7 American books that Russians know even better than Americans - Russia Beyond

7 American books that Russians know even better than Americans - Russia Beyond
GUEST ROOM | Teaching Toni Morrison - Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun
Even in Hemingway’s Woods, Sometimes a Man Needs to Cry - The New York Times
Chasing Hemingway's ghost | Arts & Leisure - Irish Echo

Posted: 28 Aug 2019 01:48 AM PDT

[unable to retrieve full-text content]7 American books that Russians know even better than Americans Russia Beyond

We decided to make a list of those American writers and their literary masterpieces that every Russian has heard about and most likely even read. But we also ...

GUEST ROOM | Teaching Toni Morrison - Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun

Posted: 27 Aug 2019 02:49 PM PDT

Toni Morrison was truly a genius. Her sudden passing on Aug. 5, 2019 is so heartbreaking. The Nobel Laureate will go down in history as one of the world's greatest writers who helped globalize the novel as a genre. She made a profound, critical impact on areas such as African American literature, American literature, black women's literature and world literature, among others. Her career launched in 1970 with the publication of her first novel The Bluest Eye while she was still an editor at Random House. She also contributed to a range of other literary genres, including the short story. She was a consummate essayist whose writings made critical interventions into public dialogues on issues from the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings to the O.J. Simpson case. Her fiction is inherently philosophical and linked to history. I have learned so much from it, like many on this campus and in the larger community who teach and treasure it. In 1955 Morrison graduated from Cornell with a Master of Arts in English, linking her literary legacy inextricably to this institution and challenging us to be good and bold stewards of it.

I have literally grown up as a student, teacher and scholar engaging in consistent reflection on her work. I first read her writing during the summer weeks before I began classes at Spelman College, a historically black and women's college in Atlanta, Georgia, as a student in 1989 because her novel Sula was one of the selections on our freshman reading list. I encountered her work again in my freshman composition courses and several other courses and analyzed Morrison's writing in several papers. I wrote my paper on her first five novels in Dr. Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper's African American literature course at Spelman, and included it as my writing sample with my applications to graduate school.

I first met Toni Morrison in person as a junior in 1991 after her public reading of what became her novel Jazz, where she signed my copy of The Bluest Eye. I didn't see her again for many years, until I was an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, where my former colleague, the writer Pam Houston, brought her to the campus in the fall of 2004 after interviewing her for Oprah's O magazine. I was invited to be a part of a panel with Professor Morrison and several students, and we each asked her a question about her latest novel, Love. Later that night during her public reading, my perspective out in the vast audience crowding the Mondavi Center — one filled with people who traveled from all over Northern California just to be in her presence — moved me all the more as a revelation about Morrison hit me: "That is why God allows greatness."

I am thankful to have been able to help celebrate her at various events held by the Toni Morrison Society, whose Biennial Conferences she attended over the years. Its "Bench by the Road Project" was inspired by the epigraph of Beloved that set forth the novel as a memorial to those enslaved. This longstanding project is all the more timely at this point as many are commemorating 400 years from the beginning of slavery in the Americas this month. While she reflects on the early period of slavery in her 2008 novel A Mercy, Beloved, which is often classified as a neo-slave narrative, was set in the years thereafter and focused on its continuing traumas.

I am thankful to have been able to tell her how much she means to me through the public tribute that I had the opportunity to do for her here at Cornell in 2009, and in my exhibition for her as an artist at the luncheon in my department, the Africana Studies and Research Center, held in her honor in 2013. I last saw her in July 2016 as the TMS celebrated her 85th birthday in New York City. The panels discussed various aspects of her outstanding editing career and featured numerous distinguished speakers, including Angela Davis, Quincy Troupe, Paula Giddings, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Edwidge Danticat and Tayari Jones, with a banquet emceed by actress, singer and director Phylicia Rashad. Her history as an editor is also one of her extraordinary lifetime achievements and has helped bring many remarkable writers to voice, and is a reminder to us all to embrace and share the stories we have.

