From My Bookshelf: Current Reads

I am loving my proximity to my branch of the New York Public Library. I can order books online and have them delivered (relatively quickly) right to that branch, where I can easily pick them up after work.

Right now I have two books checked out. The one I'm currently reading, The Stories of Mary Gordon, is as wonderful as I expected. (And yes, I requested the book before author Gordon won this year's plum $20,000 Story Prize at the end of February.)

In one review of this collection, Linda Busby Parker noted: "If there are Southern writers, Western writers, even Midwestern writers, there are also writers of the Northeast--big-city writers--and Gordon's fiction fits comfortably there. Her settings are most often New England, or various places in New York, but her characters are equally comfortable in European cities. These rich locations lend a cosmopolitan, heady air to Gordon's work." I read those lines and I thought, "Yes! That's one of the reasons I've so connected with Gordon's work!" (Let's just say that once upon a time I felt very much in the minority as a "Northeastern" fiction writer [with a particular love for Europe] among my fellow MFA students, who were mostly Southerners.)

For Parker's full review, click here.

And click here for a more recent New York Times profile of Gordon, "Where Piety Meets Creativity, in Longhand." (Free registration required.)