"Essays in Reminiscence and Reflection"Winter 2010
The first issue of the new decade features a collection of prose excursions ranging from Robert Benson and Peter Makuck on hunting and trapping; Robert Lacy and Ed Minus on westerns; and Sam Pickering on essay collections by such authors as Adrienne Rich, Kathleen Rooney, Lynn Bloom, Jeffrey Hammon, and Stephen Miller. Prose by Wendell Berry includes a tribute to James Baker Hall and an essay on religion and science. Paul Lindholdt contributes an essay on the nuthatch.
Gradually, almost reluctantly, the narrative approached the kill. We both understood the obligation to make each other see as clearly as we could, and if we had hunted well and spoken well, the shot seemed both inevitable and right.
—Robert Benson, "The Old Life of the Heart"
Mr. Core writes on the letters William Styron and those of Robert Heilman and was also able to round up reviews of five other recently published epistolary collections: David Mason on the Bishop-Lowell letters (with a dash of William Logan); William H. Pritchard on the Graham Greene letters; Mairi MacInnes on the Penelope Fitzgerald letters; Gearal Weales on the Thornton Wilder letters; and Stuart Wright on the letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams.
I seek voices that will cast a compelling spell, or at least wake me up with language of beauty, precision, vitality.
—David Mason, "Vim and Vinegar"
Complimented by reviews from John Gatta, Jay Parini, Christopher McDonough, Sanford Pinsker, Richard O’Mara and more, this issue also features new poetry by Gladys Swan, Thom Ward, and Lowell Edmunds as well as “Going Dark,” a poignant short fiction by Kent Nelson.
Perhaps it is a measure of the success of the Indian novel in English that its practitioners, like the English themselves, can now hope to win the Man Booker Prize with an utterly ordinary novel.
