THE MINIMALIST, music is a hard, demanding master to serve

THE MINIMALIST
KAILEE PEDERSEN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Tár and The Piano Teacher, this gruesome and unsettling psychological drama is a darkly lucid portrait of a classical composer’s descent into madness.

As the last and greatest student of famed minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield, Mia Voss’s rise to prominence in the insular world of classical music has long been assured. When Ryder dies unexpectedly, she inherits everything—including the unfinished manuscript of his final composition, the mysterious Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra.

Haunted by memories of her tragic romance with Ryder’s late son, Oliver—like Mia, an Asian American adoptee—Mia leaves her girlfriend behind and returns to Ryder’s home to finish his last work. There, Mia is forced to confront her complex relationship with Ryder, who hid his Jewish and gay identities to become one of the most important twentieth-century American composers; her lingering guilt over Oliver’s suicide; and her own musical ambition as the manuscript begins to exert a disturbing, mesmerizing hold over her.

Drawn from the author’s own experiences as an adoptee and classical musician, The Minimalist is a harrowing examination of loss, torment, mental illness, self-harm, and artistic self-destruction.

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My Review: Music is not a career, a job, or even a calling so much as an identity. "A musician" is not always employed making music, but they are still a musician. Those whose income derives from whatever facet of performance or creation are not *more* musicianly but simply luckier.

Or maybe not.

My second Kailee Pedersen read gave me deeply unsettling dreams about the (to me) horrifying psychological agony of being A Musician who is simply unfit for other work. Its Procrustean demands, its necessary or sometimes just conveniently available pressures to conform to a standard of self-presentation can cause deep psychological wounds. As the astonishingly complex intersectionality of Mia's identities are laid bare in her reckoning with Oliver, Ryder, adoption, musicianship, we're drawn into her psychic damage. It's horror, it's horrifying, it's horripilating as it unfolds in Author Pedersen's words. I had never once given any thought to the true extent extant in the phrase "putting oneself into one's work," but I will not be using that phrase lightly in future.

Is music a thing, an entity outside us? Is a musician possessed by music? Or does the rigorous mathematical nature of composing and performing music simply attract creative people with obsessive personalities? I don't know; I didn't even know to ask the question before I read this story. It is the best kind of reading experience for me, that. When an author's chosen story gives my endlessly curious brain something new to chew over, to turn at unusual angles so I can see its lumps and rough patches, I am deeply satiated and grateful.

So where's that fifth star? That all adds up to a rave review, doesn't it? It does; tempered with a slight squeamishness. It's often the case in body horror stories that I, on the rare occasions I buy into the horror elements, think "that right there is a bridge too far." I got there during this read. A whole half-star's worth of there. *shudder* I don't think many gore-readers will batten on the careful, attentive buildup of the story, either; it's really, despite the shuddersome bit, a psychological unraveling story where the unraveled bits also form mummy-wrapping strips of Mia's psychology.

It was a fascinating reading experience. I am reinforced in my high opinion of Author Pedersen's storytelling eye. I am also never going to be able to listen to music blithely, unthinkingly appreciating the sounds in the air...I'll be ever afterward aware of how much music costs the creators.

And how much of themselves they put into it.

THE CUT LINE, survival...contingent contentment...solitude

THE CUT LINE
CAROLINA PIHELGAS (tr. Darcy Hurford)
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship.

She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. A lot of physical labor and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish.

Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. All around Liine, nature is facing acute drought and heat. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence.

Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine—always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing—undergoes profound transformations, too. The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving way to hope and healing, joy and lightness.

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My Review: Reckoning with the toxicity of Love is the most difficult emotional task I know of; it is the central concern of this story. In Liine's life there is no softness in the emotional gifts anyone around her grudgingly and contingently grants to her. She finally accepts her partner will never be a validating, accepting, kind force supporting her own betterment. Running away at last, she lands at a family property far from the city, where there is nothing much in the way of modern conveniences. She's also hounded...well...tracked down anyway by her family who think she should accept that her violent, withholding ex is as good as she'll ever get for a man to be with.

Been there, Liine.

Her stubborn resistance to submit to family or ex is rooted in her desire to survive, maybe begin to thrive. But there's a catch (of course there is): her rural haven is under severe stress from climate change; and it's very close to a NATO base provocatively situated close to Estonia's border with Russia, their former colonial power. Liine might have leapt out of the frying pan but it looks like the fire is fast approaching.

