Two great reads

The early 20th-century Australian writer, Henry Handel Richardson, is someone I teach in my course "Women's Literature: British and Colonial." Her short story "Two Hanged Women" appears in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, my foundational textbook for both women's literature courses I teach. I love the stylistic economy of the story.

The novel I've just finished reading is Richardson's masterpiece: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which consists of three separate novels: Australian Felix, The Way Home, and Ultima Thule. The protagonist is based on her father, say most critics, and I recommend the entire 900+ pages.

A second good book, Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House, is a collection of essays about writing fiction. I'm just starting it and already I want to copy the essays to use in class.

Student [and other] Writers

MnSCU has a student literary magazine! It's online and called Inkling. Check out the first edition here: here.

I'm no critic of student creative writing: I can't tell if anything's good or not. It's terrible, really, because I'm finding myself being so impatient with mediocrity these days (okay, many of you will say "So what's new about that?") and so I can't read student creative writing. Essays, okay, but poems? Stories? There's just too little time in the day already to read poetry - I don't want to spend that time on student work.

Speaking of poetry, I picked up four good volumes yesterday at Half Price Books:

--- John Balaban - Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong (he translated this 18th-century concubine's poems: really beautiful. Also he was a professor of mine at Penn State, even gave me some advice about poems I wrote as a youngster)
--- Jim Daniels - M-80 (an amazing urban voice that I thought was African American until I saw his photo here - I don't think we're related, and I'd never heard of him, but he's published many volumes)
--- Edna St. Vincent Millay - Conversation at Midnight (really more of a drama than a poem, but the book I bought is a 1937 edition, lovely paper, a gift from one lover to another although I can't make out every word of the fountain-pen-inked inscription)
--- Adrienne Rich - Sources (scroll down this site to see this rare book, a volume of Rich's I don't have, and I'm trying to round out my collection of her work)