My seminar course Toni Morrison's Novels, which I inaugurated in 2005 in my African American literature course sequence at UC Davis after encountering her there, has been a mainstay in my teaching that I have since offered at the Breadloaf School of English in North Carolina, where I taught high school teachers, and Cornell. Here at Cornell, it has been a pleasure to study her with students, who are always excited about her work and eager to read her full body of novels. I look forward to teaching two different sections of this course this fall. I welcome everyone who would like to reflect on her writing to come journey with us through a comprehensive study of her brilliant body of novels, while exploring related historical, cultural and critical contexts. Continuing forward, we at Cornell are challenged and charged to find both small and big ways to honor her that will keep her light burning brightly in this community now and into distant futures.

Riché Richardson is an associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell. Comments may be sent to opinion@cornellsun.com.

Even in Hemingway’s Woods, Sometimes a Man Needs to Cry - The New York Times

Posted: 02 Aug 2019 12:00 AM PDT

Michigan's Upper Peninsula encompasses more than 16,000 square miles of northern hardwood forest, broken here and there by hardscrabble towns whose year-round population is slowly bleeding away. In "Hunter's Moon," Philip Caputo's powerful new collection of linked stories, the U.P. serves as a repository of damaged men. Elderly fathers are disappointed by their sons. Sons have goddamn well had it with the old man's constant ragging. Lost jobs, bruised egos and failed expectations fill every middle-aged dude's shopping cart. PTSD is as common as seasonal allergies. Like plastic swept into an ocean gyre, the wreckage of American masculinity seems to drift up to the U.P. and never leave.

The seven stories in "Hunter's Moon" act as an unflinching reality check on the state of middle-age manhood at the close of the second decade of the 21st century. The Cialis tubs and wealth management ads that pepper every golf tournament telecast portray the American man's empty nest phase as a silver-tipped victory lap. On the ground, though, the truth is ugly. The suicide rate among American men aged 45 to 64 rose 45 percent between 1999 and 2017. The states with the toughest solitary-cowboy reputations — Montana, Alaska and Wyoming — charted highest on the self-erasure scale.

That is Caputo country. The writer who established himself more than 40 years ago with "A Rumor of War," the classic memoir of his years as a Marine in Vietnam, now writes from the vantage point of an elder. Phil C., the author's fictionalized self in the story "Lines of Departure," notes that he and a fellow Vietnam veteran feel "obliged to dispense our hard-won wisdom to younger members of the soldier's tribe. That I didn't have much wisdom to dispense seemed beside the point."

Don't take that display of humility as fact. Caputo's wisdom runs deep. Few writers have better captured the emotional lives of men, their desperate yearning to improve them and their utter lack of tools or capacity to accomplish the task.

A common cast of characters runs through most of the stories in "Hunter's Moon," and one of the strongest is Will Treadwell, a Vietnam veteran who owns a brew pub in the fictional U.P. town of Vieux Desert. Will is also a hunting guide. It's his side hustle. Or, as he tells two clients — a couple of Chicago cops up for a week of bear hunting in the story "Dreamers" — it's more like "a hobby that pays a few bucks. Gets me out in the woods. The woods are good for my head. The bar business drives me crazy sometimes."

That cleansing notion — the woods are good for a man's head — drives a lot of the action in "Hunter's Moon." Michigan's northern forests (and, in one story, northern Alaska) offer men the chance to rekindle friendships, heal old wounds and forge new memories together. Hunting trips like these are often the only place middle-aged guys feel safe to share their emotional lives — just so long as the heartfelt talks are the byproduct and not the point of the outing. Sharing, supporting and healing? No, ma'am, we're just out here hunting.

The publisher bills this collection as "a novel in stories," but the stories don't combine, interweave and run together to form any sort of collective denouement. It's not a novel. And that's O.K. Just let them be stories and let us enjoy Caputo's masterly telling.

"Blockers," the collection's opening story (and its best), features three mature and mildly accomplished men whose friendship dates back to the high school football field. Years ago, Tom and Paul protected Bill Erickson, the golden boy quarterback, from getting flattened by blitzing linebackers. The good-looking son of the local newspaper publisher and state senator, Bill glided through life protected by the unseen forces of wealth and privilege.

