When a situation in life puts you at the crossroads and you have to choose one of them, you have to do it. No, I am not trying to preach any heavy philosophy. These choices are our day to day life. Yesterday I missed my post in A to Z, and technically, that’s failure in the challenge. But, when your goal while doing or participating something is clear, it doesn’t matter if you upload your post on next day. This is what the choice is all about.
The author I am choosing for the alphabet G writes his all stories about such choices done by people and their lives. I want you to meet Mr. George Saunders from Texas USA. He’s the author of many short stories, novellas, novels, essays and children’s books.
The book I have chosen for this TBR post is Tenth of December. The book is a collection of 10 short stories about people, their relationships along with the class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war. The way he describes his characters, their feelings with apt metaphors, idioms and phrases is phenomenal. In an article for GQ in 2005, Saunders wrote: “What a powerful thing to know: That one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.” Sian Cain writes quoting this in her review for The Guardian, “it’s exactly this sensation that lends such heft to his writing: the countless, gentle sentences that pop out of his stories, sparking flashes of internal recognition – I do that! I’ve thought that before! – with such sweet clarity that you cannot help but feel completely, uncomfortably understood.”
I am very much looking forward to reading this book and just because of title has December in it, I want to read it in chilly mornings of December, if possible at some place where it snows. Would you like to join me for Buddy Reading?
I am adding this to the amazing bucket of blogs at #BlogchatterA2Z.
We need to take a flight back to the USA to pay our respect to this fabulous storyteller. Many of his works are considered as classics of English literature. Nobel laureate Hemingway is a fabulous storyteller who has mastered the craft of telling a story in very simple language, most of his writing is in simple sentences. He has developed a style of describing one thing through entirely different thing which occurs below the surface. Hemingway himself calls this style as an Iceberg Theory (also called a theory of omission). Hemingway liked to tell the story through subtexts, he will not describe the action in a straightforward way, but he will write the things happening around the action so that reader will understand it anyway while reading the story.
Hola fellow bloggers and lovely readers out there, after our trip to Scotland, USA and Nigeria to meet our first three amazing wordsmiths, are you ready to visit Buxton of Derbyshire, England to meet fantastic storyteller. I would like you to meet fantastic Dan Rhodes; best known for his novel Timoleon Vieta Come Home published in 2003. He has mastered the art of putting an entire punch of the story in a compact form. Anthropology: and a hundred other stories is his debut book which is an anthology of 101 stories about girlfriends written exactly in 101 words each. With this book, he has proved himself to be a commander of words.
It’s a day 2 and after our trip to the Scottish stories, it’s a time to hit the roads in Chicago to meet Mr. Ben Marcus. Ben was born on 11th October 1967 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Ben has been writing short stories, essays in leading American periodicals. Ben has been fascinated by some wonderful storytellers like Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Donald Barthelme, Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Bernhard, Padgett Powell, J. M. Coetzee, Kōbō Abe, Gary Lutz, and George Saunders.
I am intrigued by the book because of the span it covers in terms of the writing of the story. The way it deals with loneliness, isolation, death and frustration in dark, funny and unique way puts this book on my TBR list.
It was around 2130 hours, Major Vikram rallied the bravo company around him to prepare for an ambush. Everyone on the team was already briefed and was aware of their role in the mission in the evening. Intel was heavy and solid this time. Group of insurgents was mobilizing in the forests on the other side of the border. It was moonless night, perfect opportunity to cross the border. Everyone on the border posts was alert. Major and his team at their base were getting ready, communications were getting double checked.