I FIRST SET FOOT on European soil–if we include Britain as a European country, which most Americans don’t–when I was twenty-three years old. I stayed a week, traveling around England and Scotland, visiting sites like Oxford and Coventry and Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-on-Avon, the castle of Mary Queen of Scots and Loch Ness and then Glen Coe, where my ancestors had been massacred. I went to pubs and drank lots of beer and ate lots of awful food, I rented a car and drove in the wrong lane, and in general tried to soak up as much atmosphere as I could, like any tourist. The book I was reading was George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, and I liked to believe it still had some significance, it had something to say about the England I was seeing.
Author Archives: SJW
Flannery O’Connor Chili
It’s a thrill to be asked for a recipe for The Great American Writers’ Cookbook. I’m honored to be among such giants as Mr. Cheever and Miss Welty. I hope this’ll do:
Flannery O’Connor Chili
Small Wonder
THE STORIES IN Michael Chabon’s second collection, Werewolves in their Youth, showcase his prodigious talents and touch on his major concerns–hope, loneliness, and the powers of the imagination. His work here is stronger and more sure-footed than ever, and fans of his novels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) and the more recent Wonder Boys (1995) will be left satisfied and asking for more.
The Voyage
PHILIP CAPUTO’S new novel The Voyage (Knopf, $26.00) is an old-fashioned book. Set for the most part around the turn of the century, it chronicles the adventures of the three Braithwaite brothers as they pilot their father’s schooner Double Eagle down the east coast. As in any boy’s sea story, the young Braithwaites must test themselves against the inevitable calamities to earn their manhood.
The Street Lawyer
JOHN GRISHAM’S ninth novel, The Street Lawyer, follows the basic formula of his other bestsellers, taking a jaded lawyer disillusioned with the American system of justice and–through a series of dire and not always believable events–leading him back to his original idealism through the true promise of those same institutions.
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 