... in my view, at least, is today's Inquirer Daily Magazine section, starting with
Annette John-Hall's excellent profile of Edward P. Jones: No-frills artist ...
... and continuing with Tirdad Derakhshani's essay 'Wicker Man' must appease classic's fans ...
... and David Stearns's piece about the Utrecht Early Music Festival: Early-music fete defies convention.
There's also Martha Woodall's review of The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe: Self-obsessed professor faces upheaval in his orderly world .
If your daily newspaper were always this good, you'd never miss an issue.
I'm so glad to see an article about Edward P. Jones. He's been blowing me away for years. I first discovered him as a short story writer -- his tales appear regularly in Best American Short Stories -- and then I read _The Known World_. Amazing. And amazing that no one had ever written a novel like this before, though it's well known that well-off African Americans in the 18th & 19th centuries owned slaves. He got inside the mentality of a slave-owner and revealed a deep truth: Owning another person is not about black or white skin, but about power, the need to control. Class, not color
ReplyDeleteWhat I find most admirable about Jones is that he can craft both novels and short stories with the same pitch-perfect skill. Most fiction writers do one length or the other well, but not both. He does both. Further, he has an incredible sense of humor to pair with his heartfelt understanding of despair, frustration, rage. His work is never pretentious.