Post-40 Bloomers
May 2, 2012
Post-40 Bloomer: Spencer Reece, The Poet’s Tale 5
by Sonya Chung
We needed such a story. The romance, the sense of “close call.” We need these stories to counter the inevitability of obscurity; we need stories that kindle our sense of hope, and possibility. In truth, I wouldn’t blame fans or journalists for altering or exaggerating the story. I understand why we need it to be as dramatic as possible.
March 29, 2012
Post-40 Bloomers: Harriet Doerr’s Impossible Perfection and Happiness 6
by Sonya Chung
Would a person who was happy for forty-two years write a book?
February 29, 2012
Post-40 Bloomers: Walker Percy, The Original Moviegoer 14
by Lisa Peet
“It is not like learning a skill or a game at which, with practice, one gradually improves. One works hard all right, but what comes, comes all of a sudden and as a breakthrough. One hits on something… It is almost as if the discouragement were necessary, that one has first to encounter despair before one is entitled to hope.”
January 30, 2012
Nine Stories, 16 Years in the Making: Post-40 Bloomer Daniel Orozco 5
by Sonya Chung
Orientation is not about “alienation,” modern-day or otherwise, nor about the effects of a particular cultural transition or economic decline; it’s about loneliness. About the awful, persistent distance between you and me, between me and me, between each of us and the spiritual-whatever in the universe; all of which keeps us wondering what the hell this life is about, and how we will survive it. This seems an important distinction to me, and what has allowed Orozco’s work – some of it 16 years-old – to debut with full emotional resonance.
January 12, 2012
Post-40 Bloomer: Stephen Wetta’s If Jack’s in Love 1
by Michael Bourne
It may have taken Stephen Wetta 56 years to learn to write like a twelve-year-old, but it was worth the wait.
December 30, 2011
Post-40 Bloomers: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Last Leopard 4
by Sonya Chung
One indisputable factor that deprived us of more opportunities to luxuriate in Lampedusa’s gifts was a diagnosis of lung cancer at the age of 60. The diagnosis came just a few months after he finished the novel, two publisher rejections already in hand, a third which would arrive weeks before he died in July of that year.