PenguinReaders' Group
 

Author Book Choices

Legend of a Suicide

We asked our Featured Author, David Vann, author of Legend of a Suicide, to recommend three books to our readers.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

Proulx is a master stylist. Using Anglo-Saxon diction and meter (in the second paragraph, for instance, 'hive-spangled, gut roaring' and 'ham knuckle, buttered spuds'), she heaps up content. Sentence fragments and lists cut away everything grammatical, everything unnecessary. And this is appropriate for a protagonist learning to be a reporter, learning to write newspaper headlines. Quoyle is a fabulous creation, unwanted and unloved in a novel that finally is a love story.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

In my opinion, our greatest American novel of the last fifty years (despite Beloved’s great scope and considerable claim), an heir to Melville and Faulkner. Takes a garbage genre, the western, and raises it to high literature. Offers no access to thoughts or feelings but tells character entirely through landscape and violence written as landscape. Borrowing from Faulkner, extends literal landscapes into figurative landscapes. As with Proulx’s The Shipping News, I reread this book simply for the sentences, for their unlikely existence.

The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop is a great poet accessible to all. In her poem 'At The Fishhouses', she often chooses one fine detail to evoke a larger space. 'The sparse bright sprinkle of grass,' for instance, creates a hillside. She was a painter as well as a poet, and she unifies her opening scene with silver moonlight, then emerald. We watch brush strokes and don’t become distracted. Our attention is held by the shift in the quality of light, from opacity to translucence. This is theme developing, leading toward the moment we’ll reach into 'absolutely clear' water and taste it on our tongues, encountering a kind of knowledge.