Reading “So Late in the Day” was like sitting in a seismic fault zone. Upon finishing the story I found that the earth had slipped sideways and would never be the same. How incredibly fortunate to have taken a class with Claire Keegan.
Yes: I get the impact that reading this, or indeed any other Claire Keegan stories, had for you Jennifer. I can't now quite recall whether it was "So Late in the Day" or another which first crossed my reading path12-15 months ago but it prompted to seek out and scour the whole of her published pieces, including the one novella or short novel, so far. Sublime.
Now: two questions. First did you attend her three day class as given in Tullow, County Carlow? Second, and recognising that there may be many dimensions to what leads to state so confidently that you will never be same, do you care to share anything further about what lies beneath the assertion "I will never be the same again"?
I attended her class in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, in October. I think the best I can explain it is she’s a teacher like George who can be make you see something that feels completely new.
She doesn't instruct as much as launch you on a path of personal exploration and discovery?
And, as to enquiring about Tullow, I was fascinated to read reference to the town because my mother was from Tullow and in childhood we spent the majority of days on holidays in what was then known as The Coventry Car Factories Holiday Fortnight staying in my mother's twin sister in what was her home but had been the family home (the "nine that lived" that is in my mother's generation).
I've not been in contact with Claire Keegan other than reading her fictions and some background sources about her. Even so, like you, I have been undoubtedly impacted by her. Not least because so many of the characters she writes into her stories are, literally, so real to me and the plots that unfold consequent upon their behaviours so true to life.
She does instruct AND launches you on a path of discovery. I loved the movie The Quiet Girl based on Foster and can’t wait for the Cillian Murphy film based on Small Things Like These
Loved, loved The Quiet Girl / An Cailín Ciúin and saw it in the cinema in Dungarvan, near where much of it was filmed. And then I had lunch with friends in New Ross just before Christmas and learned that we were in the café that was used in the filming of Small Things Like These with Cillian Murphy. It’s The Cracked Teapot, for info. ☺️
On the subject of Ireland and teachers. I met the wonderful Canadian writer and teacher Alexander MacLeod in Cork, and Jennifer, like you, I will never be the same. His classes were some of the most transformative teaching I have ever experienced. Hail to great writers who are great teachers too!
I just want to acknowledge that this thread led me to check out Claire Keegan. I started with Foster yesterday and I was fairly blown away. It's a gem. I don't recall reacting so strongly to each sentence in a story since I read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping a few years back.
This morning I read So Late in the Day, and afterwards came across Claire reading it on The New Yorker podcast (with George's insightful commentary). A great experience. So I'm now about to read Small Things Like These.
I am grateful for this community helping me to start the new year with such perfect stories.
That’s amazing! I had a place on her one day workshop in Dublin on Dec 13th and then, for family reasons, couldn’t go! Sooo disappointing. But I have the gem that was the recommended reading and there is one story from it that I will choose as a response to GS’s invitation.
I am jealous. Just downloaded her latest collection and can't wait to read the other two stories except I go back and reread "So Late in the Day" again and again.
So glad to see your post, Jennifer -- and yes - what a wonderful story, So Late in the Day. I read it and listened to it - and listened to George's new yorker podcast on it. And will read it again. Clare Keegan's writing has no bottom. I'm so glad you had that privilege of taking her writing class. Good for you - taking that step and making it happen! My most powerful reading was Small Things Like These - which I re-read in 2023. I'll post about that.
I can’t say any more about her class because she made clear she doesn’t want to be on the internet. I’m someone who works very hard on my prose but people respond to my screenplays instead. Her class deeply affected the way I think about writing.
Happy Holidays George! That's an easy question for me: The answer is Story Club. Not a book and not a story, but some of the most intuitive and heart felt reading and writing that I have ever encountered - from you and from fellow clubbers.
This has resonated for me in an unexpected way. It helped me appreciate Not writing. I had been writing regularly and having some success with it. However since I joined Story Club I have not written a thing, other than some journal stuff that might some day bear fruit and a few awesome emails that were just soooo profound.
And yet....I feel like a better writer, better reader and more empathetic and perceptive person. Story Club is such a rich experience of reading, analyzing and integrating great storytelling that I feel deeply satisfied. It’s as if my hunger to write, to strive for acknowledgement, has been sated by the stories you choose, the insight and heart with which you teach them, and the exchange of ideas and feelings that unfolds in the comments. This is huge. I don’t have to time to write. I’m too busy learning to see the world more fully.
I described it to someone as being as if I used to cook some pretty decent meals that people enjoyed. Then a great chef (let’s call him George) opened an amazing restaurant down the street, and now all I want to do is go see what he’s serving this week. And somehow I always feel like he makes his brilliant meals just for me. Or I used to be on an island, stuffing notes into bottles and tossing them into the sea, hoping for connection, then a boat load of interesting people from all over the world arrived and I became fully engaged with learning their languages.
So I am seeing the world with clarity and not flinching and I am thrilled, but I’m also sort of stunned and awestruck to the point I have lain down the pen and walked away from the keyboard....and am loving it.
Well, Kurt, I happen to know of at least one story of seven sentences that you wrote not too long ago. And it was fantastic! But I see what you're saying here, and Yes to all of this. I, too, feel like a better reader and writer since Story Club began. And I feel like I'm trying to be a better person, too, from this club. I said to a friend the other day that George arrived and changed my life (and probably doesn't have any idea how much). I feel so incredibly lucky. Happy new year to you, Kurt!
Uh oh. You blew my cover. Let's just call it artistic license when I say I haven't written a thing....And thanks so much for appreciating those sentences over on that other substack that I love.
Kurt; all writers have those days. Often when I do I say oh well I am not a writer it is over but then I go to Julia Cameron's Book - THE ARTIST'S WAY and I sit and wait again to put pen to paper. this is a quote in her book “I have come to believe that creativity is our true nature and the blocks are unnatural thwarting of a process about as normal and miraculous as a blooming flower...." I think it may be true for me anyway. I like your writing on substack so maybe that is enough right now. Keep posting because I read all your stuff and it is good.
Gloria! The number of times I have felt like it was all over, useless, the candle went out, is too many to count. Then, always, a glimmer, a thought. And my heart awakens, as I'm sure your does as well.
Wow Kurt! That’s how I feel! I don’t know if I would’ve put that into words though as well as you just did. So perfect. I like having ideas, rolling around my head all week, and love reading the comments.
I was wracking my brain to find even one individual book or story that changed my life when I too realized it was Story Club itself. I'd been writing for many years, but not stories. I write about art but I want what I write to be art too. It was story club that made me see that, maybe not for the first time, but more clearly. A Swim in the Pond came first: I read it when it came out, then immersing myself in Chekhov’s stories, before joining Story Club when it started. But specifically, in the past year, Story Club has changed my life not only by opening up the story form to me as a reader (the variety of forms story escalation can take has been a revelation) but also by vindicating/validating my writing process. George told me it was OK to start small, OK to keep polishing a tiny bit of prose till it’s ready to take me where I’m going next. Borrowing from computer programmers, I call it the bottom-up method. I always felt guilty because I have trouble outlining a project in advance, it takes me a while to discover what it is I’m writing about. I don’t know what is important till it is there (same is true for this comment). So, thank you George for being as honest as you have been about what’s going on in your mind as you write – and as you read.
