Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
Molly McArdle (mmcardle@mediasourceinc.com, @mollitudo on Twitter) is Assistant Editor, Library Journal Book Review. She also manages the Library Journal tumblr.
I confess I am a longtime fan of “Dear Sugar,” the online advice column published by the Rumpus. Writing anonymously as “Sugar,” its author recently revealed herself to be novelist and memoirist Cheryl Strayed (Wild). Her columns, collected for the first time in Tiny Beautiful Things (see the starred review in LJ 5/15/12), are moving responses [...]
I was lucky to meet Adrienne Rich when I was in college and she came to visit the campus. I had several hurried, fraught conversations with both students and professors about pronunciation. Was it true, I heard, it wasn’t AID-rienne but ADD-rienne? (It was.) No one wanted to say the wrong thing. Everyone wanted to meet her. I [...]
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, [...]
I don’t remember when I first read “Bartleby.” I do remember how it made me feel—bemused, disquieted, and finally just sad. It seemed at times, like the rest of Melville’s work, impossibly modern. It could also be as inscrutable as Bartleby himself. It’s the kind of story you keep in your pocket, a talisman, to reach [...]
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