Kirjahaku

Acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and poet, David Huddle captivates us with a new collection. Not: A Trio is a sequence of three related stories that, taken together, form a unified work of fiction. This faceted approach is especially suited to a work that reveals the intricate connections among Danny Marlow, Claire McClelland, and Ben McClelland. Danny, Claire, and Ben are thoughtful people who know each other well—yet hardly at all. Danny narrates the first story, introducing the reader to Claire, a therapist who has, he says, "lived a life that would drop most men in their tracks." The second story, told in the third person, explores the character of Claire's second husband Ben. These two men and their stories set the stage for the appearance of Claire in the third and most powerful story. Claire informs the reader at the outset that a crisis looms: "At any rate, I'm not going to be able to go on with the life I have so carefully constructed for myself here in town." Huddle is especially concerned with the forces that separate these singular individuals from each other—and from themselves—as well as with the romantic and sexual energy pulling Danny and Claire together and with the wistful intimacy briefly held between Claire and Ben. In the process, the book also draws a darkly humorous picture of small-town life in contemporary Vermont. Critics have praised David Huddle for his skill in creating individual voices and selves that work together to reveal intimately connected lives. He has done so once again in Not: A Trio, leaving the reader with what feels like a secret understanding of these three people and the forces that move them.

In his "stunning first novel" (Wall Street Journal), acclaimed short story writer and poet, David Huddle, paints a group portrait in which every character is the hero of his or her own story. It begins with a secret affair between fifteen-year-old Marcy and the husband of her mother's friend. Years later, the emotional fallout from the affair still echoes in unexpected ways through the lives of the people closest to Marcy. A multilayered tale unfolds through their eyes, in which each character seeks to recapture a kernel of long-forgotten goodness.

In this absorbing novel, the award-winning author David Huddle tells a provocative story involving the life of the mysterious painter Georges de La Tour and the echoes of his work across time. An art history professor, Suzanne Nelson escapes her failing marriage by retreating into her research and the fertile world of her imagination. La Tour's ability to create luminous portraits of peasants stood in sharp contrast to his aggression toward the poor, but little information about his life exists, and Suzanne finds herself filling in the details, trying to understand how a man capable of brutality could create such beauty. Unwittingly looking to her own life and marriage, she invents La Tour's final painting sessions with a young model, a village girl. When the girl modestly disrobes for the artist, he discovers a marking on her back that she is obviously unaware of. By painting her, La Tour in effect reveals to the girl exactly who she is and who she is not. Her reaction is at once astonishing and utterly warranted. In Suzanne's mind, this encounter becomes a story of truth and lies, art and identity. Deftly moving between the present and the seventeenth century, Huddle reveals the surprising repercussions of history and art in modern life. In the process he asks the biggest questions: How do we come to define who we are? Which secrets must remain our own and which can we justify giving away? LA TOUR DREAMS OF THE WOLF GIRL is both passionate and fascinating, a wonder of narrative invention and emotional depth.

At ease equally in poetry and prose, David Huddle is an immensely talented writer esteemed for his shrewd powers of observation, ear for authentic voices, and ability to set forth painful truth with stunning effect. Summer Lake, a beautifully coherent compilation of Huddle's best poetry to date, chronicles one late-twentieth-century American life, disclosing the anthropology of the human spirit.The collection opens with a plainness of language and form born of the poet's native Blue Ridge Mountains and builds to an amalgamation of free and formal variety, including sonnets and a lengthy poem in terza rima. It pauses over vivid childhood moments, visits the wounds from a ""Tour of Duty"" in Vietnam, and enters into that passage of deep adulthood during which one's parents fall ill and die. These are ordinary life events, rendered with uncanny penetration. At times the poems are openly, even angrily, despairing. When all is said and done, though, the last two lines of the book are ""my mother cooking supper / my father whistling as he walked home from work.""Huddle's web of experiences is near to all of our own stories, the universal cycle of making our own life, raising up new lives, and letting go of those that formed ours, and the need to continually rediscover who we are in the process. The hammer Huddle's father gave him as a child (""My Daddy, Whenever He Went Some Place"") and the one he handed him soon after Huddle's daughter was born (""Gifts"") both made the poet cry but for different reasons. Manly, heartbreakingly human, honest, ""That's what I hate,/when my good buzz of hostility/turns into this pissy pity"", Summer Lake reveals and moves, and ultimately consoles.

In his compelling new collection, David Huddle writes, ""We think / we stand in the vivid colour of here and now / and view the past as drab black and white, / whereas the truth is , it's our future / that's the off-center, badly focused grayscale.""Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected, and admittedly embellished, from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar: a teenage dance, Grandmama's morning coffee, young daughters playing dolls. With age, wonder has become understanding, and so when intimations of his death arise in the midst of sharing a joke with his children, the poet shows us the comfort and peace that murky prospect may hold. Playful and fantastic narratives about penguin clans, Jane Goodall and the chimps, and what to do when it snaows offer wit and craft as further barriers against pain and despair. ""In my family we were /all good at dreaming,"" Huddle's closing poem notes. Undaunted, Huddle gives us in Grayscale not false hopes about our lives but a range of ways to transcend their limits.