Her willingness to work hard is barely keeping her even with the environmental changes; her emotional healing work is under siege from the perfidious ex's smear campaign in their friend circle (after a breakup, Liine, walk away and let those who care follow you; those who don't are not your friends), and her family's pressure to go back; the NATO base is constantly "testing" ie exploding weapons in a cacophonous assault on nature. An environment that does not support her much-needed self-repair work. So what else is new.

It sounds very challenging, right? It really is; it really demands we invest in Liine to overcome her manifold obstacles to becoming herself, for herself, not answering to anyone else. If she can stay the course...if she can pull the heroic feat of self-reinvention off....

In under 150pp, you're not getting a full redemption arc. It's more a book about vibes, about being in the moment with the character. I was rooting for her to live each day, since she tells us directly that "at night I die several times" to make sure we get how intense the labor she does really is.

It comes from deep within, an anger I've never dared to feel before. It's a wild feeling of injustice that I've been treated like an inferior kind of being that doesn't deserve respect. Like someone who can be pushed about, who can be manipulated, who can be reproached, humiliated, and who won't fight back. Why didn't I fight back? Why did I put up with it all? I'm mad at myself as well. No, hold on a moment. That's another thing that's been planted in me: blame yourself, descend into an endless labyrinth where you find nothing but your own faults. Analyze only what you did wrong. Consider what you did to deserve it. And anyway, if it was so bad, why didn't you leave sooner? Stop.

That's a distillation of the work of recovery from abuse that can't be bettered.

What you're getting in this plunge-pool of a story is the dive not the swim. The ending isn't A Resolution; it's Liine committing herself to resolving the problems she came to sort out, to coping with the problems she has limited control over (nature, NATO), and being her own, real, honest self.

It is a gratifying story to read to me in this moment I'm making changes in my own life. It is not all tied up with a bow. That won't be to everyone's taste, some facets (eg going to her sister for...what? nothing happens) were not to mine. No perfect score from me; but a deep, enfolding read about a tough woman finding the strong core she needs to stand on while facing down the world.

And she does it for herself.

MY NAME MEANS FIRE: A Memoir, unflinching examination of the selves who saved the author

MY NAME MEANS FIRE: A Memoir
ATASH YAGHMAIAN
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An unflinching and stunning debut memoir of an Iranian girl’s coming-of-age experiencing abuse, war, and superstition—and her survival through dissociative identity disorder, which offered her an inner world into which she could escape

When she was a child, Atash Yaghmaian’s home life was unpredictable: a confusing mix of love and terror. Outside of her home, Iran was also on fire. Her reality of abuse, war, gender oppression, and religious superstition left her feeling unsafe everywhere. So, she left reality and disassociated into a place she called the House of Stone: a building in a magical forest full of peaceful creatures, kind talking trees, and volcanoes. Inhabiting this world are 9 beings, each different parts of Atash, who would be her salvation from the external horrors of her outer world.

Set against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, and the 8-year Iran-Iraq War, My Name Means Fire is Atash’s story of survival as she experiences tragic events including sexual abuse, a mother who subjected her to superstitious rituals, and the horrors of war. In chapters alternating with what’s happening in her outside world, her other parts—each named after a color—tell the story of her inner world, giving readers an understanding of what it’s like to be inside the consciousness of someone who is multiple.

Honest, powerful, and moving, My Name Means Fire is a bold narrative that challenges the stigma and misinformation around dissociative identity disorder (DID) and ultimately reckons with what it takes to survive.

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My Review: A story not of abuse, but the lengths a mind will go to in order to survive abuse.

Author Atash is a child of war, growing up in revolutionary Iran during its convulsive birth. She had the bad fortune to be female at a time that was becoming as awfully abuse-worthy and dangerous as it can possibly be. She was equally unlucky in having a mother sufficiently divorced from reality as to subject her daughter to bizarre-to-me religious rituals in place of protecting her or getting her proper care.

We had the same mother, Author Atash. Mine had no war to excuse her insanity, but I had the great good luck to be born male. Harms balanced; my heart goes out to you. It won't help forty years later but it is sincere sadness for the things that occurred in your life that caused splitting your mind into compartments was the best way to keep yourself safe.

In this story of peril unprotected, abuse unstopped, and damage unheeded, the one thing that ran through my mind was, "your mind is astoundingly powerful! Your ability to divide yourself into different people, each capable of more than you thought you were, is close to miraculous!"

