In this amazing collection of Elizabeth Bishop's selected letters, all of the various nuances of her most personal voice --warm, intimate, keenly observant, whimsical and humorous, generous, shy, gutwrenchingly honest, decorous and demure -- come through with astonishing human clarity. Bishop's engaging and elegant epistolary style makes reading One Art almost like reading an epistolary novel. The collection certainly functions as a fascinatingly candid biography of the somewhat shy and elusive Bishop, and also provides marvelous glimpses of both her writing processes, and the contextual background against which many of her poems emerged. Mostly, though, I found myself liking Elizabeth Bishop to excess . . . her humor, her eye for detail, her weirdly shy and modest charisma, even her flaws . . . and wishing that I could have been one of her inner circle of friends receiving these wonderful letters.

These letters provide a fascinating insight into the poet, who was as compelling in prose as in poetry. I love Bishop's work, and I am enjoying this book!

As in all of the writings by Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose allows the reader to open the door into her masterfully brilliant and private world of thoughts. I took this book to the beach each night before the sun went down and read one or two of her poems ... Bishop's ability to connect our everyday actions with a deeper, higher meaning makes this book one of my all time favorites. She is truly a wonderful creator and writer!

Should residents be allowed to have pets? That's the burning question agitating the trustees of the Jamie Coralund Home for the Aged. Barrister Robert Forsythe is called on to mediate, but he is no fool and declines the honor. Instead, he sends his formidable secretary, Miss Sanderson, to deal with the tempest in the provincial teapot.

It might have ended there but for two things: a dog is poisoned and an old lady is smothered.

Miss Sanderson, ever sensitive to the ebb and flow of human passions, learns that the trustees-three middle-aged men and one timelessly beautiful woman-have known each other since childhood, the handpicked playmates of rich little Jamie Coralund, Jamie himself has been dead for thirty years. Or so everyone believes.

Miss S. suspects that, dead or alive, Jamie is somehow involved in present events, and that the sins of the past are making a return appearance....

While Malamud is without doubt a very skilled writer, I gave up attempting to read this book approximately 1/3 of the way through it. The atmosphere of the book was overwhelmingly dour and depressing: story after story of loneliness, poverty, bleakness, bitterness, struggle, alienation from family. It leaves one ready to jump off a bridge somewhere.

This is the first time I read Malamud based off a recommendation from my well read grandfather. I asked him who are the best modern Jewish fiction writers. Bellows, Roth, and Malamud are definitely the best he noted. I was very impressed by the depth of all of the characters introduced in this novel and I was especially pleased at the constant reappearance of an artist down on his luck but completely in love with making art. And that is exactly what Malamud does - create art.

Many of his characters are the outcast types that feel like outsiders hardly understand them and their passions (we've all felt that way at times haven't we?) Many of the protagonists are writers, artists, store owners, janitors - an ordinary walk of life. I recommend this book despite the incoherency of the last couple short stories - but don't worry the 50something before it are wonderful.

Nobody comes close to Bernard Malamud as master of the short story in the 20th Century. As roll-overs from the 19th Century Thomas Mann and Henry James come pretty close but only pretty close.Its easier to write late Victorian and mal du siecle
stories than the less formalized stories of the common man who
frequents Malamud tales of the grubby depression-shocked heros
of the 30s and 40s.

Giroux presents a well reasoned argument about the nature of what knowledge of the poet's life is available from the sonnets. It is both informative and pleasing to read.

"A Deed of Death" is well worth reading . It provides some interesting information and the author discusses the possible suspects in considerable detail. His final "Summing Up" as to the likely guilt( or otherwise) of certain people is logically set out and the arguments he presents appear to be well supported by acceptable evidence. Perhaps a bit too much space was devoted to seemingly unrelated career details of Mable Normand such as her problems with Samuel Goldwyn which didn't seem to have anything to do with the Taylor case. Also, the author chose not to expand on the fact that Taylor was due to appear in court on the day of his murder as a defence witness for his butler who had been arrested in WestLake Park not long before on a morals charge. Kirkpatrick in "A Cast of Killers" obviously considered this fact to be more significant than Mr Giroux. But, overall this book is very entertaining and the author has managed to dig out some new facts about the central character which are enlightening . Bill Taylor comes across as being a thoroughly decent man who has been wrongly maligned over the years.

A sideshow for serious students of Shakespeare; required reading only for the specialist who must read everything. Next to Harrison, a puny (and manic) contributor to scholarship.

John Haffendon has done Shakespeare readers a great service with this compilation of poet John Berryman's writings and musings on Shakespeare, both the man and the dramatist. Included in this compendium are extensive excerpts from a projected biography of the bard; introductory fragments of an authoritative edition of King Lear; conjecture as to the identity of Mr. W.H. ("the onlie begetter" of the sonnets); as well as short essays on a number of plays, including The Comedy of Errors, King John, and Macbeth. As one might expect of a poet of his caliber, Berryman has a keen ear and an insightful intelligence. He calls Dogberry "the supreme and triumphant enemy of the English language"; he sizes up Lady Macbeth as "unscrupulous, but short-winded," "single-natured...[b]ut nihilistic"; sonnet 135, he informs us, "is among the most indecent formal poems in English." Treasures such as these can be found throughout these wonderfully rich essays. Never intended for publication in this form, the book does contain a good deal of repetition: a comment regarding King Lear, for instance, or a supposition about Shakespeare's source reading will be mentioned here, repeated there. This does little, however to mar the surprising cohesiveness of the book; it very nearly reads as a completed volume. Haffendon does reveal a bit more than he should in the more-than-fifty-page introduction, giving away some of the surprises Berryman has in store for us. It might have made a more appropriate afterword. Similarly, "Letters on Lear,"--a bit overly pedantic and tedious--might have fitted better into an appendix, although it does offer a fascinating insight into the workaday efforts and integrity of a scholar like Berryman. The letters also contain at least one laugh-out-loud moment when the poet casually and parenthetically corrects Dr. W. W. Greg: "I am not 'Dr.,' by the way." In the closing pages of this fascinating book, Berryman rewards us with a compelling meditation on the King of France's recollections of Bertram's father from All's Well That Ends Well. It is a striking passage, "nearly fifty lines, contributing nothing to the play" and without support in Shakespeare's sources, but nevertheless, asserts Berryman, "the most remarkable tribute in the whole Shakespearean canon." His thoughts on this passage (and others besides), offer the attentive student as much insight into Berryman and his works as into Shakespeare and his plays.

This posthumous collection of essays, letters, and unfinished writings by John Berryman is one of the most vivid and interesting works of Shakespearean literary criticism I've read. Berryman's insightful essay on "Shakespeare at Thirty" is alone worth the cover price. The real heart of the book is the author's lectures on Shakespeare's body of work, from the earliest comedies to "Shakespeare's Last Word" ("The Tempest"). While I disagree with some of Berryman's idiosyncratic readings, such as his endorsement of an Oedipal complex for Hamlet and his disparagement of "Much Ado About Nothing," I nevertheless found the book consistently interesting, always readable, and sometimes brilliant. I would rank it among the best general-interest books on Shakespeare in the last fifty years or so. Also recommended: Harold Goddard's two-volume THE MEANING OF SHAKESPEARE.