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Stories Into Film

Check out this NPR story about Wayne Wong's film versions of Yiyun Li's stories
"A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" and "The Princess of Nebraska."

Welcome to the New World/ Out Stealing Horses

For the past few weeks, the lack of updates on this blog has been sitting out there on the Internets like a big fat zero, taunting me, not because I didn't have anything to say but because I haven't had time to get to it.  The beginning of the semester combined with a sudden burst of activity with my own writing, along with baby duty, has been keeping me pretty busy.  But I have to admit that this is a little more important than blogging:

But this is not a baby blog, so I promise not to overdo it with pictures of Miss Libs.

While I've been experiencing the new world of working moms, I've been reading about the Old World, in the form of Per Petterson's excellent Out Stealing Horses. 

It's a deceptively simple story: A man who has just moved to a remote cabin in his native Norway comes upon a man whom he knew in his childhood, and over a few days he remembers how he met that man as a child and the way their families' destinies both changed that summer.  There's a definite sense of unfocused menace that hangs over the narrative, but what I liked most was that the things a lesser writer might have focused on became mere background in Petterson's hands.  It was lovely, quiet, and brave.  Go read it amd you'll see what I mean. 

Now I've started Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero, which has a similar quality to the Petterson but is a hardcover and therefore more difficult to read one-handed while I'm nursing. (I bought it a while ago but didn't want to read it too fast; you have to ration your Ondaatje or you'll run out too soon.)  So I'm also reading Michael Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.  I'm trying out more comedies these days because I'm thinking I might try one myself sometime and am paying more attention to how the comedy is achieved.  It's not my natural MO.  I find myself a little mystified by this one; it's not as funny as everyone told me it would be.  Which means to say it's no Confederacy of Dunces.  But I'm suspending final judgment until I get through the whole thing.

Combined with the books I'm re-reading for the Spec Fiction class I'm teaching this fall (Nice Big American Baby, Cloud Atlas, The Keep, The Plot Against America, Never Let Me Go, The Man in the High Castle, and The Handmaid's Tale) I'm actually getting quite a lot of reading done these days.  Must be why the stories are suddenly taking off too.

The New World of the working mom still encompasses a lot of the old, it seems.