It was hard to read, I wanted to help her escape her lunatic mother, rescue her from the war-torn horrors around her adolescent self. I hurt for the potential squandered in her awful childhood...a mind this resilient could easily have achieved much more than survival, though it is astonishing she managed to survive. I'm extremely impressed that her life has been such that she was able to conceptualize and create this account of how she came to be a multiple, and how she became a self that could function.

I wished, to be honest, we had spent more time with the multiples, not quite so much detailing their traumatic genesis. It's a quibble, too, that ending the story as she's escaping to the US felt...rushed...but it gives me hope Author Atash will write a volume two. I'm glad I got to meet Fire in her present state.

BAD HANDWRITING: Stories, angry, bitter, truthtelling stories without any need to coddle you

BAD HANDWRITING: Stories
SARA MESA (tr. Katie Whittemore & Frances Riddle)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories.

The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness; alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface—subterranean, furious and impotent; people who are tormented—or not—by regret and doubt, addicted to feelings of culpability; men who take advantage of women and adults who exercise power over children with a disturbing degree of control; kids abandoned by their parents; the suicide of the elderly and the young; lives that hide crimes—both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing, on even the smallest scale of an individual life, a single family.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sara Mesa's collection does something exciting to me: It presents a woman's unexpurgated thoughts on her role, her world's extent, and why it is (not could or should be) that way. The women in question aren't always adults, or the PoV characters. They are always, though, the heart of the tale told.

Where men should know to go, they are clueless, or narcissistic, enough not to. All the stories together make a dark and compelling vision of our cruel world. Little hope is offered here that there is light at the end of the tunnel, even that of an oncoming freight train's headlight.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the use of the Bryce Method hereinafter applies.

The Screech Owl might refer to the bird, or the unkind and minatory older woman in charge of this forest picnic:

The snap of the pine needles breaking beneath her feet grew quieter as she drew near, strangled by the voice of the aunt, a voice from the depths of an earthen jar, deep, strong, stony. ... The aunt always knew exactly what had to be done and the proper steps to do it. ...allowing no one to disturb her ritual. She performed it deliberately, unhurried, as if time itself was obliged to mold to her pace.

Nothing good comes of wondering and wandering when your real purpose is escape. From so very much, it turns out; the screech owl least of all. Darkly suggestive of bitter secrets and unspoken unhappiness, redolent of the matriarchal control by guilt and shame, a very, very sad and betrayed start to the collection. 4*

Mármol finds us in the memories of a writer whose class is jolted by the suicide of the freckle-faced titular character at the sad age of fourteen. She recalls for us the way she felt before the event, the childish concerns and hatreds that consume all schoolkids in that passage of life; her older sister bonding with her over a particularly weird and awful teacher; the way she held her pencil, apparently so odd and unpleasant to others that they recall it decades later. Nothing much about the boy himself, unsurprisingly, since this isn't his story only one of the life that goes on after tragedy. The writer narrating the story is formed by the event and her observations set in stone because of it. Reads differently in the age of ever-increasing rate of youth suicide than it would've when written. 3.5*

Just a Few Millimeters limns some uneasy cultural attitudes towards disability as a young teacher copes awkwardly with a severely disabled teenaged boy with all his thoughts and feelings but who is trapped in his head. She is in his room to administer a school exam, as he communicates (like Hawking) via tiny eye movements.

Told in a headlong rush of listening in on her private thoughts, the story hurts in its voyeuristic honesty of prejudice, of Othering, of silent but vocalized rejection. The cruelty we all possess, express inside our heads, and so reject community, communication, simple communing with The Other. Hard subject, but when did that stop Mesa from tackling it? 4.5*

"Creamy Milk and Crunchy Chocolate" explores the shadow side of accepting responsibility for one's actions: Guilt. Not "I did this thing that hurt you, I'm sorry" guilt; the kind that, in its intensity, recenters the causer of harm, focuses all the attention on the committer of the harm thus re-robbing the harmed of centrality in their life. In other words, toxic narcissism wrapped in saintly clothes.

A man and woman come together in a guilt-issues therapy group. Their self-centeredness keeps on reinforcing their narcissism. They continue to cope, not by reaching for healing, rather with extravagant sex accompanied by religiosity and toxic outward focus to avoid the learning guilt, remorse, and regret can offer.

Subtle language point: The title of the story is in English in the original Spanish text. It carries an extra weight that way, that the quotes around it in translation approximates. 5 stars, a story that lives with me

Stonewords takes place in the past of "The Screech Owl" above. The origin story, so to speak, of the unhappiness and bitter resentment in that tale of horrors committed with "Love" in the mouth of a woman for whom it is only a word, devoid of any interiority.

