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Articles by Walter Biggins
Kenan’s short stories explore a return to faith, home
Small towns are strange. Cities may put up with more oddity, and indeed freaks from rural towns often escape to big cities precisely because their weirdness is more tolerated there. But, if urban spaces provide safe haven for weirdness, it’s tiny, isolated communities that breed it. Artists as varied as William Faulkner, Gilbert Hernandez and David Lynch have always known this; their fictional rural spaces bloom and fester with dreamscapes, night visions and ghosts. Randall Kenan knows it, too.
Whose South are we talking about, exactly? On Don’t Quit Your Day Job, edited by Sonny Brewer
First things first, the subtitle’s off. Half the essayists in Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit explicitly reveal that they don’t quit work in order to write, and almost none of them have gotten to the point where they can make a living through writing. More importantly, many of these essays don’t really concern how the discussed jobs relate directly to the author’s writing style, thematic concerns, or even the writing process.
Issue 53 of The Quarterly Conversation
When I first read Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile for my high school AP French class, an alarm went off on me. That I was reading the words of someone who understood love in the same way I did. At that point in my life I hadn’t yet experienced love, but it didn’t matter. It was a foreshadowing of what was to come, of what I already knew to be true. The next year, in a college French class, I read Duras’s The Lover. From the first page (J’ai un visage détruit) I saw myself again.
‘Brother Moochie” an ambitious, uneven look at prison system and race.
Our heroes don’t have to die for us to lose them. When Issac Bailey was 9, his beloved brother Herbert Lee Bailey, known as Moochie, killed a man. Moochie stabbed poor James Bunch two dozen times during a botched robbery in the man’s own home. Moochie, an African-American, was 22 and high as a box kite at the time. The victim was a white shop owner who seemed to have no enemies of any race.
‘A Shout in the Ruins’ a Civil War drama that treads tired terrain
Kevin Powers’ “A Shout in the Ruin” hopscotches from the Civil War to the mid-1980s, meandering through threads of intersecting black, white and multiracial lives, though pointedly it doesn’t successfully untangle the knots that those threads make or even articulate why the tangling is necessary beyond narrative contrivance.
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