Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog: A Novel (New York & Boston: A Reagan Arthur Book/Little, Brown, 2011) ("Tracey cut the toast into triangles and arranged them on the plate. If it had just been for her she would have slapped a doorstep onto a piece of kitchen roll and been done with it. It was different having someone to do things for. Made you more careful. 'Mindful,' a Buddhist would have said. She only knew that because a long time ago she had dated a Buddhist for a few weeks. He was a wimpy bloke form Wrexham who ran a secondhand bookshop. She was hoping for enlightenment, ended up with glandular fever. Put her off spirituality for life." Id. at 117.).
Hilary Reyl, Lessons in French: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
Susan Choi, My Education: a Novel ((New York: Viking, 2013).
Kate Christensen, The Astral: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
Kate Christensen, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites (New York: Doubleday, 2013).
Kate Christensen, The Epicure's Lament: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2004) ("'I wish I had become an artist. I didn't have the courage; I took the road most traveled. Law school? Any half-intelligent monkey can be a lawyer.'" Id. at 61.).
Kate Christensen, The Great Man: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2007) ("The unmarried old owner, Homer Meehan, the last surviving descendant of the family who'd bought it when it was built in the 1870s, had become too crippled to live alone and so was headed for an old-age home and was selling his family house. He left behind odd touches, like the Chinese-cardboard cartoon faces in the lav, ballpoint pen-scrawled maunderings upstairs on the wall of the smaller of the two bedrooms (her favorite: 'It's useless to give up and useless to persevere, so take the path of least resistance with your eyes and mouth shut'), and photos of wild animals mating or about to mate, cut from National Geographics and pasted in a free-form collage on the wall of the tiny boot room leading out to the backyard. Teddy had left all this handiwork untouched, partly out of her heartbroken reluctance to start over in a new place, partly out of an appreciation for weirdo eccentrics." Id. at 27-28.).
Kate Christensen, In the Drink: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 1999).
Kate Christensen, Trouble: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Kathryn Davis, Duplex: A Novel (Minneapolis, Mn: Graywolf Press, 2013).
Kathryn Davis, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1993) ("After the Great War, civilized people played bridge. Or more precisely, indoors they played bridge. Outdoors they played tennis. After the Great War civilized people thought they could substitute manners for morality. So it happened that by the time the monster had arisen, slavering, from its pit, it was too late; the habit had been formed. By that time, didn't everyone know that it was bad manners to interfere." Id. at 303-304.).
Kathryn Davis, Hell: A Novel (Boston: Back Bay Books/ Little, Brown, 1998, 2003).
Kathryn Davis, Labrador: A Novel (Boston & New York: A Mariner Book/Houghton Mifflin, 1988).
Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place: A Novel (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2006) ("It was hard being married to a romantic." Id. at 11. "Richard removed his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose; then he put them back on and returned his attention to what what he'd written. The problem isn't animals, the problem is people, he read. Of course animals routinely ate other animals, it was in their nature. A wolf ate a lamb and thought nothing of it. When a wolf ate a lamb, it wasn't treating the lamb like something it wasn't. For a wolf to dwell with a lamb was merely the opposite side of the same coin: the key difference being that the wolf's appetite hadn't been activated. Whereas human beings since the dawn of time had continually used all of the resources at their disposal to treat other human beings like something they weren't, that is, not human. Human beings turned their young into walking bombs and sent them forth to destroy places of human habitation. Human beings wrapped other human beings in pitch and set them alight and mounted them like torches in gardens; they sewed them in the skins of wild animals and set hunting dogs in them. They scraped them with pincers, they tore out their eyes, they cut off parts of their bodies and roasted them. They gassed them, they starved them, they turned their bones to radium. There was no other side to that coin." Id. at 239 (paragraph breaks omitted).").
Kathryn Davis, Versailles: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) ("Of course death is never a coordinate, not for humans at least. Which is why it's wrong to say that a life gets cut short." Id. at 69.).
Kathryn Davis, The Walking Tour: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) ("'Business has to break the law to grow,' he told her, grazing. 'If it doesn't it'll die'" Id. at 17.).
Sarah Dunant, Blood and Beauty: The Borgias: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2013) (See Liesl Schillinger, "Poison, Incest, Intrigue," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/7/2013.).
Jenni Fagan, The Panopticon: A Novel (New York: Hogarth, 2012) ("'You know what they don't tell you in this life, Anais, it's this, those...' She points at a wall of penis paintings. 'The phallus, the prick, the cock, whatever you want to call it, it's not the most powerful thing in the world.'... 'No. Like they think it is, they build skyscrapers and mosques and big weapons in the shape of penises, to make you think that it is.' 'Why?' 'Gender wars. Absolute domination, over that they fear. What men fear is a cunt, so they try and make the cock scarier. It's why they cut off girls' clitorises, and use rape as a war tactic. It's why the sentencing for rape is so offensively pathetic.' ... 'Men are scary, sometimes, Pat.' ''Aye, but it's all up here.' She taps her head. 'They want us to think rape's the worst thing that can happen.' 'It's not?' 'Look--I've been raped six ways from Sunday, and it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was not as bad as losing my firstborn, it was not as bad as watching my mother die from cancer. I mean it was bad. I am not saying it wasn't bad; it was horrific, it made me stab one guy and I won't even tell you what I did to another. The point is: society's conditioned us, men and women, to live in fear.'" Id. at 198-199." Also, see Tom Shone, "Surveillance State," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/21/2013).
Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 1991).
Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn't See and Other Stories (Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2000).
Karen Joy Fowler, Wit's End: A Novel (New York: A Marian Wood Book/ C. P. Putnam's Sons, 2008).
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying: A Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973).
Anouk Markovits, I Am Forbidden: A Novel (London & New York: Hogarth, 2012).
Alice McDermott, Someone: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) (See Leah Hager Cohen, "The Drift of Years," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/8/2013.).
Gabrielle Roy, The Road Past Altamont, translated from the French by Joyce Marshall (Lincoln, NE: The Bison Press/U. of Nebraska Press, 1966, 1993) ("I always thought that the human heart is a little like the ocean, subject to tides, that joy rises in it in a steady flow, singing of waves, good fortune, and bliss; but afterward, when the high sea withdraws, it leaves an utter desolation on our sight. So it was with me that day." Id. at 102.).
Cathleen Schiene, Fin & Lady: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) (See Christopher Benfey, "It Takes the Village," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/28/2013.).
May Swenson, Collected Poems, edited by Langdon Hammer (New York: Library of America, 2013) (From 'Poet's Choice': "Because of the dead grass we were fed in school--some of it was fine, but nevertheless dry from storage in the educational barn--when I began to write I was impatient with any form that smacked of the past. I hated symmetry, I hated the expected." Id. at 676, 676. I like those phrases, "dead grass," "dry from storage," and "educational barn." So much of it reminds me of the state of education in America, though the rise of 'corporate educators' is bringing about change, but not not improvement.).
