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NORWICH — Plans to build a roughly half-mile sidewalk on Beaver Meadow Road have stalled after town officials last week decided not to seek grant funding for the project, frustrating neighbors who have called for traffic and safety improvements over...
Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of the books “Lincoln’s Melancholy” and “Powers of Two,” has resigned from his positions as editor in chief of the Believer magazine and artistic and executive director of the Black Mountain Institute. On March 24, staff of the institute, a literary arts center within the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the publisher of the Believer magazine, were notified via email that Shenk, 50, had resigned and that John P. Tuman, associate dean for faculty at the university, would step in as its acting executive director. A search for a new executive director will ...
Anton Chekhov It’s easy to feel daunted by the idea of talking about Anton Chekhov’s work because we admire him so much or because so much has already been said by scholars and writers. Chekhov is often credited with having profoundly influenced the evolution of the modern short story. Peter Orner So what is it that Chekhov manages? It’s complicated. But in the story “The Betrothed,” it has to do with the very obvious, though no less mysterious, issue. The characters in a short story are motivated by all the things they just can’t articulate and that, therefore, those around the...
Edna O'Brien In Edna O’Brien’s “Irish Revel,” Mary is a 17-year-old girl who’s been invited to a party in town. She dons a black dress that belonged to no one in particular in her family but came to her small farm home in Ireland all the way from America. It’s a dress she considers special — for a special occasion. She undoes her braids to reveal the crimped hair she may have deemed fancier than her normal straight locks or the braids themselves — a style to keep the hair out of her face while she tended to her baby twin siblings or the many chores on the farm. Her efforts t...
Edna O'Brien Edna O’Brien doesn’t shy away from controversy. Her storied dust-ups with critics of her works of memoir and fiction have never deterred her from the truths she continues to tell about herself and others who represent her particular brand of unvarnished truth-telling. In writing stories about the vagaries of love, she has been as persistent O’Brien has said, “I am obsessed quite irrationally by the notion of love … It’s an obsession, and I know it’s very limiting. At the same time, it’s what I feel the truest and most persistently about, and therefore it’s the ...