American Authors – Magic Carpet Books

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Proprietor

‘Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather’ by Benjamin Taylor

Slender, discerning … Should appeal to anyone — novice or expert — ready to explore Cather’s life and work in the company of a critic so alert to the shimmering subtlety of her style and the hard years of effort that went into crystallizing it … With great feeling and deeply informed perception, Taylor helps us readers realize anew the sustained effort it took for Cather to meet ‘the rest of herself,’ in her novels and her life. Read more

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Posted on June 13, 2023 by Proprietor

Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89

Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Read more

Posted on April 10, 2023 by Proprietor

The Oddballs and Odysseys of Charles Portis

Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country. Read more

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Posted on March 15, 2023March 15, 2023 by Proprietor

John Jakes, Whose Historical Novels Hit the Jackpot, Dies at 90

His sagas of the Revolution and the Civil War sold tens of millions of copies, were adapted for TV and put him in the pantheon of big-name authors. Read more

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Proprietor

Russell Banks, Novelist Steeped in the Working Class, Dies at 82

He brought his own sometimes painful blue-collar experiences to bear in acclaimed stories exploring issues of race, class and power in American life. Read more

Posted on November 20, 2022 by Proprietor

Gerald Stern in The New Yorker

Gerald Stern’s generous, practical, and fanciful poems, which The New Yorker began publishing in 1976, are both rhapsodic and earthbound. Read more

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Posted on June 2, 2022 by Proprietor

The Walter Tevis Renaissance

Gin, bourbon, valium, weed, horse racing, nine-ball, poker, pills, petroleum, chess, sex, television, losing, winning—the novels of Walter Tevis are queasy with addictions big and little. Most are hazardous. Some are deadly. A few seem nice enough, but nice is usually booby-trapped somehow, so that a character can’t enjoy, say, a game of pool without going on a bender a page later. These are novels without rising or falling action; they move to the jerkier rhythms of recovery and relapse. Read more

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Posted on March 31, 2022 by Proprietor

Meet the Novelist Who Was Lynched By An Angry Mob and Lived to Tell the Tale

Ned Buntline is the only American novelist who was lynched by an angry mob and lived to tell the tale, although he much preferred telling fictitious tales that made him seem heroic. Read more

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