I read Homer’s The Iliad many, many moons ago. I somehow connect that memory with sleep. From what I remember the epic focused on decade-long war between Greece & the city of Troy - all over a woman (Helen), the fall of Hector, the quarrel between stubborn Achilles and proud Agamemnon and many, many pages of interference from the pesky Greek gods. All exciting stuff, I assure you, but still I remember sleep. That is until Alessandro Baricco’s very ambitious and keenly successful retelling. You may remember me raving about the Italian writer and his very elegant and sensual novella, Silk. An Iliad, quite slim at 176 pages, reimagines our civilization’s greatest tale of war. He recreates the siege of Troy with such intensity, I almost fell into the subway platform reading it. Gone is the archaic language, Gods who keep reappearing for no other reason but to annoy me, and here is a very plain story about war - why we enter into a war and why we keep fighting. Baricco makes some critical observations regarding our engagement in Iraq in the novel’s afterward. For anyone who wants to brush up on their Homer and wants a fascinating, very human story, I recommend An Iliad.

From ancient Greece to Rome (391 A.D. to the present), is M.J. Rose’s ninth and perhaps finest novel, The Reincarnationist (full disclosure: M.J. and I are friends). Although I am about half-way through the novel, I simply cannot put this down. From B&N: Photographer Josh Ryder is among the casualties of a terrorist bomb explosion in Rome. But his symptoms are baffling; instead of predictable post-traumatic stress, he is experiencing vivid flashbacks of pre-Christian Italy. Puzzled and troubled by these visual seizures, he begins to connect them with stories of past-life memories gathered by researchers at the Phoenix Institute. Like an archaeological dig, his probe takes him deep into the past, but it also exposes him to threats unmistakably present.

I’ll have more to say about M.J.’s terrific novel when I’ve finished it and she’ll be a guest on Writers Revealed on 9.9.07. However, in the interim, visit her site for more info.

Rules for Saying Goodbye follows a fictional Katherine Taylor as she makes her way from a farm-town girlhood toward the cosmopolitan adulthood she imagines for herself. From a Massachusetts boarding school to a dissolute life in Manhattan to a stint in Europe that culminates in a failed engagement, Rules explores the comic undertones of tragedy and disappointment, homesickness and loss, and the dynamics of contemporary middle class American family life.

Katherine Taylor has won a Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares. Much like her fictional alter ego, she has burned bridges in London, Rome, and Brussels, but now lives in Los Angeles.

Essential Links
Read an excerpt from Rules for Saying Goodbye
Toronto Star Review
LA Weekly Review
SF Gate Review

Want to score a copy of Rules for Saying Goodbye? Leave a question for the author, and if we use it on air, you’ll win!

Gone to the Crazies tells the story of a young woman’s search for identity and mental equilibrium. It follows her from her childhood on the Upper East Side of New York City to a “therapeutic rehabilitation” boarding school in the mountains of northern California, where she is sent at fifteen years old and remains until graduation at eighteen. Cascade is more cult than cure, and within the surreal isolation of the school’s mountain campus, she leaves her old self behind, warping into a brainwashed model of Cascade’s mottos and ideals.

Upon returning to New York City in 1996, she is fundamentally lost and begins to ingest copious amounts of drugs to fill the emptiness that has always been quietly present. She quickly falls into a frightening and reckless addiction that eventually forces her to examine the hazy mess of her life and find the sanity she has long been searching for.

Essential Links
Read an excerpt from Gone to the Crazies (pdf doc)
HOW Literary Journal
PlayPhilly.com Review

Want to score a copy of Gone to the Crazies? Leave a question for the author, and if we use it on air, you’ll win!

Someone (who was it, originally? T.S. Eliot? Anne Morrow Lindbergh? Chef from South Park? help me out here, WR Classics readers!) once said “It’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters.”

For Virginia Woolf’s work, there can be no more apt epigraph: following her stream-of-consciousness is more enriching than actually reaching the sea. Woolf may not be everyone’s cup of English tea, but few dispute her canonical status as one of the foremost Modernists.

So why does that matter?
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Join us on Tuesday, August 21, all day, as we chat about Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, arguably one of the finest novels written in the twentieth century. Whether you’ve read To The Lighthouse twenty years ago or you’ve only just discovered it, please join us!

It is a truth universally acknowledged… wait, wait, I’m supposed to be introducing you to Virginia Woolf, not Jane Austen! But still… it really is the truth that what you get out of a book depends on who you are when you read it. (You never forget your first reader-response theory… sigh. Now I need a cigarette.)

