The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Playwright and author, Tennessee Williams called her “the greatest prose writer that the South produced.” I fell in love with Carson McCullers’ writing when I read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. In her debut novel which she wrote at the young age of 22, McCullers interweaves the racial tensions in the South with the internal human struggles of her characters. McCullers touches on several themes including unrequited love, racism, poverty, cruelty, forgiveness and loneliness.

Set in a small Southern mill town in the 1930s, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a richly told, unforgettable story about a deaf-mute John Singer and a spirited young teenager girl, Mick Kelly. Mick is an idealist beyond her financial means who struggles for happiness. She becomes infatuated with Singer. In the end, Singer is a “Christ-like” figure where those broken, misunderstood, put-upon characters rely on to help them in their search for meaning in their lives.

One of my favorite literary reviews reads of this novel reads as follows:

"This book is literature. Because it is literature, when one puts it down it is not with a feeling of emptiness and despair, but with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth. For one knows at the end, that it is these cheated people, these with burning intense needs and purposes, who must inherit the earth. They are the reason for the existence of a democracy which is still to be created. This is the way it is, one says to oneself - but not forever." - May Sarton.

There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

"There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby" is sure to get you into the Halloween spirit. The title of this book alone says it all. Vanishings and apparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. Although her stories in this book are reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe’s writing style, Ludmilla’s style is in a class entirely of her own.

According to the English translators of this book Keith Gessen and Anna Summers, Ludmilla’s writing style can best be explained from a subtitle she used in one of her earlier works called “The Possibilities of Menippea”. According to ancient Greek mythology, Menippus visited Hades and since then the satirical genre named after him has often been said to include visits to the literal or social underworld. These visits are called nekyia, a night journey, after Homer’s term in the “Odyssey”. Classic nekyia describe travels to the underworld and dialogues with the dead. In Homer’s Odyssey, for example, Odysseus must first drink human blood before talking with the dead. Modern nekyia include Lewis Caroll's “Alice in Wonderland” and Henry James' “The Turn of the Screw”. Modern nekyia typically involve extraordinary situations involving near death experiences and borderline states where both reality and time are ambiguous.

Ludmilla’s work was heavily scrutinized during the days of Communist Russia. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union before all of her work could be widely circulated.

The following critique of the book sums the book up perfectly.

“Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia-or anywhere else in the world-today.”