Now in his 50s, Bill finds the verities of that life breaking down. He can't stop drinking and his newspaper can't stop losing money. And he hides it all so well. "Dudes!" he shouts when he sees his old friends, hooking his arms around their necks. "How's Cheryl? How's Julie? How're the kids? Goddamn, love ya, great to see you guys again."

Paul, who's now a professor of Russian literature at Michigan State, narrates the story and captures the loving, awkward dynamic between the men:

"You've probably heard a story about ex-high school sweethearts who meet decades later, discover that the emotions of first love haven't faded, divorce their spouses and pick up where they left off. In the same way, Tom and I found that our relationship with Bill hadn't changed. We fell right back into our guardian roles. For a week of nights for six autumns in a row, we made sure he didn't do grievous harm to himself, dragged him out of bars, waltzed him into bed. It got on our nerves but was nothing we couldn't put up with."

It falls to Lisa, Bill's wife, to fill the boys in on the truth. She's been spiking Bill's orange juice with Zoloft. He's too stupidly proud to take the antidepressant on his own. To do so would be admitting he needed help.

A similar affliction troubles Will Treadwell, the brew pub owner and hunting guide. In the story "Lost," Will sells the brew pub and finds himself unhappily retired at age 64. After a dimwitted argument with a colorful local character named Skryd (about whom this reader hopes to read more, perhaps in a future novel), Will tailspins from a deep brood into a prickly depression. His wife, Maddie, makes him confront the demons that are chasing him. "To his own surprise, he does," Caputo writes. "To his surprise because he's a former Marine, because he doesn't come from people who readily confide their troubles to others — no, not even to their spouses or closest friends. To do so is a sign of weakness."

For solace Will runs to the woods — to a spot near the Two Hearted River, the Upper Peninsula waterway made famous by Ernest Hemingway's 1925 short story. Readers of "Hunter's Moon" will not be shocked to find that the woods don't solve his problems. It may be Caputo's way of telling us that now, almost a century after Hemingway wrote that piece, we know this much: A stoic, manly week in the woods isn't enough to cure the deep wounds of war.

A bill has come due. Decades of American male bravado, of Hemingway woodsmen and Clint Eastwood cowboys, of rugged individualists driving manly trucks alone, have given us the suicidal wreckage of American masculinity. Philip Caputo is 78 years old and he's seen enough. Punt the pretense and tear down the tough-guy facade. In "Hunter's Moon," he all but begs his countrymen to ask for help and open up: Take care of one another, you bighearted lunks, you stubborn fools, you American men.

Chasing Hemingway's ghost | Arts & Leisure - Irish Echo

Posted: 28 Aug 2019 10:50 AM PDT

Tara O'Grady and Dink Bruce in front of his 1949 Chevy pickup truck.

By Tara O'Grady

Ernest Hemingway came to me in a dream recently. He was wearing eye glasses made from elephant tusks. The author contemplated me with concern. My intuition informed me I was not seeing him the way he wanted to be seen. I woke wondering if I should change my perspective about the legend that is connected to 1920s Paris café society, civil war and bull fights in Spain, fishing in Key West and Cuba, and mental illness that lead to suicide in the American west.

It started with the bull fights. I was living in Seville after I left teaching high school literature in New York. If I was ever going to become a writer, I had to explore the world, like Hemingway. But I didn't admire the man. I had only read one short story in college, "Hills Like White Elephants." It was actually the biography of James Joyce that I admired while reading a copy of "Dubliners" which I picked up at the Joyce Center in Dublin on June 16 on my way to Spain in 1999. At the time I didn't know the Irish author was acquainted with Hemingway in Paris along with the rest of their Lost Generation gang. I simply knew I wanted to be like Joyce because he was multilingual, lived all over Europe and published words that I devoured. I recognized his voice. I recognized his Ireland.

