Category: fiction

“Even then I sensed this . . . would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.”

PamukcropThis novel is a collection of beautiful sentences about self-discovery.  For example: “It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure.” (52)  When … Read More

“They could tell it was Jun Do who’d picked which orphans ate first and which were left with watery spoonfuls.”

Johnson editWhen Jun Do was a child living in an orphanage in North Korea, one of his responsibilities was to decide which of his peers would be punished.  That was just the beginning. As an adult, he was often in the impossible position of trying to let the most innocent suffer … Read More

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Fitgerald croppedWhat does this final line of The Great Gatsby mean?  That depends on what you want it to mean.  You can use this line to support an affirming “life goes on” perspective. Or, if you are an existentialist, you can say that it shows how pointless it is to … Read More

“Only the past interests me now.”

See croppedAlbert Einstein wrote that the separation between the past, present and future  is only a stubbornly persistent  illusion.  This idea is at play in Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.  The narrator is an old woman who looks back and concludes that she has waged a … Read More