A childhood, then adolescence, lived with a harpy whose grudges and jealousy masquerade as concern for her reputation (though not her feelings), leaves the narrator used to insults, belittlement, cruelty she labels "stonewords." She describes them in the same terms one would rain: as sliding down her arms, her legs, unsurprising and ordinary. The day comes to her, as it does to all of us, that all the exciting fumbling around has an end, a purpose, that does not follow rules.

Accidentally matured, she explains to her aunt the sight that brought this loss of innocence to her. The line she (which she?) never understood is finally crossed, and...offscreen, as it were...the full weight of all the stonewords lands on her (which her?). 4.25*

Nothing New foretells the death of the old, useless, addicted men who supported a system now in its rigor mortis and wrapping tightly around the few remaining pleasures of life: hatred, booze, and pointless cruelty, all horribly addictive.

The grandson recounting, sort of, the story of the old man's last hours on Earth, wasn't there wasn't even interested in it except as a story told to an anonymous audience. A bleak picture of an end that will come to so many. I hope it comes exactly this way to the old bastards in charge in 2025. 4*

White People portrays the unconsidered use of power associated with gender, as well as skin color. A young woman turns down an invitation to see her parents at Christmas so she can visit her sister, While she is there, her sister decides not to have an abortion or put her unborn baby up for adoption in spite of the pressure to do so after she is sent to prison for murder. Unmemorable, if nicely written. 3.5*

Papa is Made of Rubber tells us of three young brothers, one an infant, struggling to survive in an apartment that their parents have, for unknown reasons, abandoned. Mesa has writes about children in crisis, or simply in hard-to-fathom difficulty, and it is a strength of hers. It is a moving, unnerving piece of storytelling, but there's a missing heart of meaning. 4*

What is Going On with Us is the ugly aftermath of rape. It's told in Sara Mesa's most usual stream-of-consciousness prose.

Nothing graphic happens. I wish it had. I'd feel less...dirty...compromised...maybe revulsion for the act is cathartic. I've been this woman, and this is exactly what it felt like, still feels like, and can never be expunged from any part of you. 5*

Cattle Tyrants Short and sharp. Vivid vignette of being assaulted, being brutalized, just because They can. It's in the aftermath the tragedy unfolds. A bit like "The Screech Owl," it's more about what They will think than about what happened to you. 4*

Mustelids...those weird little critters that combine mammalian fur, reptilian sinuosity, and add a hefty dash of playful destructiveness...are her favorite animals. He's left trying to put that into the puzzle he has some pieces to, though not the ones he supposes he does. The corner piece is her published collection of violent, dark stories; then his picture's blown into new configurations as she explains how otters and incest coexist in her head, before "falling asleep" on his shoulder as they go back to their home city.

He will never know if she listened to any of the interesting facts he shared. He waits for her while she creates all kinds of embarrassing fuss and ruction looking for her left-behind otter plushie.

Clueless to the end. 4*

THE JOHN WILLIAMS PAGE: STONER; and THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life

THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life
CHARLES J. WILLIAMS
University of Texas Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An “engrossing” biography of a brilliant novelist underappreciated in his own time who became a twenty-first-century bestseller, from the New York Times–bestselling author (The New Yorker).

When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet the quietly powerful tale of Midwestern college professor William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish, eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner “a perfect novel,” and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C.P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it “a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.”

This biography traces the life of Stoner’s author, John Williams. Charles J. Shields follows the whole arc of Williams’s life, which in many ways paralleled that of his titular character, from their shared working-class backgrounds to their undistinguished careers in academia. Shields vividly recounts Williams’s development as an author, whose other works include the novels Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus (for the latter, Williams shared the 1972 National Book Award). Shields also reveals the astonishing afterlife of Stoner, which garnered new fans with each American reissue, and then became a bestseller all over Europe after a Dutch publisher brought out a translation in 2013. Since then, Stoner has been published in twenty-one countries and sold over a million copies.

“Like Williams, Shields know how to tell a good story, one that will appeal especially to those interested in the ins and outs of the publishing industry and the ups and downs of a writer’s life.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My earlier reading of Author Shields' excellent And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life made me eager to read this book about John Williams. My as-yet unblogged review of Stoner is below, to add the needed context to my ideas about this book and its subject.

