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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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Adios, Gary Reilly
Gary Reilly, The Novel Man My friend Gary Reilly passed away a few days back. A damn shame on a personal level, of course—he was brilliant, irascible, funny, and what my mother would have called “peculiar” (a word she always applied with affection). We were always glad to see each other, but never had that warm, unconditional type of friendship that Oprah talks about. Gary operated on his own wavelength, a channel you were welcome to tune in to, but he wasn’t about to change his frequency for your convenience. Gary’s death is a damn shame on another level.Read More