I need some recommendations for contemporary fiction, particularly by other women. I feel like writing really changed after television became integral to the American landscape and don't want to read things that "I can see in my head." but things that take me over completely. Who are the young Alice Munros, Joyce Carol Oates and Doris Lessings...
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I need some recommendations for contemporary fiction, particularly by other women. I feel like writing really changed after television became integral to the American landscape and don't want to read things that "I can see in my head." but things that take me over completely. Who are the young Alice Munros, Joyce Carol Oates and Doris Lessings (or even better Virginia Woolfs)? Does anyone think that I am missing them out there. I would love to know.
To get an idea of what I mean about how different writing is try reading Nelson Algren's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM which was published in 1948. It is writing learned from reading, not from watching.
Below was what I originally wrote in this space before I added these lines today. I also put some new favorites on the front shelf. Didn't mean to put two by Zola, but he has been my favorite find this year. I am so glad I never read him before.
So . . .
I read like crazy. Someone asked me a funny question recently. I have lived in Brooklyn, New York for most of my life and the neighborhood I grew up in has gone through so many changes in the past nearly forty years that my friend, who had only lived there for seven years and could not believe the amount of changes at that time, asked me where I felt at home.
I didn’t have an answer right away. Then it came to me. I had been re-reading WAR AND PEACE. I told her I felt at home when I was reading Tolstoy.
The comfort of reading great books never changes.
I could read before I could really see. I got my glasses when I was seven and the doctor told my mother now I would be able to learn how to read. She told him I had already read the Chronicles of Narnia. He was astounded and commented how it must have taken great desire.
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