Here's Alice Ziplinsky, troubled hero and narrator of Katharine Weber's wild new novel True Confections, telling us about the job search that ultimately led her to a leadership position at a family-owned candy factory in Connecticut:
My next interview was for a receptionist position at a big law firm on Church Street, but when I met with the human resources lady, before I could say a word about which job I was applying for, she took one look at me and shook her head, and then she quickly told me the job had been filled and then she started typing really fast and didn't look at me again. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the building in my dowdy interview outfit feeling waves of shame as office workers on their lunch hour brushed by me. I had just been intercepted attempting to pass myself off as a regular person.
International literature gets a decent workout in today's
New York Times Book Review. I'm about to dive into
The Book of Fathers, a 300-year family novel by Hungarian favorite Miklos Vamos, and I'm encouraged to hear that Jane Smiley thinks well of it.
1. Catholic boy to the end ... from Cassie Carter's long-running fan site, here's Jim Carroll's
funeral card.
Fifteen or twenty pages into the great Nicholson Baker's quirky new novel
The Anthologist, I was sure Maine's craggly bard had finally lost his mind.
1.
Buy the Lighthouse. The scenic spot that inspired Virginia Woolf's
To The Lighthouse is for sale.
I enjoyed the response to Monday's article about the words
"modernism" and "postmodernism" as they are used in the separate fields of architecture and literature. Serendipitously, a tangentially related article has now drifted my way, an illustrated piece by Joseph Clarke about
modern architecture in religion and business.
