Tag: giveaway

A Weekend Giveaway! Simenon, Jane Bowles, Leonora Carrington, Christopher Tilghman, & H. R. Cross

simenon

Happy Weekend!  It’s warm, but not too warm, and I hope you’re enjoying the garden or sitting in front of the fan with a good book.  It’s giveaway time!   I can affirm the first four books are worth reading; the other two are unsolicited review copies, which I don’t have time to read.

Pick one  or all six and I’ll put your name in the hopper! Leave a comment or email me at mirabiledictu.org@gmail. com

Here are the six books:

Simenon’s Maigret Bides His Time.  Everybody likes a fast-paced Simenon.  In this one, Maigret investigates the apparent suicide of a Corsican immigrant.

Jane Bowles’s Everything Is Nice, a collection of stories, plays, sketches and letters.  Although I prefer her husband Paul Bowles’s books, Jane Bowles is an accomplished writer in her own right, and this is a beautiful edition.

Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.  Virago hails this posthumously-published novel by the surrealist painter and writer  a masterpiece.

Eleanor Dark’s The Little Company, an Australian novel set during World War II (Virago).

Christopher Tilghman’s Thomas and Beal in the Midi. Here’s the Goodreads blurb:  A young interracial couple escapes from Maryland to France in 1892, living first among artists in the vibrant Latin Quarter of Paris, and then beginning a new life as winemakers in the rugged countryside of the Languedoc.  An unsolicited review copy.

H. S. Cross’s Grievous seems to be about a secret society at a school.   A  blurb by Jen Baker compares the book to C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending.  It is an unsolicited review copy.

A Giveaway: “Asymmetry” by Lisa Halliday

This is one of the Best Books of the Year, according to The New York Times critics. And  I’m giving it away to anyone willing to reimburse me for the postage!

Halliday writes beautifully, and yet I found Asymmetry gimmicky.   It consists of two novellas, the first about Alice, a twenty-something wannabe writer who has an affair with Ezra Blazer, a famous American writer in his seventies. Coincidentally,  Halliday in her twenties had an affair with seventyish Philip Roth.  Every reviewer gossips about this, so I assume the tittle-tattle was part of the publicity package.

As a Second Wave feminist, I eventually tired of Alice and Ezra.    It’s not that women who f— their way to fame don’t have talent, but it’s the f– part that cements the deal.  Fortunately, in the second novella, “Madness,” Halliday  casts aside  Alice and Ezra to delineate a truly interesting character, Amar, an upper-middle-class  Iraqi-American researcher who is detained at Heathrow Airport in London on the way to Iraq.  This is the truly brilliant part of this novel.

Alas, in the final section Ezra is back!  He gives an interview on a BBC radio show,  “Desert Island Discs.”   And, not surprisingly,  Ezra mentions an interesting young writer he is helping.  Just as we thought, Alice has benefited from Ezra’s patronage.

Somebody will love this novel, but I want it out of my  house!  When will women get out from under men?

How I miss Second Wave feminism!

The book is beautifully written and critically acclaimed.  Leave a comment or email me at mirabiledictu.org@gmail.com if you want the book.

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