Hi Karen, I really liked this sentiment of yours: "I write about art but I want what I write to be art too." And I agree that George has shown us all that it is ok to follow your own process. Just get it out there, then polish, revise, reject, reinvent until it feels right, or until it feels to you like...art.
So typically insightful and incisive Kurt. Each paragraph resonates with me and within each paragraph the choices made in selecting words and stringing them in cadent sentences suffices to carry my reading eye along in the stream of their flow.
I have this image of George's Story Shacks opening, epidemically, across the country and internationally (why not be known to open asap where ever there are communities of word curious folks?) with two doors leading into two distinct writing lounges: 'The Writing Lounge' and 'The Not Writing Lounge'.
As it happens I've chosen to place our most recent point of reading departure - James Baldwin - in the frame of my three read response to George's question. In truth I could, without doubt or artifice, have put any of the stories (and other writings by their authors) we have been genially invited to read and work on in 2023 in the focal frame.
Like you I am feeling that I am 'reading' the fictive world through fresh grounded enhanced specification Saunderian lenses. What's more its not a clarity confined to the written story: having watched several classic movies and newly put out streamed dramas in the past week or so I sense I'm appreciating how they have been made with greater clarity than in time past.
Thanks Rob. Indeed, great story telling happens in film as well. I'm so glad George named this place Story Club and not Writing Club. The idea and power of stories transcends writing. There is something primal happening for sure.
Most powerful and grief striking poem* by Refaat Alareer, Palestinian poet killed December 7, 2023 in Gaza with his sister and her family and his six children:
I tead this poem on Twitter … a friend and writer posted it the day we found out he and his family had been killed. :(((( amazing poem such sad horrific times…
And how many creative others have died since this poet wrote this, since the poet's life and the lives of those most close to and most closely gathered around him was so illegally terminated, since the latest day's dawn in Gaza?
What words, what fictive words of power, what telling word strings can Story Clubbers come up with and dare to put out into the Chaos that is the World we live in?
What was Isaac Babel really writing about, showing us through his story telling, in "My First Goose"? What drove him to write in spite of not just the risk but, likely, knowing full well the consequences that would catch-up with him in the real world in which he lived rather than the beautifully written fictive world of his unbounded imagination?
I have writing friend who has been a life long activist, in support of causes she believes in. She's now in her 70s, enjoying young grandchildren, and given up on physical protest and turned to majoring poetry . . . what can I say but that she is proof that pen put to poetic purposes proves the potency of pen over sword!
Yes dear Peer Story Clubber I am definitely, with considered deliberation stirring the thinking pot. Is writing, aimed at fictive product of literary merit, an inherently political act? Thinking back to the first of George's stories in my reading frame that I read . . . *In the Cart" in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain . . . and on since, starting with "The Falls", here in Story Club . . . the answer to a recurrent question seems to be that "Yes, the act of writing fiction is often inherently political and the implications of this are as irrefutable as they are unduckable."
Demon Copperhead. My reading took a deep dive this year as I spent most of my year creating content (Sounds gross, was hard but rewarding) for a kids' book I released in 2022. But Demon Copperhead stopped me in my tracks and forced to me to read until the breathless end. I loved it.
That was it for me as well. It was an incredible book. Of the moment, but tracking the plot of a classic, it was an achievement. And all of those sentences that reminded me of something my nanna or my in laws would have said. It made you feel sad, but it also felt like those characters were people I could know in a slightly different life.
I agree. This was a heavy read but so worth it. I immediately read "Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted" by Beth Macy after Demon Copperhead, which no doubt informed Kinglsover's masterful book. Then I squared it all with being a young nurse and learning about pain being "the 5th vital sign" and that "pain is what the patient says it is". Mind-blowing, all of it, really.
That was one of my three too. I didn't have to have had Damon's experiences to know his pain, to relate to how it may send one down wrong paths until learning better. And I read it having just moved this year to a town in Appalachia, though nothing like Damon's.
Definitely this! I have a dear friend in North Carolina and took a trip to see her (and Appalachia) right after I read the book. I also got to see Barbara Kingsolver speak at Seattle Arts & Lectures. And after all that I re-read David Copperfield. Even my husband, who never reads, is engrossed in the audiobook of Demon Copperhead. (He loved the North Carolina trip too.) Demon and Angus stayed with me for a long time. The Poisonwood Bible is another book that hit me like this. When I can’t sleep because I am worried about the characters in a novel... !
YES!! I just finished it and felt the same. I was so absorbed in the voice and the story that I kept forgetting to examine how B. Kingsolver worked her magic. I'll have to read it again :)
Same. This book is so heavy you might not be able to lift it off the shelf. Wow. Demon has a life you wouldn't wish on anyone—a torrent of hurt. There are depth immersions in the challenges of life in the rural south, with stinging portrayals of how denial and family history shackle people despite their best efforts to step away. There is heroism too, in people who keep faith in people despite sharp evidence against. Demon himself pushes through darkness over and over again, though he never is unscathed.
This is a tough one to read, but so worth it. Kingsolver is masterful.
I couldn’t put Demon Copperhead down while I was reading it (frequently tearfully) and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks afterwards. The way Barbara Kingsolver inhabited and animated that character was truly breathtaking.
Yes and yes! So much depth of feeling among a broad cast of characters, all brought to vivid life. Great stuff (but man, a lot of it was tough to take—hard lives).
Just finished listening to it on Audible. It is a very moving book. I loved Demon's voice and wit which redeemed the very dark aspects of the story. Kingsolver mapped the story out beautifully against Dickens' original. While it's not necessary to have read Copperfield in order to enjoy/appreciate Copperhead the continuity between the books reveals the perennial nature of such problems in our society.
Me too. I even went back and read David Copperfield (which had somehow slipped past me earlier) to see what she kept and what she changed or dropped. I liked Kingsolver's version better.
That was it for me as well. I listened to the audiobook while sheet mulching my yard over the course of several days last winter, often in misty rain. The roller coaster of a story amplified by tedious labor put me right there in Kentucky. I often listen to audiobooks while gardening or walking, but I've never had a reading experience as visceral as this.
Hi George. I've been working my way backward through all the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels of the past several years. After reading The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019's winner), I can't help but recommend it to everyone I know. I was completely immersed. I loved how the threads of the individual stories wove in and out of one another, and I was left with a clear message, which I like to believe was exactly the author's intent.
I felt changed after reading The Overstory! With regard to trees and forests, yes, but even walking down a city street soon after, I felt somehow more present even in that environment--both present in the moment and also seeing my surroundings from a broader perspective of time and place.
I loved The Overstory and was fortunate enough to read it while on a vacation in the Minnesota north woods, up by the Canadian border, where there are both tons of trees but also tons of logging. It really resonated with me.
