Episode two of the podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, is titled Bret Ellis, Valley Boy, and it focuses on the city of Los Angeles in the 1980s, and how it provided the setting for Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero. Continue reading
Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. Continue reading
Joan Didion’s South and West is loosely defined as a travel essay, but of course, like all of Didion’s writing, it delivers so much more.
The book is comprised of excerpts from notebooks Didion kept in the 1970s. The first part, ‘Notes on the South‘, traces a road trip that she took through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Along the way, she chronicles her observations about the small towns they pass through and she gently examines the deeply rooted (and sometimes unquestioned) beliefs about race, class, and heritage held in the South.
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