I didn't recognize Hemingway's Spain, the one my father had read about. Dad adored Ernesto, as most men did growing up in America, and regarded him as an adventurous, worldly man's man who hunted and threw himself into danger. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was published in 1940, the year before my father was born. It is considered one of the best war novels of all time and covers the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway saw firsthand as a journalist. When my father turned 11 in 1952, Hemingway published the book that would bring him a Pulitzer, "The Old Man and the Sea." That was the first novel I read by the American author. I brought it to Key West on my initial trip to the island. I knew Hemingway had been a famous resident in Florida. I thought the book would give me some insight into his life.

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Ernest Hemingway's Underwood Portable typewriter in his Key West house.

Neither the old man nor the sea sparked my interest in him. I was impatient with his style and how long it took the Cuban fisherman to catch the damn fish. But I liked Hemingway's grand house in Key West and I was interested in learning more about the women in his life.

I learned about his first wife Hadley after finding a book on a beach near Malin Head in Donegal, Ireland – "The Paris Wife," by Paula McLain. That's when I discovered Hemingway was connected to Joyce and Fitzgerald and all the famous writers and artists of his time in 1920s Paris. They spent their starving artist days writing and chatting in cafes on the left bank. I then read "A Moveable Feast," which is Hemingway's memoir about his time in Paris in the 1920s. I preferred his fact to his fiction. I always prefer memoirs, even when their facts become fiction because we don't always remember things as they actually happened due to hindsight and perspective.

When I was awarded an artist residency at the Studios of Key West this past spring to write new songs inspired by the island, I visited Hemingway's house again on Whitehead Street and bought a book in the gift shop beside the pool his second wife Pauline installed. I purchased another Paula McLain book, "Love and Ruin." This one was about his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, the one who covered the Spanish Civil War and bought a house with him in Cuba. Again, I was more interested in the female perspective. After reading about her, I decided Hemingway was a bombastic, egotistical jerk.

While living in Key West, locals told me I had to read a memoir called "Running with the Bulls," by Valerie Hemingway. She was his Irish secretary whom he met in Spain in 1959 while he was writing sketches on his memories of Paris which became "A Moveable Feast." The young Dublin born protégé was eventually invited to move to Cuba with Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary. Valerie formed a special bond with the author and helped him work on his memoir before his suicide in Idaho in 1961. Her last name comes from marrying Ernest's son, detailed in her extraordinary memoir which also reveals her relationship with Brendan Behan.

Dink Bruce's cluttered desk in Key West where the local artist was reading a copy of Tara O'Grady's memoir.

I was also advised to meet the son of Hemingway's other assistant, Toby Bruce. Toby was basically Hem's everything man. The longtime friend drove Hem's children between Idaho and Key West, he built the wall around the grand house on Whitehead Street to keep out gawking tourists, and he organized the author's artifacts after he died. Toby's son, Dink, is a rare character and local artist with fascinating stories of his own. We sat in his living room listening to Hemingway's jazz records surrounded by photographs of the author with Dink's parents. The 75-year-old wore a baseball cap with the name of Hemingway's fishing boat embroidered on it – "Pilar." Dink was 17 when Hemingway died. He told me about how he had to present an oral report at school on why an author wrote one of their novels. He interviewed Hemingway directly, but his teacher disagreed with his "research." That's when Dink discovered that perspective, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Dink invited me to Montana this summer where he and his friend Valerie Hemingway live. Both gave me the impression that you can't believe everything you read, and that there are many sides to an individual, especially one who has had so many books written about him, both fiction and non-fiction.

I believe Ernest was trying to make me see through his elephant eyes when he visited me in my recent dream. Perhaps he will show me his Paris this autumn when I'll be teaching a workshop with the Ireland Writing Retreat in the cafes where he and his friends, including Joyce and Fitzgerald, used to write, drink and ponder their perspectives on love, war, and life in general.

Tara O'Grady recently published her memoir "Migrating toward Happiness." For more information on the Ireland Writing Retreat in Paris from Oct. 14-20, visit her website here.

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