The Pulitzer does pick some good ones, doesn't it? I loved the two from this year and am currently reading The Sympathizer, from 2016. I was also wowed by The Overstory when I listened to it.
The complete MAUS by Art Spiegelman. My son gave it to me last Christmas and I read it nightly before bed. Moving, funny, penetrating, imaginative, resourceful. The art's pretty good, too. The story moves in directions you don't expect, given how much many of us are familiar somehow with Holocaust history. Highly recommend.
I'm reading Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was recommended to me by a friend. It's a short book, but it has a wonderful wintry feel to it (perfect for those of us living in Central NY) and the narrator is an older woman who is into horoscopes, Blake, and animals. Quirky, but I can't wait each day to get back to it before I go to bed.
I also read a nonfiction book this year called Common Phantoms about the work of the American Psychical Society and the philosophers and psychologists who committed to investigating psychic phenomena. One of my favorite philosophers, William James, is a central character in the story and it's an interesting look at citizen science, enthusiasts, and the idea of evidence and science.
Glad to see Tokarczuk’s book mentioned here. It was my favorite book this year, and possibly for the last five years. Such a unique and surprising character, unlike any I have read before!
Oh I loved that book. I just loved Janina. At the moment I'm in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by snow, and thinking how nice it is to be so far from people/neighbors. (Have you read Tokarczuk's Flights? It's one of my favorite books from the last ten years)
Sara! It's been too long! Hope all is well in Portland (are you still in Portland?) and you stayed warm and cozy through those cold spells.
I think it's worth mentioning that I read Flights, mostly out loud, through those endless hours of nursing when my daughter was a newborn. So it was a weird, magical, time-bending, unforgettable experience.
I've read Lighthouse several times, most recently earlier this year (I'm 61), and I get something different from it every time I read it. One of my all-time favorite books.
I'll reread it too. She's a poet, really. A poet who invented her own form. Her diaries are really riveting. She writes about many things in her life, but the main thread is her work, and the process, progress through the novels and also her essays.
Agreed. I've read her diaries and many of her letters. One year I read all her novels in the order they were published, which was eye-opening in terms of seeing her development as a novelist.
I bet! And I'd forgotten about the letters. Will track those down too! She was such a genius, but so self effacing.....to the point of ending her life, I guess. So often creative intensity - especially to the degree in which she embodied it - goes hand in hand with depression.
I’d love to know how the experience differs-- I can imagine. I read it this year before a hiking trip in Scotland. Then I read all her books. Along with Willa Cather’s books and journals and letters.
I read Hernan Diaz's novel "Trust" in about 2 days, post-knee replacement surgery and only slightly loopy from pain meds. Not only did it distract me, but the sheer brilliance and artistry was its own kind of medicine.
Yes! I must join in and throw an oversized bouquet to Hernan Diaz for "Trust"! As professional critics like to write it was a revelation. Brilliant in its structure, in the creation of four singular narrative voices and in the spare prose beauty of the final chapter. Another belated floral tribute to Italian author Natalia Ginzburg- a writer I'm ashamed to say I was inexcusably ignorant of until a year ago. Her memoir "Family Lexicon" is an immersive portrait of her academic father, and her family against the backdrop of 1920's and 30's northern Italy and all that it entailed. It's fascinating in its picture of domestic detail and of how one family navigated - or didn't- fraught times.
I've been hesitant about picking this one up: I worried that reading the same story from different perspectives would be boring or redundant. Yet, I keep reading rave reviews. Might have to give it a shot!
I’m kicking myself for discovering Iris Murdoch this year, but I’m grateful she’s left such a legacy behind. “Under the Net” and “The Sea, The Sea” topped my reading this year. Thank you for another year of this too!
I’m on a Murdoch kick at the moment as well. Just finished The Bell (five stars - ha) and am into The Black Prince. Contradi’s masterful bio “Iris” is wonderful as well.
Roger Ebert said somewhere that the recurring appearance of a new Iris novel was always a major event for him. I've read eight of them, plus her philosophical work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. And yes, her biography is fascinating. I plan to tackle all the novels if I'm granted the lifespan. Reading her, I have such a delightful feeling of simply basking in the light of a great intelligence working out a unique synthesis of wry humor, deep philosophical roots, wide-ranging imagination, and intense humanism. She's not in particular favor or fashion at present - at least according to the drift of the articles I run across in the NYT and so on. Ah, such silliness as the sparks fly upward.
Good last line. To continue the silliness but from the opposite direction, I sense she’s on the cusp of a major comeback. She’s starting to crop up everywhere. Heard an interview with NYT’s David Brooks and he goes on and on about Murdoch’s quip that “attention is a moral activity”.
I had read The sea, The Sea a number of years ago but like you returned after reading Metaphysical Animals (and the equally good “The Women Are Up to Something.
I’m new to Substack, so I think I muted this thread by mistake! My answer was that she’s so unsentimental it’s breathtaking. I love so many of her books. A Severed Head, The Unicorn, An Unofficial Rose, The Green Knight, The Black Prince, and on and on.
You're right, Amanda. In addition she is a great comic writer which I think some people ignore because they want to see her as a philosophical novelist. She has a gift for bringing a bunch of incompatible characters together in a crisis scene like a stage farce, usually with disastrous consequences for some.
True! And people act like idiots and it’s wonderful. Which are your favorites? I have t read every single one but I have them all and it’s a goal of mine.
The Sea, The Sea is certainly one. The Nice and The Good is a perfect example of your point about the people acting like idiots. There's a great kind of split screen moment where three women each do silly things simultaneously. The Sandcastle - some brilliant writing about art there too.
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan. Read in one sitting. I wish I could have gone with Jennifer JS Smith to the writing course, not so far for me but impossible. Powerful, economical writing.
I read John Williams’s Stoner right at the beginning of the year and the feeling has stayed with me. Such a clean and beautiful book. Also the Rosamund Bartlett translation of Anna Karenina made my first reading of the book a joy
I came upon Stoner by accident while bookstore browsing (which can't really be done so easily online) several years ago & fell in love with it at once---the language, Williams's drilling down into Stoner's life---and in all the reading in the years since it still ranks among my favorites.
This is so much fun!!! George has single-handedly inspired my reading list for 2024 by way of beloved Story Club readers.
The most powerful reading experience this year occurred with William Brewer's debut novel "The Red Arrow." The book is about a ghost writer, writing a memoir for a famous quantum physicist who goes missing. I am listening to the last portion of the book as I make my way on foot up University Place in New York City. I'm headed to Union Square market. The book group meets in 5 hours and Brewer is coming as a guest and I very much want to finish the book in time. I'm walking fast. but no way to hurry the listening. The day is milder than I expect so I stop and hang my back pack along a fence post that runs beside the Washington Square Mews, to remove my jacket. In the book (no spoilers) time is folding back on itself in the telling, and the sentences are a little intoxicating--- I'm making my way to Union Square in a kind of trance. When I arrive, when I go to pay the Two Guys from Woodbridge for salad greens, I realize that I don't have my backpack. I've left it on the fence post outside the Mews. Of course, I panic. This is New York City, but somehow I'm still in the thrall of the book, living in its time scape, and as I foot my way fast back to 8th street I am strangely amused. There it is. Hung over the fence post. As if no time had past. All is present.
