“The story I want to tell here is about a young man and what could have been a family,” says Brad Holmes, one of three hardened protagonists whose DNA and threaded stories comprise Bret Lott’s novel, Ancient Highway.
From the daily archives:
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
It is Tuesday and the economy remains depressed. We mention this only because two of our recommended readings come from unusual literary sources: The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. Maybe we’re overcooked, but it seems the country’s finances mirror the tone of what the kids are reading. Nevertheless, literature remains resilient and poetry returns from the dead. Tom Robbins knows Izzy Stone was a soothsayer on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But he questions whether Stone’s prophesies were louder as a radical or independent voice. Moving along, David Nicholls ponders the old question of a writer’s relationship with criticism, Orwell’s 1984 is compared to Zamyatin’s We, and finally, in today’s ”In Case You Missed It” department, we catch wind of Leonard Cohen’s poetic roots and Roberto Benigni’s rendering of The Inferno. — Andrew Geer
