Kevin Rabalais
Kevin Rabalais's books include Novel Voices (2003), The Landscape of Desire (2008), and Conversations with James Salter (2015).
'Our parents intimately link us, closeted as we are in our lives, to a thing we’re not, forging a joined separateness and a useful mystery, so that even together with them we are also alone,’ writes Richard Ford early in ‘My Mother, In Memory’, the first of the two memoirs that comprise Between Them, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s bewitching first book-length work of non-fiction.
Born fift ... (read more)
‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. In Moonglow, his latest novel, Michael Chabon follows Dickinson’s directive. This shape-shifting novel masquerades at times as a memoir and at others as a biography of the author’s grandmother and, more frequently, of his grandfather. At the centre of this family saga that takes us through much of the American Century, we disco ... (read more)
At the outbreak of World War II, the British novelist Anna Kavan began a journey around the world that brought her, ultimately, to New Zealand. Her two years there in a landscape that she describes as ‘splendid’ but also ‘sinister’ and ‘frightening’ inspired Kavan’s most famous novel. The surreal and post-apocalyptic Ice (1967) emerged from a mind that found itself adrift, while the ... (read more)
Read a few of the essays or chapter excerpts in Annie Dillard's The Abundance, and you might find yourself writing a letter to the author. Part of that letter might look like this: Please tell me what kind of writer you are, Ms Dillard – an essayist, a naturalist, an explorer, a theologian, a philosopher? Dillard defies categorisation. In books such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), An American ... (read more)
For many young writers, Julian Wasser's 1968 Time magazine photograph of Joan Didion posed in front of her yellow Corvette remains the epitome of cool. This has less to do with the car and the cigarette than the challenging gaze that seems to say, 'I'd rather be writing.'
Didion's work continues to deliver news to us as readers and instruct us as writers. In essay collections such as Slouching To ... (read more)
Before his first Brazilian sojourn in 1936, Stefan Zweig – the Viennese author who enjoyed fame as the most widely translated writer in the world between the two world wars – deemed the South American country 'terra incognita in the cultural sense'. Once it had also been unknown in the geographical sense, this 'land that one should hardly call a country anymore, but rather a continent', as Zwe ... (read more)
The streets of New Orleans double as scented gardens for the blind. Round any corner in the Vieux Carré – known to most as the French Quarter – and experience the assault of sensory details. It might start with a spicy tang of boiling seafood, crawfish, or shrimp or crabs plucked from the amphibious Louisiana land. Maybe it's frying beignets or praline mixture bubbling on stoves, or one of th ... (read more)
The traveller, as V.S. Naipaul describes that role in A Turn in the South (1989), 'is a man defining himself against a foreign background'. Over the past forty years, Paul Theroux has built his career writing books, nearly fifty novels and travelogues, to become an exemplar of that definition. He seeks always to go farther and deeper, often journeying, to borrow one of his titles, to the ends of t ... (read more)
For the most part, we move among books with ease, passing from one writer's prose to another without having to adjust the frequency of our inner ear. We detect shifts in style and sensibility, sure, but as readers we open ourselves to such a wide harmonic range that, should multiple books arrive on our lap with the authors' names deleted, we could segue from page to page without stumbling over min ... (read more)