So many of our SC stories have blown me away. One of the best things has been getting back to James Baldwin. Rereading “Sonny’s Blues” reopened me to how utterly complex every interaction and moment of change can be—and, how necessary it is to learn how to write into them. Plus, I love reading anything about music!
(My five-year-old pulled Their Eyes Were Watching God off a bookstore shelf yesterday and insisted I buy it for him. I complied, and asked if he minded whether I read it first.)
That's a great anecdote. I'm thinking of reading "Her Eyes" next, too. It's on my pile since I heard it's one of Zadie Smith's favourite books. My new 2024 diary include descriptions of special dates and Zora Neale Hurston's birthday would have been next week, 7 January.
Oh my, David. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a favorite of mine. I bought a copy this year for my 12-year old granddaughter and I am not ready to give it to her yet. I definitely would recommend that you read it first. Maybe you can read it to your five-year old so you can comment on some of the scenes. It’s a difficult and wonderful read.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - read it twice. Also Ali Smith’s Seasons Quartet and Proust’s Time Regained, and Dickens’ Hard Times. Then watched Peterloo.
And so . . . what, out of all these well and close read words, cometh?
And though I acknowledge being direct I don't - I hope - come across as being some kind of latter day incarnation of the pointy square fingered Thomas Gradgrind type.
Well, I was rather humbled by realizing I am a less capable close reader than I thought, and I hope I have picked up some pointers on how to do better.
Gradgrind, remember, had some level of redemption by the end of the book.😁
Foster and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. I’d never heard of her before, but her writing... I’m in awe. Those stories shook me to my core, I was unsettled for weeks afterwards. I also just read something in the New Yorker about people who have long Covid, and what it means to write about people who are suffering from long Covid. Of course I can’t recall the writer’s name. Another piece that really blew my mind was Annie Lareau’s story of the Pan AM bombing. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pan-am-flight-103-classmates_n_6570bcb3e4b0f96b99d9c66b
You are so on target in writing "but her writing... I’m in awe. Those stories shook me to my core, I was unsettled for weeks afterwards." I've got goosepimples (where I live maybe 'goosebumps' local to you?) just recalling, involuntarily, in response to your words what I felt when I read her never mind the words and words strings that I read.
Claire Keegan wouldn't, I think, readily relish reference to her as 'genius' . . . but there I've written it and would be entirely prepared to substantiate why I think it is word that is meaningful as applied to her talent.
I scooped up Keegan's story collections when I was in WA last summer--a number of her stories I can't stop thinking about. Antarctica! I won't say anything about it but if you haven't read it--you must!
After reading Claire Keegan’s “So Late in the day” in the New Yorker, I flew to Ireland to take her three day writing class. I will never be the same.
Absolutely *loved* “Small things like these” lucky you!!!!
I’m reading that right now!
Thanks to y’all who’ve been talking up Claire Keegan, I finally read Small Things Like These. Utterly fabulous.
Me too!
Thanks for the tip; I added this to my Good Reads wanna read list.
Reading “So Late in the Day” was like sitting in a seismic fault zone. Upon finishing the story I found that the earth had slipped sideways and would never be the same. How incredibly fortunate to have taken a class with Claire Keegan.
What an amazing opportunity!
I love her books! How amazing to take a class with her. What was her best piece of advice?
Yes-- please share!
Yes: I get the impact that reading this, or indeed any other Claire Keegan stories, had for you Jennifer. I can't now quite recall whether it was "So Late in the Day" or another which first crossed my reading path12-15 months ago but it prompted to seek out and scour the whole of her published pieces, including the one novella or short novel, so far. Sublime.
Now: two questions. First did you attend her three day class as given in Tullow, County Carlow? Second, and recognising that there may be many dimensions to what leads to state so confidently that you will never be same, do you care to share anything further about what lies beneath the assertion "I will never be the same again"?
I attended her class in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, in October. I think the best I can explain it is she’s a teacher like George who can be make you see something that feels completely new.
She doesn't instruct as much as launch you on a path of personal exploration and discovery?
And, as to enquiring about Tullow, I was fascinated to read reference to the town because my mother was from Tullow and in childhood we spent the majority of days on holidays in what was then known as The Coventry Car Factories Holiday Fortnight staying in my mother's twin sister in what was her home but had been the family home (the "nine that lived" that is in my mother's generation).
I've not been in contact with Claire Keegan other than reading her fictions and some background sources about her. Even so, like you, I have been undoubtedly impacted by her. Not least because so many of the characters she writes into her stories are, literally, so real to me and the plots that unfold consequent upon their behaviours so true to life.
She does instruct AND launches you on a path of discovery. I loved the movie The Quiet Girl based on Foster and can’t wait for the Cillian Murphy film based on Small Things Like These
Loved, loved The Quiet Girl / An Cailín Ciúin and saw it in the cinema in Dungarvan, near where much of it was filmed. And then I had lunch with friends in New Ross just before Christmas and learned that we were in the café that was used in the filming of Small Things Like These with Cillian Murphy. It’s The Cracked Teapot, for info. ☺️
Sounds SO incredible! Hope I can try something similar in the future.
You won’t regret it.
I just looked - don't see any for 2024 yet, but it would be great if some of us GS Story Clubbers(?) went to the same workshop.
On the subject of Ireland and teachers. I met the wonderful Canadian writer and teacher Alexander MacLeod in Cork, and Jennifer, like you, I will never be the same. His classes were some of the most transformative teaching I have ever experienced. Hail to great writers who are great teachers too!
I just want to acknowledge that this thread led me to check out Claire Keegan. I started with Foster yesterday and I was fairly blown away. It's a gem. I don't recall reacting so strongly to each sentence in a story since I read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping a few years back.
This morning I read So Late in the Day, and afterwards came across Claire reading it on The New Yorker podcast (with George's insightful commentary). A great experience. So I'm now about to read Small Things Like These.
I am grateful for this community helping me to start the new year with such perfect stories.
That’s amazing! I had a place on her one day workshop in Dublin on Dec 13th and then, for family reasons, couldn’t go! Sooo disappointing. But I have the gem that was the recommended reading and there is one story from it that I will choose as a response to GS’s invitation.
I am jealous. Just downloaded her latest collection and can't wait to read the other two stories except I go back and reread "So Late in the Day" again and again.
I reread it many times myself
Yes she was my favourite writer. Might have to take that trip to Ireland
What an incredible experience! How was the course?
Life changing
She's amazing. And what expeience must be taking a course by her! Have you read "Small Things Like This"?
Yes of course. Amazing.
So glad to see your post, Jennifer -- and yes - what a wonderful story, So Late in the Day. I read it and listened to it - and listened to George's new yorker podcast on it. And will read it again. Clare Keegan's writing has no bottom. I'm so glad you had that privilege of taking her writing class. Good for you - taking that step and making it happen! My most powerful reading was Small Things Like These - which I re-read in 2023. I'll post about that.
