inspiring their beautiful, accident-prone, lesbian artist daughter, Allegra, to move back in and join the book club along with her mother. Also on board are disheveled and loquacious Bernadette; Prudie, a high-school French teacher; and Grigg, the only man. Fowler shares Austen's fascination with the power of stories, and explores the same timeless aspects of human behavior that Austen so masterfully dramatizes, while capturing with anthropological acuity and electrifying humor the oddities of our harried world. Fellow Austenites will love Fowler's fluency in the great novelist's work; every reader will relish Fowler's own ebullient comedy of manners, and who knows how many book clubs will be inspired by this charming paean to books and readers. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved BookPage, May 2004 Though Fowler takes Austen as her inspiration, she clearly possesses her own unique voice and gift for storytelling. The New York Times Book Review, May 2, 2004 [The Jane Austen Book Club is] that rare book that reminds us what reading is all about. San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 2004 Karen Joy Fowler deserves every success this savvy, episodic but chamois-smooth novel can bring. Christian Science Monitor, April 27, 2004 I'm instinctively wary of genetic engineering, but Karen Fowler may have produced a literary equivalent of the elusive Super Tomato. Time Out New York, May 13-20, 2004 Fowler has fashioned a deft, witty multiple-character study and closely observed comedy of romantic manners. Newsweek, June 14, 2004 The Jane Austen Book Club is the hot choice for book clubs around the country.

KAREN SLAUGHTER, July 2004 "INDELIBLE" Dennis Drabelle - The Washington Post Throughout Indelible, Slaughter excels at pitting one strong character against another. A long conversation between Sara and her mother, as Sara gets ready to go off for a weekend with Jeffrey and her mother takes over the packing, epitomizes the blend of love, bossiness, resistance, banter and tenuous compromise that shapes relations between a tough-minded parent and a willful child. And in Slaughter's steady hands, the trajectory of Sara and Jeffrey's off-and-on romance is clear and convincing.