Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and […]
The Front Page of Absurdity
David Mamet is best know as the playwright behind such award-winning plays as Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-plow, and American Buffalo. Chicago is his fourth novel but his first in eighteen years. The winding plot follows newspaper reporter Mike Hodge as he attempts to solve a string of gang-related murders in the titular town during the 1920s. With help from his fellow reporter Clem Parlow, a black female madam named Peekaboo, and a host of colorful characters on both sides of the law, Hodge attempts to […]
I’m a Teacher In a Movie (or “I’m a college professor in a contemporary romance”)
This was one of the books I received for Jolabokaflod this year from my sister, and it was just the type of novel that I needed to escape to last weekend—an interesting group of friends, an academic setting, and a rather silly plot involving an online dating site. Millie Morris is a professor of criminology, specializing in female serial killers, at UC-Santa Barbara; she has a tightknit but eccentric group of male friends, all academics in different departments and all single. Reid and Ed are […]
Just take out a loan to buy food, Sophia. Grocery stores will work with you, if you can’t afford to eat…
“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” I have an ongoing reading project called “A Century of Women,” where I am reading a book written by a woman author for every year in the 20th century, from 1900 through 1999. For that reason, you’ll be seeing a lot of reviews of books written – by women – before 2000. Published in 1950, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths is told in the first person by Sophia Fairclough, who meets and marries Charles […]