I’ve been reading her stories throughout the year, and have been so impressed. Can you say more about her class?
I can’t say any more about her class because she made clear she doesn’t want to be on the internet. I’m someone who works very hard on my prose but people respond to my screenplays instead. Her class deeply affected the way I think about writing.
I'm just finished it myself, Jennifer, and am so excited to have found another great writer to luxuriate in! Thank you!
Happy Holidays George! That's an easy question for me: The answer is Story Club. Not a book and not a story, but some of the most intuitive and heart felt reading and writing that I have ever encountered - from you and from fellow clubbers.
This has resonated for me in an unexpected way. It helped me appreciate Not writing. I had been writing regularly and having some success with it. However since I joined Story Club I have not written a thing, other than some journal stuff that might some day bear fruit and a few awesome emails that were just soooo profound.
And yet....I feel like a better writer, better reader and more empathetic and perceptive person. Story Club is such a rich experience of reading, analyzing and integrating great storytelling that I feel deeply satisfied. It’s as if my hunger to write, to strive for acknowledgement, has been sated by the stories you choose, the insight and heart with which you teach them, and the exchange of ideas and feelings that unfolds in the comments. This is huge. I don’t have to time to write. I’m too busy learning to see the world more fully.
I described it to someone as being as if I used to cook some pretty decent meals that people enjoyed. Then a great chef (let’s call him George) opened an amazing restaurant down the street, and now all I want to do is go see what he’s serving this week. And somehow I always feel like he makes his brilliant meals just for me. Or I used to be on an island, stuffing notes into bottles and tossing them into the sea, hoping for connection, then a boat load of interesting people from all over the world arrived and I became fully engaged with learning their languages.
So I am seeing the world with clarity and not flinching and I am thrilled, but I’m also sort of stunned and awestruck to the point I have lain down the pen and walked away from the keyboard....and am loving it.
Well, Kurt, I happen to know of at least one story of seven sentences that you wrote not too long ago. And it was fantastic! But I see what you're saying here, and Yes to all of this. I, too, feel like a better reader and writer since Story Club began. And I feel like I'm trying to be a better person, too, from this club. I said to a friend the other day that George arrived and changed my life (and probably doesn't have any idea how much). I feel so incredibly lucky. Happy new year to you, Kurt!
Therapy Club....
Uh oh. You blew my cover. Let's just call it artistic license when I say I haven't written a thing....And thanks so much for appreciating those sentences over on that other substack that I love.
❤️
Kurt; all writers have those days. Often when I do I say oh well I am not a writer it is over but then I go to Julia Cameron's Book - THE ARTIST'S WAY and I sit and wait again to put pen to paper. this is a quote in her book “I have come to believe that creativity is our true nature and the blocks are unnatural thwarting of a process about as normal and miraculous as a blooming flower...." I think it may be true for me anyway. I like your writing on substack so maybe that is enough right now. Keep posting because I read all your stuff and it is good.
Gloria! The number of times I have felt like it was all over, useless, the candle went out, is too many to count. Then, always, a glimmer, a thought. And my heart awakens, as I'm sure your does as well.
Wow Kurt! That’s how I feel! I don’t know if I would’ve put that into words though as well as you just did. So perfect. I like having ideas, rolling around my head all week, and love reading the comments.
Forgive punctuation I’m talking into the phone while I clean my house.
Thanks Sea. I know from your comments throughout this adventure that you see things sort of the same.
I do! Wonder twins, activate!
one of my choices was A Swim in the Pond, which made me want more, and got me to join this group. And yes, being more emphatic and perceptive...
Yes, George's perspective and skill make this group a really great place. And he brings that out in each of us, which makes it an even better place.
I love this, Kurt. Thank god you're still willing to write to US, with US.
Absolutely! And thank you too.
that is just...perfection. Love it. 💜
Thanks Freya!!
I was wracking my brain to find even one individual book or story that changed my life when I too realized it was Story Club itself. I'd been writing for many years, but not stories. I write about art but I want what I write to be art too. It was story club that made me see that, maybe not for the first time, but more clearly. A Swim in the Pond came first: I read it when it came out, then immersing myself in Chekhov’s stories, before joining Story Club when it started. But specifically, in the past year, Story Club has changed my life not only by opening up the story form to me as a reader (the variety of forms story escalation can take has been a revelation) but also by vindicating/validating my writing process. George told me it was OK to start small, OK to keep polishing a tiny bit of prose till it’s ready to take me where I’m going next. Borrowing from computer programmers, I call it the bottom-up method. I always felt guilty because I have trouble outlining a project in advance, it takes me a while to discover what it is I’m writing about. I don’t know what is important till it is there (same is true for this comment). So, thank you George for being as honest as you have been about what’s going on in your mind as you write – and as you read.
Hi Karen, I really liked this sentiment of yours: "I write about art but I want what I write to be art too." And I agree that George has shown us all that it is ok to follow your own process. Just get it out there, then polish, revise, reject, reinvent until it feels right, or until it feels to you like...art.
This is all so beautifully said! Truly glad you expressed this.
Thanks Erika!
What a lovely comment. I’m so glad you articulated this.
Thanks Susan
I agree. I've read some of the best, thoughtful writing in SC.✨✨
I deeply resonated with this. Thank you for sharing your heart with us.
Thanks Brooke. Much appreciated!
I feel the same, and you said it much better than I ever could have. Thank you, Kurt
Thanks Manami. I always like reading your posts and 'seeing' you around here.
So typically insightful and incisive Kurt. Each paragraph resonates with me and within each paragraph the choices made in selecting words and stringing them in cadent sentences suffices to carry my reading eye along in the stream of their flow.
I have this image of George's Story Shacks opening, epidemically, across the country and internationally (why not be known to open asap where ever there are communities of word curious folks?) with two doors leading into two distinct writing lounges: 'The Writing Lounge' and 'The Not Writing Lounge'.
As it happens I've chosen to place our most recent point of reading departure - James Baldwin - in the frame of my three read response to George's question. In truth I could, without doubt or artifice, have put any of the stories (and other writings by their authors) we have been genially invited to read and work on in 2023 in the focal frame.
Like you I am feeling that I am 'reading' the fictive world through fresh grounded enhanced specification Saunderian lenses. What's more its not a clarity confined to the written story: having watched several classic movies and newly put out streamed dramas in the past week or so I sense I'm appreciating how they have been made with greater clarity than in time past.
Thanks for you post Kurt.
Thanks Rob. Indeed, great story telling happens in film as well. I'm so glad George named this place Story Club and not Writing Club. The idea and power of stories transcends writing. There is something primal happening for sure.
Not sure which metaphor is singing my song--the restaurant or the notes in bottles. Good thing I don't have to choose.
Hah! Rona, Please don't choose. I gift them both to you (and me, and all of us). Thanks for appreciating them.
Love it.