I think the reason this book never got to pop-culture awareness, in spite of Stoner's tremendous success in the twenty-first century, is simple: John Williams is a shitty human being. I mean, men of his generation more often than not were shitty, and abusive, and sexist...homophobic...by our standards of acceptability, irredeemable in ways even Armie Hammer and Neil Gaiman don't approach. Tempus fugit; sic transit gloria mundi.

No one would get away with Vonnegut's misogyny and sexism today, yet here's a man who wrote one of the most horrendous, harridanly women in literature...Edith Stoner...irredeemable even in victim terms, as her malevolence is obvious long before her husband rapes her. What I could never figure out is why she hated Stoner so much, he was never any kind of promising except of failure and disappointment. She wasn't duped; she married the real him, looking down on him every step of the way.

And Williams' life? He insisted Stoner was fictional. I myownself, after reading this book, think otherwise. The litany of grievances against life, work, colleagues (he had no friends that I thought deserved the name), all of it: Stoner. So how does he, Williams, get a pass from the literati? Beats me all hollow, though I suspect it's merely a matter of time.

What made me enjoy this book so much was the factual reporting of his life story: The multiple infidelities and marriages; his early infatuation with theater; his early love for Look Homeward, Angel, that adolescent's dream book; his admiration for Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in the film of A Tale of Two Cities (I shudder even typing that sentence fragment, go look at the link to see why; oleaginous much?). These facts and many more make as comprehensible and clear a picture of the man who could author Stoner as well as the proto-Blood Meridian Western-but-don't-tell-him-you're-calling-it-that Butcher's Crossing as one could ever hope to find.

Violence, in John Williams' œuvre, is less physiologically present than in McCarthy's. It's not dwelt on with loving, prurient, in my view pornographic lingering money shots of prose. It's, well, I guess my best match between vocabulary and feeling is clinical. John Williams was undoubtedly an acoholic, an abusive and distant man, and the way to be all those things is to be removed from one's emotional states, to devalue and deny empathy while, paradoxically, demanding that very feeling for one's characters as they enact worse and worse things on their victims.

Should one who has not read any Williams, but would like to, read this biography? Not with any expectation of still wanting to read his work. It's a good way to learn how you'll respond to the work itself though. I don't know how knowing about the real person doing the writing of the books we know and love should make us feel. It varies, I suppose, from reader to reader, from writer to writer.

I'll go out on a limb and say that, for $2.99 on Kindle, the answer in this case is "absolutely do read it." Author Shields is enough of a talented storyteller to make time spent learning how nasty one person can get worth one's time.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

STONER
JOHN WILLIAMS
NYRB Classics
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 2, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.

I BOUGHT A PAPERBACK FROM THE PUBLISHER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. THANK YOU, PAST SELF.

My Review: I went into this read thinking it'd be another wildly overpraised midcentury modern grimfest. I was happily proved wrong, though that is the last time I will ever use the word "happy" in conjunction with this tale.

A story about a small Prufrockian man, doomed from the get-go to a disappointing existence unworthy of the descriptor "life" by any but the most generous definition of the subject. Author Alex Preston (Goodreads profile link), in a 2015 review he blogged, said of Stoner:

With each of Stoner’s defeats, he backs further and further away from us, his voice becoming more distant, his character less alive on the page. At the start of the novel, I was yelling at him to grow a pair. By the time he lets his wife sacrifice their daughter on the altar of her motiveless malignancy, I’d given up on him entirely. I read through to the end because I wanted to see if...there would be something elegiac, a note of quiet redemption in the final passages of the book. There wasn’t.

Scathing! Angry, upset, and not wrong in any way. Yet, as Author Preston's fury warms my heart, I am required by my own appreciation of the story to admit that I found these very things to be the raison d'etre of the novel, and the beating heart of John Williams' artistry. He told a failure's life in a failure's language; he accepted Stoner as the small, ungreased cog in a small, janky machine full of others like him that Williams himself was.

So, while very aware of this divisive thematic and stylistic choice will not be to everyone's taste, I can honestly and wholeheartedly say it was very much to mine.

Casey Affleck was set to portray Stoner in the film! (Although ten years on, I think we're safe to assume the project has spluttered out.) This was excellent news! I...enjoyed, liked, all those words seem full of misplaced chirpiness applied to Stoner's small, cramped life...resonated with this novel and after seeing Mr. Affleck in Manchester by the Sea I can only be happy and grateful he might yet assume the leading role in it.