( from the archives)
Elizabeth Strout is probably my favorite writer and
Oh, William
is a continuation of the story she began in MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON. I
love her unadorned, plain-speaking writing style, I like her characters
and find them completely credible, I love her affection for even the
worst of them. Lucy Barton is introduced as a patient in a hospital
after an operation went bad. She spends a month there ruminating on her
life and especially on her horrific childhood. Her mother visits
her-something unexpected because of the way she treated Lucy as a child.
But William calls her in because it is hard for him to visit with a job
and two children to care for.
Oh William picks the
story up later. Lucy is now a successful novelist with two grown
daughters and has just lost her second husband, who she adored. William
was her first husband and she is thrown together with him when he finds
out he has a stepsister he never knew existed and needs help coping with
it. Lucy takes the journey with him despite herself.
I am now
reading the third story about this family (although written before Oh,
William) and it is terrific too.Is anything nicer than being in the
hands of a writer you love?
11 comments:
Diane and her Book Club love Elizabeth Strout as much as you do. They read OH, WILLIAM at a meeting Diane hosted (I was there to serve wine and coffee) and there was a lot of conversation about that book.
She is a real favorite with me.
In November, I read LUCY BY THE SEA and TELL ME EVERYTHING. I loved both of those books. I read OH, WILLIAM! just a month or so before that.
I think Tell Me Everything is just extraordinary!
I love them all starting with AMY AND ISABELLE
The only books by Strout that I haven't read yet are AMY AND ISABELLE and ABIDE WITH ME. I have a copy of AMY AND ISABELLE but will have to find a copy of ABIDE WITH ME later in the year.
I shall have to try Strout. I have just picked up the current issues of PLOUGHSHARES, EQMM and FANTASY AND SF yesterday, and it only cost as much as a good meal for two at a mid-range restaurant these days, which does not bode well for the health of the fiction-magazine industry going forward. And that with what amounted to a five-dollar coupon at B&N.
What do we make of magazines charging reading fees for expedited responses to submissions? I'm finding some remakarbly self-righteous defenses of this practice of late, for example: "It is not true that it is shady. That is a difference of opinion. If MO. REVIEW is delivering what they say they deliver, and writers can choose strategically, it is not automatically shady. It is a business model. The real metric is whether the process stays fair and the value is real. Waiting only to be rejected is cheaper, but it can be equally shady when there is no transparency, even from the most prestigious magazines. Anything else is just moral posturing. If a magazine is genuinely upfront, with clear pricing, a clear statement that payment does not buy acceptance, and a clear explanation of what you actually get (a faster response, feedback, or editorial notes), then calling it shady is a stretch. It is a paid service layered on top of a standard submission lane. You can dislike it, sure, but transparency is the opposite of a scam. And if the free submission lane takes much longer, that is super shady too. What exactly are they protecting: editorial integrity, access, or their submission fees where you have to wait to be rejected? There is also a lot of industry hypocrisy. Plenty of free magazines are opaque, slow, and give writers nothing but silence or a form rejection with zero accountability. That is cheap for writers, but it is not exactly clean handed either, and it is equally shady when there is no communication." My response to this has been '"Shady" is Always a matter of opinion. The magazines are not doing the writers favors by reading their stories; they are in the business of publishing stories for their readers, who buy the magazine to read those stories (and other contributions). Reading fee critique might be a way of finding some further income for the magazine's staff, but it remains a practice where the funds are flowing in the wrong direction, and is inherently prone to corruption. That little magazines particularly are frequently underfunded is unfortunately true, but that doesn't make this practice any more likely to be genuinely helpful as opposed to exploitation, even when announced clearly in advance. The attempt at "virtue-signaling" a practice of "pay-to-play" in this manner has famously been a racket, particularly at the likes of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency and its peers, in decades past.'
Interesting that Blogger/Blogspot has started, sometime in the ?recent past, to plop "©2026 Blogger" at the bottom of our pages. Not sure I recall agreeing to that.
We can read most magazines through LIBBY at the library.
I should check if my local library subs to LIBBY. Though I am the greedy sort who wants the copies at hand, I will also settle for what I can read at Archive.org, and other sites.
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