Most powerful and grief striking poem* by Refaat Alareer, Palestinian poet killed December 7, 2023 in Gaza with his sister and her family and his six children:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
*Poem written one month before his death.
I tead this poem on Twitter … a friend and writer posted it the day we found out he and his family had been killed. :(((( amazing poem such sad horrific times…
And how many creative others have died since this poet wrote this, since the poet's life and the lives of those most close to and most closely gathered around him was so illegally terminated, since the latest day's dawn in Gaza?
What words, what fictive words of power, what telling word strings can Story Clubbers come up with and dare to put out into the Chaos that is the World we live in?
What was Isaac Babel really writing about, showing us through his story telling, in "My First Goose"? What drove him to write in spite of not just the risk but, likely, knowing full well the consequences that would catch-up with him in the real world in which he lived rather than the beautifully written fictive world of his unbounded imagination?
I have writing friend who has been a life long activist, in support of causes she believes in. She's now in her 70s, enjoying young grandchildren, and given up on physical protest and turned to majoring poetry . . . what can I say but that she is proof that pen put to poetic purposes proves the potency of pen over sword!
Yes dear Peer Story Clubber I am definitely, with considered deliberation stirring the thinking pot. Is writing, aimed at fictive product of literary merit, an inherently political act? Thinking back to the first of George's stories in my reading frame that I read . . . *In the Cart" in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain . . . and on since, starting with "The Falls", here in Story Club . . . the answer to a recurrent question seems to be that "Yes, the act of writing fiction is often inherently political and the implications of this are as irrefutable as they are unduckable."
Ohhhh. No words.
❤️❤️❤️
oof yes. this. 💔
I went to a concert a couple weeks ago, solo violinist/vocalist Jessica Moss, and she read this poem before she began performing.
Thanks, Rolf. Glad the poet's story is being told all over.
Demon Copperhead. My reading took a deep dive this year as I spent most of my year creating content (Sounds gross, was hard but rewarding) for a kids' book I released in 2022. But Demon Copperhead stopped me in my tracks and forced to me to read until the breathless end. I loved it.
That was it for me as well. It was an incredible book. Of the moment, but tracking the plot of a classic, it was an achievement. And all of those sentences that reminded me of something my nanna or my in laws would have said. It made you feel sad, but it also felt like those characters were people I could know in a slightly different life.
Same.
One of my most powerful reading experiences of 2023 too. What a book, so full of empathy.
I have that in my to read pile!
I agree. I read it in March, and I still catch myself thinking about it.
I agree. This was a heavy read but so worth it. I immediately read "Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted" by Beth Macy after Demon Copperhead, which no doubt informed Kinglsover's masterful book. Then I squared it all with being a young nurse and learning about pain being "the 5th vital sign" and that "pain is what the patient says it is". Mind-blowing, all of it, really.
That was one of my three too. I didn't have to have had Damon's experiences to know his pain, to relate to how it may send one down wrong paths until learning better. And I read it having just moved this year to a town in Appalachia, though nothing like Damon's.
Definitely this! I have a dear friend in North Carolina and took a trip to see her (and Appalachia) right after I read the book. I also got to see Barbara Kingsolver speak at Seattle Arts & Lectures. And after all that I re-read David Copperfield. Even my husband, who never reads, is engrossed in the audiobook of Demon Copperhead. (He loved the North Carolina trip too.) Demon and Angus stayed with me for a long time. The Poisonwood Bible is another book that hit me like this. When I can’t sleep because I am worried about the characters in a novel... !
YES!! I just finished it and felt the same. I was so absorbed in the voice and the story that I kept forgetting to examine how B. Kingsolver worked her magic. I'll have to read it again :)
Same. This book is so heavy you might not be able to lift it off the shelf. Wow. Demon has a life you wouldn't wish on anyone—a torrent of hurt. There are depth immersions in the challenges of life in the rural south, with stinging portrayals of how denial and family history shackle people despite their best efforts to step away. There is heroism too, in people who keep faith in people despite sharp evidence against. Demon himself pushes through darkness over and over again, though he never is unscathed.
This is a tough one to read, but so worth it. Kingsolver is masterful.
I couldn’t put Demon Copperhead down while I was reading it (frequently tearfully) and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks afterwards. The way Barbara Kingsolver inhabited and animated that character was truly breathtaking.
Yes and yes! So much depth of feeling among a broad cast of characters, all brought to vivid life. Great stuff (but man, a lot of it was tough to take—hard lives).
Just finished listening to it on Audible. It is a very moving book. I loved Demon's voice and wit which redeemed the very dark aspects of the story. Kingsolver mapped the story out beautifully against Dickens' original. While it's not necessary to have read Copperfield in order to enjoy/appreciate Copperhead the continuity between the books reveals the perennial nature of such problems in our society.
Oh I’m looking forward to writing a review of the Dutch translation later this year !!! Really curious.
Me too. I even went back and read David Copperfield (which had somehow slipped past me earlier) to see what she kept and what she changed or dropped. I liked Kingsolver's version better.
That was it for me as well. I listened to the audiobook while sheet mulching my yard over the course of several days last winter, often in misty rain. The roller coaster of a story amplified by tedious labor put me right there in Kentucky. I often listen to audiobooks while gardening or walking, but I've never had a reading experience as visceral as this.
Read it in 4 days, which is unusual for me.
Hi George. I've been working my way backward through all the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels of the past several years. After reading The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019's winner), I can't help but recommend it to everyone I know. I was completely immersed. I loved how the threads of the individual stories wove in and out of one another, and I was left with a clear message, which I like to believe was exactly the author's intent.
I still look at trees differently to this day ! I read it in 2019 and reread it this fall…especially love the 1st half .
I felt changed after reading The Overstory! With regard to trees and forests, yes, but even walking down a city street soon after, I felt somehow more present even in that environment--both present in the moment and also seeing my surroundings from a broader perspective of time and place.
I loved The Overstory a couple of years ago and loved it too. Then I happened on Orfeo by Powers which is also a wonderful book.
I’ve just re-read Bewildered by Richard Powers which is just as beautiful.
Spot on Sandra. Bewildered just about killed me - beauty and horror in equal measures,
I loved The Overstory and was fortunate enough to read it while on a vacation in the Minnesota north woods, up by the Canadian border, where there are both tons of trees but also tons of logging. It really resonated with me.
The Pulitzer does pick some good ones, doesn't it? I loved the two from this year and am currently reading The Sympathizer, from 2016. I was also wowed by The Overstory when I listened to it.
I read The Overstory last year (otherwise I would say that's one of mine for this year.) It is truly a perspective-altering book.
I was smitten by that story. Always had trees as friends. Took me back to reading about Julia Butterfly while living on the West Coast.
Loved overstory so much
This is on my TBR pile and I must get to it soon!
The complete MAUS by Art Spiegelman. My son gave it to me last Christmas and I read it nightly before bed. Moving, funny, penetrating, imaginative, resourceful. The art's pretty good, too. The story moves in directions you don't expect, given how much many of us are familiar somehow with Holocaust history. Highly recommend.
