By: Alissa Lauzon,
on 7/8/2009
Eddie lives in a small coal-mining town and wants nothing more than to quit school, work in the mines, and spend as much time as possible with his friend/girlfriend Sally. His brother Larry, on the other hand, is determined to do well in school and escape life in their small town but he does not have the social graces to successfully pursue the girl he is interested in. Their father has
By: Sally Murphy,
on 3/21/2008
I've spent a goodly part of my Good Friday afternoon updating Aussiereviews with twelve new reviews. As always, the majority are children's and young adult titles, though this time round there are two nonfiction titles and one adult fiction. My favourite from this batch is probably Cold Skin, a verse novel by Steven Herrick, a master of the form. Having been recently working on verse novels
By: John Mark Boling,
on 2/19/2008
A. N. Wilson takes on the enigmatic John Cowper Powys in essay from The Spectator: "Morine Krissdóttir is a real authority on Powys. She has been studying him throughout a long life, she knows the material well and she has produced a book which no reader of Powys will want to be without." Krissdottir's biography of Powys, Descents of Memory, was released last Fall along with a new edition of Porius.
By: John Mark Boling,
on 1/7/2008
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In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Morine Krissdottir's Descents of Memory gets another fine notice: "The first comprehensive biography of John Cowper Powys, the author of “Wolf Solent” and “Porius,” reveals a man who saw himself as a magician and manipulator, to the occasional consternation of the family members and lovers who found themselves depicted in his writing. Born in Derbyshire in 1872, Powys was plagued by ulcers and possessed of a disastrous business sense, had various sexual preoccupations (he found the slender legs of young boys titillating), and tended to mythologize his own existence, ritually tapping his head on stones in attempts to communicate with Indian spirits. He was also incredibly prolific, drawing on his suffering and his obsessions to produce sprawling novels. Krissdóttir’s sympathetic immersion in the Powysian universe is balanced by a sharp critical engagement with Powys’s work, and she uses recently discovered correspondence and diaries to provide a fuller portrait of his relationship with Phyllis Playter, his longtime companion and amanuensis."
By: John Mark Boling,
on 12/17/2007
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The new Overlook edition of Porius, the monunmental novel by John Cowper Powys, is reviewed by Maggie de Vries, in The Globe and Mail:
By: John Mark Boling,
on 11/15/2007
By: John Mark Boling,
on 11/2/2007
Overlook's new edition of Porius is reviewed in this week's New Yorker: "The line between reality and reverie is not always clearly demarcated, and the epic number of characters is often bewildering, but the astutely envisaged world and the operatic romantic couplings quickly draw in the reader."
And the brilliant new biography of Powys, Descents of Memory, by Dr. Morine Krissdottir is the subject of a lengthy review ("The Dorset Proust") in The Literary Review: "An inspired study of the tangled and precarious life an absurdly neglected writer."
By: John Mark Boling,
on 10/21/2007
By: John Mark Boling,
on 10/12/2007
By: John Mark Boling,
on 10/3/2007
The long awaited biography of John Cowper Powys, Descents of Memory by Morine Krissdottir, has just been released by The Overlook Press. This landmark work provides fascinating new details of the life of Powys, including his relationship with Phyllis Planter, the daughter of a Missouri businessman who was the writer's companion from 1923 until his death. The book also explores the life of Powys as an itinerant lecturer - he spent 25 years in America, touring the country, drawing enormous crowds to his public speeches. In today's review of the new biography in the New York Sun, Oxford Professor Paul Dean writes: "Powys was a spellbinding platform orator - at the end of one two-hour discourse on Hardy, a crowd of two thousand people rose to its feet, roaring for more . . ."
By: John Mark Boling,
on 9/9/2007
By: John Mark Boling,
on 8/16/2007
Releasing this week in bookstores across the country is a new,
unabridged and carefully restored edition of PORIUS, by the
great John Cowper Powys. Kirkus Reviews notes that
"readers of all things Tolkien will find this epic a pleasure,
for it is full of Tolkienesque characters and interludes and
plenty of good old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery stuff, all very
well told." Considered by Powys to be the "chief work of my
lifetime," PORIUS is a swirling, sweeping and challenging work
of genius, and might be appreciated by contemporary readers as
a masterpiece of magical realism. The new Overlook edition
checks in at 751 pages, with a Foreword by preeminent Powys
scholars Judith Bond and Morine Kridottir.
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Might I respectfully suggest that Mr. Powys and his characters are, contrary to this reviewer, very much creatures of the 21st century; but -- they happen to belong to the later portion of the century. Such is the way with visionaries... Let us see...