Reading Recommendations:

The Seamstress

As seamstresses, the young sisters, Emilia and Luzia dos Santos knew how to cut, how to mend, and how to conceal. These are useful skills in the lawless back country of Brazil, where ruthless land barons called "colonels" feud with bands of outlaw cangaceiros, trapping innocent residents in the cross fire. Emilia, whose knowledge of the world comes from fashion magazines and romantic novels, dreams of falling in love with a gentleman and escaping to a big city. Luzia also longs to escape their little town, when residents view her with suspicion and pity. Scarred by a childhood accident that left her with a deformed arm, the quick tempered Luzia finds her escape in sewing and in secret prayers to the saints she believes once saved her life.

But when Luzia is abducted by a group of cangaceiros led by the infamous Hawk, the sisters' quiet lives diverge in ways they never imagined. Emilia stumbles into marriage with Degas Coelho, the son of a doctor whose wealth is rivaled only by his political power. She moves into the sprawling seaside city of Recife where the glamour of her new life is soon overshadowed by heartache and loneliness. Luzia, forced to trek through scrubland and endure a nomadic existence, proves her determination to survive and begins to see the congaceiros as comrades, not criminals.

In Recife, Emilia must hide any connection to her increasingly notorious sister. As she learns to navigate the treacherous waters of Brazilian high society, Emilia sees the country split apart after a bitter presidential election. Political feuds extend to the countryside, where Luzia and the Hawk are forced to make unexpected alliances and endure betrayals that threaten to break the cangaceiros apart. But Luzia will overcome time and distance to entrust her sister with a great secret, one Emilia vows to keep. And when Luzia's life is threatened, Emilia will risk everything to save her.

From the older bookshelves - This book I read not once but twice. When I was younger anything Brazilian appealed to me. Imagine my delight when I was able to travel to Brazil with John. He was there on business and I was able to study the people and the country to my heart's content.

One Matchless Time

One Matchless Time

Between 1928 and 1942, during what Faulkner called his "one matchless time," a period of wild inspiration when characters and stories came to him mysteriously and in abundance, he published more than half a dozen masterpieces, including the novels The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Sanctuary; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; The Wild Palms; Go Down, Moses; and The Hamlet. This is an astonishing achievement without equal in American literature.

Parini, who has taught Faulkner's work to students for nearly thirty years, vividly brings to life this writer's complex fictional world in the context of his life, using the one to illuminate the other. He uses letters and memoirs unavailable to earlier biographers as well as interviews he had with Faulkner's daughter and several of his lovers. His William Faulkner is an immensely gifted, obsessive artist plagued by alcoholism and a bad marriage, but someone who rose above his limitations to become a figure of major importance on the stage of world literature.

From the older bookshelves.

If Wishes Were Horses

"There was something Gabby thought Wyatt deserved to know, something she had neglected to tell him during their meeting. The longer she sat across the table from him, the greater her need to admit it became.

Her omission had haunted her ever since Wyatt had agreed to accept Trevor into the New Beginnings Program. As the past week had gone by, she worried more and more that had Wyatt known, he might have refused her request. Even now, she didn't know whether her silence had been accidental or intentional.

Worse, she feared that if she told him, he might decide he had been doubly tricked and angrily rescind his offer. But if there was one virtue Gabby Powers steadfastly refused to compromise, it was her honesty."

From If Wishes Were Horses

See you at Rylander!

, a novel, Robert Barclay is a sympathetic, sweeping evocation of William Faulkner's life and work. From his birth in 1897 in Mississippi to his death sixty five years later, Faulkner spent almost his entire life on this one small patch of land, "the significant soil" from which all his fiction grew. Jay Parini paints an intimate picture of Faulkner's Mississippi world and shows how the artist transformed this raw material into Yoknapaatawpha County, a place of pur imagination., A Life of William Faulkner, Jay Parini, a novel, Frances DePointes Peebles