I also read Maus this year. Amazing book.
Maus is astonishing. It captures so perfectly the damage which victims carry long after escape.
Loved it, read it many years ago. Still on a shelf or packed away somewhere from moving ten years ago.
Thank you for this recommendation!!
My sister has the book on her shelf. Been considering borrowing it for a while.
I'm reading Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was recommended to me by a friend. It's a short book, but it has a wonderful wintry feel to it (perfect for those of us living in Central NY) and the narrator is an older woman who is into horoscopes, Blake, and animals. Quirky, but I can't wait each day to get back to it before I go to bed.
I also read a nonfiction book this year called Common Phantoms about the work of the American Psychical Society and the philosophers and psychologists who committed to investigating psychic phenomena. One of my favorite philosophers, William James, is a central character in the story and it's an interesting look at citizen science, enthusiasts, and the idea of evidence and science.
What a book (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead). I had no idea what a powerhouse Tokarczuk is…but I do now.
Glad to see Tokarczuk’s book mentioned here. It was my favorite book this year, and possibly for the last five years. Such a unique and surprising character, unlike any I have read before!
Oh I loved that book. I just loved Janina. At the moment I'm in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by snow, and thinking how nice it is to be so far from people/neighbors. (Have you read Tokarczuk's Flights? It's one of my favorite books from the last ten years)
Manami! Hi! It’s been so long since our comments have crossed paths.
So happy to see you here and hope all is well and wonderful in your world. 🥰
(And I just put this book on my library hold list!)
Sara! It's been too long! Hope all is well in Portland (are you still in Portland?) and you stayed warm and cozy through those cold spells.
I think it's worth mentioning that I read Flights, mostly out loud, through those endless hours of nursing when my daughter was a newborn. So it was a weird, magical, time-bending, unforgettable experience.
Loves Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead. A most unusual mystery
I've read this book, too, and want to share that it was made into a theatrical production. Here's a review, just fyi because it was incredible and disturbing but good. My husband came with me and left during intermission, hahaha. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/theater/drive-your-plow-review-complicite.html
I read this earlier in the year and loved it. Was definitely my favorite reading experience of the year.
Hey, Marianne!
That's been on my list for a little while, you've just reminded me to move it to the top.
that sounds fascinating, thanks for sharing it!
To the Lighthouse. Rereading at age 73 after first reading at age 16. An entirely different experience!
I reread Mrs. Dalloway, which is also an amazing book.
Also The Waves
I've read Lighthouse several times, most recently earlier this year (I'm 61), and I get something different from it every time I read it. One of my all-time favorite books.
I'll reread it too. She's a poet, really. A poet who invented her own form. Her diaries are really riveting. She writes about many things in her life, but the main thread is her work, and the process, progress through the novels and also her essays.
Agreed. I've read her diaries and many of her letters. One year I read all her novels in the order they were published, which was eye-opening in terms of seeing her development as a novelist.
I bet! And I'd forgotten about the letters. Will track those down too! She was such a genius, but so self effacing.....to the point of ending her life, I guess. So often creative intensity - especially to the degree in which she embodied it - goes hand in hand with depression.
I’d love to know how the experience differs-- I can imagine. I read it this year before a hiking trip in Scotland. Then I read all her books. Along with Willa Cather’s books and journals and letters.
I read it this year, as well. What a book!
Extraordinary! Now I'm reading her diaries.
i love this one!!!!
I read Hernan Diaz's novel "Trust" in about 2 days, post-knee replacement surgery and only slightly loopy from pain meds. Not only did it distract me, but the sheer brilliance and artistry was its own kind of medicine.
Yes! I must join in and throw an oversized bouquet to Hernan Diaz for "Trust"! As professional critics like to write it was a revelation. Brilliant in its structure, in the creation of four singular narrative voices and in the spare prose beauty of the final chapter. Another belated floral tribute to Italian author Natalia Ginzburg- a writer I'm ashamed to say I was inexcusably ignorant of until a year ago. Her memoir "Family Lexicon" is an immersive portrait of her academic father, and her family against the backdrop of 1920's and 30's northern Italy and all that it entailed. It's fascinating in its picture of domestic detail and of how one family navigated - or didn't- fraught times.
I'm currently being blown away with this novel - only a few more chapters to go - what a masterpiece.
I loved it too
the format alone was worth the read…it is like nothing else
Ah this one was so good!
I've been hesitant about picking this one up: I worried that reading the same story from different perspectives would be boring or redundant. Yet, I keep reading rave reviews. Might have to give it a shot!
There's no redundancy (that I felt, at least). It's a brilliant book.
Good to hear, thanks! You guys are convincing me :).
Hi Bee,
Definitely not boring. Mind-blowing, mystifying, surprising...I think you'll enjoy it.
Thanks, I think I’ll give it a shot this upcoming year!
I’m kicking myself for discovering Iris Murdoch this year, but I’m grateful she’s left such a legacy behind. “Under the Net” and “The Sea, The Sea” topped my reading this year. Thank you for another year of this too!
Iris Murdoch is an essential author! I recommend The Unicorn.
Thanks for the rec!
I’m on a Murdoch kick at the moment as well. Just finished The Bell (five stars - ha) and am into The Black Prince. Contradi’s masterful bio “Iris” is wonderful as well.
Roger Ebert said somewhere that the recurring appearance of a new Iris novel was always a major event for him. I've read eight of them, plus her philosophical work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. And yes, her biography is fascinating. I plan to tackle all the novels if I'm granted the lifespan. Reading her, I have such a delightful feeling of simply basking in the light of a great intelligence working out a unique synthesis of wry humor, deep philosophical roots, wide-ranging imagination, and intense humanism. She's not in particular favor or fashion at present - at least according to the drift of the articles I run across in the NYT and so on. Ah, such silliness as the sparks fly upward.
Good last line. To continue the silliness but from the opposite direction, I sense she’s on the cusp of a major comeback. She’s starting to crop up everywhere. Heard an interview with NYT’s David Brooks and he goes on and on about Murdoch’s quip that “attention is a moral activity”.
do you mean the film? I thought it was great as well.
I actually meant the massive bio of Murdoch called “Iris - the Life of Iris Murdoch. Though, yes, the film was good.
Ah! So cool! I’ll check out the bio too. I got into her via Cumhaill and Wiseman’s “Metaphysical Animals”.
I had read The sea, The Sea a number of years ago but like you returned after reading Metaphysical Animals (and the equally good “The Women Are Up to Something.
I’ll check out “The Women Are Up to Something” – that’s a cast and time period I’m really interested in. Thank you!
Cf - my post. Murdoch is another of the four subjects in both “Metaphysical Animals” and “The Women Are Up To Something”.
She’s my absolute favorite author
Ah that’s wonderful! Why? She’s fast becoming mine
Your question almost demands an entire SC thread of its own!!
I’m new to Substack, so I think I muted this thread by mistake! My answer was that she’s so unsentimental it’s breathtaking. I love so many of her books. A Severed Head, The Unicorn, An Unofficial Rose, The Green Knight, The Black Prince, and on and on.
