The writers of these books, with painstaking research, have produced studies that may help the present generation understand American history and culture just as Perry Miller and Henry Nash Smith aided understanding a generation ago. …
Linda Sillitoe is a powerful wielder of the story writer’s craft. In the stories at hand, her plots are organic, her sentences are flexible and lucid, and her metaphors convey a kinetic motion. Over and…
A clergyman visiting Salt Lake City was invited to the Tabernacle where Heber C. Kimball addressed the congregation. The minister was so disturbed by Kimball’s impish and impious ways that had his own family been…
Disparate voices of contemporary short story writers, among them Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, Louise Erdrich, and even Mormon author Linda Sillitoe, all use external situations to probe the inner life of characters. All…
After your letter, I hoped to translate,
if I could, apples and bread into dark open streets.
That girl in Heidelberg drew a black line,
white paper against the shed door,
Three of them are older. None
Grew bold enough in tone and manner
To carry her executive airs.
(1961) I sat waiting in the downstairs living room in the “House of Happiness” where only a correct, efficient, middle-aged nurse interrupted a grueling aura of lost wills, defeated pluck. The inmates, whose residence in…
When the arduous season conies, again,
unexpectedly, air rushes through
needled trees causing a sudden
shift of time, a shift of light:
In a couple of weeks, I’ll pack up my truck and with my roommate head for Utah. We’ll be there the week before Christmas, skiing and visiting friends and family. We both bought new skis…
“Walk,” scold your doctors, but you snort
that it will take a cold day in hell
to make you shuffle from room to room
like some old man. So here I am,