- Short Story: Bullet in the Brain by Tobias WolffAnn Arbor District Library: Malletts Creek Branch, Ann Arbor, MI
Let's read "Bullet in the Brain", a short story by Tobias Wolff and get together at Malletts Creek Library in the Rain Garden Room to discuss it.
URL
https://wordsunlimited.typepad.com/files/bullet.pdf
You might remember a movie in the 90s called "This Boy's Life" starring Robert DeNiro and a very young Leonardo DiCaprio.Tobias Wolff (born June 19, 1945, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.) is an American writer who is primarily known for his memoirs and for his short stories, in which many voices and a wide range of emotions are skillfully depicted.
Wolff’s parents divorced when he was a child. From the age of 10, he traveled with his mother, who relocated frequently and finally settled in Seattle, Washington, where she remarried. Wolff wrote about his childhood in the 1950s, including his relationship with his abusive stepfather, in This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (1989; film 1993), which was perhaps his best-known work. His older brother, the novelist Geoffrey Wolff, was brought up by their father (an aeronautical engineer and a pathological liar) and wrote about his childhood in The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father (1979). The brothers were reunited when Tobias was a young teenager.
Wolff served in the military as a paratrooper during the Vietnam War, after which he was educated at the University of Oxford (B.A., 1972; M.A., 1975) and Stanford University (M.A., 1978). He was appointed writer in residence at Syracuse (New York) University, where he taught from 1980 to 1997. His first published collections of short stories were In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981; U.K. title, Hunters in the Snow) and Back in the World (1985). Wolff also edited several anthologies of short stories, including Matters of Life and Death: New American Stories (1983), A Doctor’s Visit: Short Stories by Anton Chekhov (1988), and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (1994). - Novel Revelry: "Horse" by Geraldine BrooksAnn Arbor District Library: Malletts Creek Branch, Ann Arbor, MI
Let's get together to discuss "Horse" by Geraldine Brooks in the River Birch Room of Mallett's Creek Library.
Horse (2022) is a historical novel based upon the racing horse Lexington. It quickly became a New York Times Best Seller.[17] It won the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction.
The Pulitzer Prize winner explores the unwritten true tale of America’s most famous racehorse—and uses that story to show how far we need to go in confronting systemic racism.Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues.
In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans.
She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, is an international bestseller, and People of the Book is a New York Times bestseller translated into 20 languages. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.
Brooks married author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup, France, in 1984. They had two sons– Nathaniel and Bizuayehu–and two dogs. They used to divide their time between their homes in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Sydney, Australia.
- Short Story: "Emergency" by Denis Hale JohnsonAnn Arbor District Library: Malletts Creek Branch, Ann Arbor, MI
Let's read "Emergency" by Denis Hale Johnson (9 pages) and get together to discuss it. I just read it and I would recommend you buckle your seatbelts as you dive into it! This is my first time to read something by Denis Johnson. Bio below.
Here is the URL:
https://public.wsu.edu/~bryanfry/emergency_by_denis_johnson.pdfDenis Hale Johnson (July 1, 1949 – May 24, 2017) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He is perhaps best known for his debut short story collection, Jesus' Son (1992). His most successful novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award for Fiction.[2] Johnson was twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[3] Altogether, Johnson was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage.[4] His final work, a book of short stories titled The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, was published posthumously in 2018.
He earned a B.A. in English (in 1971) from the University of Iowa and an M.F.A. (in 1974) from the Iowa Writers' Workshop,[6] where he also returned to teach.[5] While at the Writers' Workshop, Johnson took classes from Raymond Carver.[9]