Thanks for recommended titles!
You're right, Amanda. In addition she is a great comic writer which I think some people ignore because they want to see her as a philosophical novelist. She has a gift for bringing a bunch of incompatible characters together in a crisis scene like a stage farce, usually with disastrous consequences for some.
True! And people act like idiots and it’s wonderful. Which are your favorites? I have t read every single one but I have them all and it’s a goal of mine.
The Sea, The Sea is certainly one. The Nice and The Good is a perfect example of your point about the people acting like idiots. There's a great kind of split screen moment where three women each do silly things simultaneously. The Sandcastle - some brilliant writing about art there too.
Such a great description – thanks for getting back!
I loved The Sea, The Sea - hilarious in places. She writes brilliantly about swimming and the sea.
The Sea, The Sea. A book with a long trajectory, for me.
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan. Read in one sitting. I wish I could have gone with Jennifer JS Smith to the writing course, not so far for me but impossible. Powerful, economical writing.
I also read “Small Things Like These” this year and absolutely loved it. I even read it to my wife afterwards.
I read John Williams’s Stoner right at the beginning of the year and the feeling has stayed with me. Such a clean and beautiful book. Also the Rosamund Bartlett translation of Anna Karenina made my first reading of the book a joy
I came upon Stoner by accident while bookstore browsing (which can't really be done so easily online) several years ago & fell in love with it at once---the language, Williams's drilling down into Stoner's life---and in all the reading in the years since it still ranks among my favorites.
I loved Stoner as well. So quiet but powerful. I read it thanks to Story Club (shout out to Rosanne and Mary G)!
I was also going to include Stoner. Fell into my hands back in January and adored it-- love to see so many of us encountered it this year.
I also read Stoner at the beginning of this year. What a perfect book.
Oh—Stoner. So sad.
This is so much fun!!! George has single-handedly inspired my reading list for 2024 by way of beloved Story Club readers.
The most powerful reading experience this year occurred with William Brewer's debut novel "The Red Arrow." The book is about a ghost writer, writing a memoir for a famous quantum physicist who goes missing. I am listening to the last portion of the book as I make my way on foot up University Place in New York City. I'm headed to Union Square market. The book group meets in 5 hours and Brewer is coming as a guest and I very much want to finish the book in time. I'm walking fast. but no way to hurry the listening. The day is milder than I expect so I stop and hang my back pack along a fence post that runs beside the Washington Square Mews, to remove my jacket. In the book (no spoilers) time is folding back on itself in the telling, and the sentences are a little intoxicating--- I'm making my way to Union Square in a kind of trance. When I arrive, when I go to pay the Two Guys from Woodbridge for salad greens, I realize that I don't have my backpack. I've left it on the fence post outside the Mews. Of course, I panic. This is New York City, but somehow I'm still in the thrall of the book, living in its time scape, and as I foot my way fast back to 8th street I am strangely amused. There it is. Hung over the fence post. As if no time had past. All is present.
I agree...so much fun...inspired my reading list for 2024 by way of beloved Story Club readers. I'm taking notes as fast as I can.🌱
Me too!!
This is great Gail. And I love how NYC can surprise us all. (as can most people we make assumptions about...)
Lovely story, Gail!
So many of our SC stories have blown me away. One of the best things has been getting back to James Baldwin. Rereading “Sonny’s Blues” reopened me to how utterly complex every interaction and moment of change can be—and, how necessary it is to learn how to write into them. Plus, I love reading anything about music!
(My five-year-old pulled Their Eyes Were Watching God off a bookstore shelf yesterday and insisted I buy it for him. I complied, and asked if he minded whether I read it first.)
That's a great anecdote. I'm thinking of reading "Her Eyes" next, too. It's on my pile since I heard it's one of Zadie Smith's favourite books. My new 2024 diary include descriptions of special dates and Zora Neale Hurston's birthday would have been next week, 7 January.
Where can you read Zadie Smith’s list?
https://radicalreads.com/zadie-smith-favorite-books/ Happy 2024!
Thank you! You too
Hurston's stories really blow me away: their characters, their dialogue, their economy of means. Also loved Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Gonna haffa wrestle my kid for dibs on that one!
Oh my, David. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a favorite of mine. I bought a copy this year for my 12-year old granddaughter and I am not ready to give it to her yet. I definitely would recommend that you read it first. Maybe you can read it to your five-year old so you can comment on some of the scenes. It’s a difficult and wonderful read.
Somehow my child has really great taste, in all the arts. I will take all the guidance I can get!
Of course, he has good taste he is like his Dad. Happy New Year David to yo and yours.
Possibly he has better taste! Happy New Year to yours and to you!!
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - read it twice. Also Ali Smith’s Seasons Quartet and Proust’s Time Regained, and Dickens’ Hard Times. Then watched Peterloo.
Swim was great. Who wrote that again?
Trying to remember......it's on the tip of my tongue.....🤣😂
George's book was excellent. I've recommended it to a number of people who have all loved it.
OH, second Ali Smith's quartet. SO brilliant.
Ali Smith is a treasure. I am reading How to Be Both right now and finding it very touching.
And so . . . what, out of all these well and close read words, cometh?
And though I acknowledge being direct I don't - I hope - come across as being some kind of latter day incarnation of the pointy square fingered Thomas Gradgrind type.
Well, I was rather humbled by realizing I am a less capable close reader than I thought, and I hope I have picked up some pointers on how to do better.
Gradgrind, remember, had some level of redemption by the end of the book.😁
Foster and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. I’d never heard of her before, but her writing... I’m in awe. Those stories shook me to my core, I was unsettled for weeks afterwards. I also just read something in the New Yorker about people who have long Covid, and what it means to write about people who are suffering from long Covid. Of course I can’t recall the writer’s name. Another piece that really blew my mind was Annie Lareau’s story of the Pan AM bombing. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pan-am-flight-103-classmates_n_6570bcb3e4b0f96b99d9c66b
🎯 Bullseye Sea.
You are so on target in writing "but her writing... I’m in awe. Those stories shook me to my core, I was unsettled for weeks afterwards." I've got goosepimples (where I live maybe 'goosebumps' local to you?) just recalling, involuntarily, in response to your words what I felt when I read her never mind the words and words strings that I read.
Claire Keegan wouldn't, I think, readily relish reference to her as 'genius' . . . but there I've written it and would be entirely prepared to substantiate why I think it is word that is meaningful as applied to her talent.
Goose pimples! Yes we say bumps. I think of her stories on a regular basis.
Gooseflesh?
Oh yeah! I really do see a plucked dead bird with that word.
Your First Goose?
Another great story!
I scooped up Keegan's story collections when I was in WA last summer--a number of her stories I can't stop thinking about. Antarctica! I won't say anything about it but if you haven't read it--you must!
Oh! I don’t know it. Excited!
For some reason I think I read them based on something you wrote in a comment six months ago.
Cool! Don’t those stories stay with you?
I also read both of those books this year and loved them. Keegan has become a favorite.