When I first read To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s masterwork, I was very young and newly engaged to be married. I was terrified that like generations of women before me that I would lose my identity when I became a wife, especially since very few of my peers were choosing the same path. Therefore, Mrs. Ramsay, ueber-earth-mother, terrified me: would my life’s triumph be perfecting some recipe, like her boeuf en daube?

In fact, Mrs. Ramsay’s presence loomed so large for me at that time (and deliberately so; Woolf wants her to cast a long shadow) that the only message I heard from the character of Lily Briscoe was the oft-repeated message of “Can’t paint, can’t write” that she’s taken in from Charles Tansley. (Odious man.) Combined with the metaphor of the boeuf en daube, Briscoe’s mental refrain gave me chills — and prevented me from seeing that Lily Briscoe ultimately breaks free of both Mrs. Ramsay’s chosen prison, and her own.

My own fears also, then, prevented me from understanding a central message of the book. Before I began reading To the Lighthouse in preparation for this week’s discussion, I thought: well, you imbecile, you also missed out on the largest point of all. Virignia Woolf, after all, wrote this amazing book. Why are you so caught up in the “can’ts” and not seeing the achievement?

Then I began reading… and both realized and remembered how plagued by doubt and dismay Woolf herself was. However, she was such a genius that she was able to use her doubt and dismay to create a vision that illuminates her own psyche and that of her characters. Reading To the Lighthouse is an experience as rich as eating a proper Provencal stew or seeing a beautiful painting. It may not be the same as cooking that stew or creating that painting — and that’s all right.

What has reading To the Lighthouse been like for you?

-Bethanne Patrick

Related Posts
Why Bethanne chose To the Lighthouse

Oscar Feldman, the “Great Man,” was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject—the female nude. When he died in 2001, he left behind a wife, Abigail; an autistic son; and a sister, Maxine, herself a notable abstract painter—all duly noted in The New York Times obituary.

What no one knows is that Oscar Feldman led an entirely separate life in Brooklyn with his longtime mistress Teddy St. Cloud and their twin daughters. As the incorrigibly bohemian Teddy puts it, “He couldn’t live without a woman around. It was like water to a plant for him.” Now two rival biographers, book contracts in hand, are circling around Feldman’s life story, and each of these three women—Abigail, Maxine, and Teddy—will have a chance to tell the truth as they experienced it.

The Great Man is a scintillating comedy of life among the avant-garde—of the untidy truths, needy egos, and jostling for position behind the glossy facade of artistic greatness. Not a pretty picture—but a provocative and entertaining one that incarnates the delicious satirical spirit of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

Kate Christensen is the author of the novels In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, and The Epicure’s Lament. Her essays and articles have appeared in various publications, including Salon, Mademoiselle, the Hartford Courant, Elle, and the bestselling anthology The Bitch in the House. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Essential Links
Read an Excerpt from The Great Man
The New York Times Review
On Largehearted Boy
The Great Man website (at Random House)

Want to score a free copy of The Great Man? Leave your question in the comments space below, and if I use your comment on air, you’ll snag The Great Man!

There are so many ways you can tune into Writers Revealed! Next show is this Sunday, at 7pm EST/4pm PST

1. Click here to listen to the live show
2. Going to miss the show? No worries. Click here to download the podcast
3. Want to call in and chat with our guest? Call (310) 984-7600
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5. Or leave your question in the comments section below.

Enjoy!

Join us on Tuesday, August 21, all day, as we chat about Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, arguably one of the finest novels written in the twentieth century. Leading up to the chat, Bethanne will post her thoughts on Woolf’s novel, themes to discuss, etc. Whether you’ve read To The Lighthouse twenty years ago or you’ve only just discovered it, please join us!

More about Virginia Woolf’s novel & Bethanne’s thoughts after the jump!

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Jamestown is a fantasia on the Jamestown settlement of 1607, the first viable English settlement in North America, set not in the past but in an indeterminate future, some years after an unspecified cataclysmic event. The U.S. has devolved into warring corporate city-states. The settlers, rather than setting out for Virginia from England on three ships in search of gold and a route to the Pacific, set out from Manhattan on an armored bus in search of fuel, food, and uncontaminated water.

About the Author: Matthew Sharpe’s novel Jamestown was published this year by Soft Skull Press. He is also the author of the novels The Sleeping Father and Nothing Is Terrible, as well as the short-story collection Stories from the Tube. He has taught at Columbia University, New College of Florida, the MFA program at Bard College, and the Bronx Academy of Letters, and now teaches in the English department of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Links
Sci Fi Weekly Review
Bookforum Review
Small Spiral Notebook Interview
Matthew Sharpe reads from Jamestown
Read an excerpt from Jamestown

Do you have a question for Matthew Sharpe? Leave your question in the comments field and if I use it on air, you’ll score a free copy of Jamestown!