In Glory River, David Huddle's poems pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live in a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening. Huddle opens with a sequence of exceptional tales about an imaginary hamlet in the mountains of Virginia. The residents of Glory River are rough, crude, and full of fight, but eager to tell their stories, ""to explain how / in that place they had become the people / they were."" Huddle also includes a series of poems exploring modern life, touching upon subjects as diverse as memory, family, art, politics, and pain. Accessible and often humorous, the poems in Glory River range from the strange and extraordinary happenings in the fantastical Virginia town to the painful, hopeful, and no less magical situations that can occur in real lives.

In Glory River, David Huddle's poems pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live in a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening. Huddle opens with a sequence of exceptional tales about an imaginary hamlet in the mountains of Virginia. The residents of Glory River are rough, crude, and full of fight, but eager to tell their stories, ""to explain how / in that place they had become the people / they were."" Huddle also includes a series of poems exploring modern life, touching upon subjects as diverse as memory, family, art, politics, and pain. Accessible and often humorous, the poems in Glory River range from the strange and extraordinary happenings in the fantastical Virginia town to the painful, hopeful, and no less magical situations that can occur in real lives.

David Huddle's latest collection, Blacksnake at the Family Reunion, shares intimate and amusing stories as if told by a quirky, usually reticent, great uncle. In ""Boy Story,"" a teenage romantic meeting ends abruptly when the boy's sweetheart realises they have parked near her grandmother's grave. The poem ""Aloft"" recalls a widowed mother's indignation after she receives a marriage proposal in a hot air balloon. Haunted by the words on his older sister's tombstone - ""born & died... then / a single date / in November"" - the speaker in one poem struggles to understand a tragic loss: ""The ampersand / tells the whole truth / and nothing but, / so help me God, / whose divine shrug / is expressed so / eloquently / by that grave mark.""Blacksnake at the Family Reunion continues Huddle's poetic inquiry into the power of early childhood and family to infuse adulthood with sadness and despair - an inquiry conducted with profound empathy for the fragility of humankind.

An account of spiritual survival through the practice of literary art, the poems in David Huddle's eighth collection, Dream Sender, move among a variety of poetic forms and voices. Here, a bear wonders why he could not have been a raccoon, a bird, or a meadow; and a five-year-old thrills to the forbidden taste of whiskey as he eavesdrops on his parents' after-dinner conversation. By turns outrageous and pragmatic, Huddle's poems acknowledge the powerful and disturbing currents of the contemporary world as they also explore the comfort and familiarity we find there.Huddle's poems illuminate the nature of relationships between family, friends, and even animals, celebrating their shortcomings, embarrassments, and eccentricities. At once frank and compassionate, Dream Sender finds both humor and poignancy in human imperfections.

In My Surly Heart, the prolific poet and novelist David Huddle reflects on turning seventy-six years of age and records his aghast reactions to changes brought about by the current president of the United States. Huddle avoids the pitfalls of speechifying, pseudo-philosophizing, or indulging in unmitigated complaint. Instead, he embraces the potential of poetry to use intelligence, wit, language, knowledge, and sense of form to move toward useful revelations. Throughout this idiosyncratic collection of verse, Huddle deploys poem making as a method for psychologically and spiritually navigating from his past to his present life and on into whatever his future may hold. These poems traverse childhood memories, birding adventures, musical reveries, the role of art, and many points in between. My Surly Heart shows a celebrated poet confronting the challenges of age and country with wry humor and unsparing honesty.

Facing the blank page of the empty computer screen requires an unswerving belief in possibility, a steadfast assurance that something can and will come out of nothing. In The Writing Habit, David Huddle demystifies the writing task and shows that what may seem like alchemy is in reality a habit: the work itself, not magic, unlocks the writer's potential."A real writing life is not something you do merely for a day or a month or a year,"Huddle asserts. "For a writer, the one truly valuable possession is the ongoing work--the writing habit, which may take some getting used to, but which soon becomes so natural as to be almost inevitable." Drawing from his own experience as a teacher and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays, Huddle explores the questions all writers--from novice to professional--face: Why write in the first place? How can writers fashion their lives to accommodate that all-important habit? What are some ways to deal with failure? What roles do memory, reality, and inspiration play in the creative process? How can prose best be crafted, characters brought alive, universal truths revealed from the bits and pieces of everyday life?

Can we ever truly know another person, however well-loved? Brainy, decent, funny, and likeable, the members of Horace Houseman’s family and his closest friend possess quirky and compelling interior lives that they reveal to no one else. Nothing Can Make Me Do This, David Huddle’s tenth work of fiction, enters the minds of Horace, Eve, Hannah, Clara, Bill, and others over fifty years, leaping in chronology an intersecting the vantage points, in a kaleidoscopic vision of a contemporary clan (and their secrets).

Can we ever truly know another person, however well-loved? Brainy, decent, funny, and likeable, the members of Horace Houseman’s family and his closest friend possess quirky and compelling interior lives that they reveal to no one else. Nothing Can Make Me Do This, David Huddle’s tenth work of fiction, enters the minds of Horace, Eve, Hannah, Clara, Bill, and others over fifty years, leaping in chronology an intersecting the vantage points, in a kaleidoscopic vision of a contemporary clan (and their secrets).

A work of uncanny originality, David Huddle’s nineteenth book is the account of an extraordinary death trip taken by a charismatic and beloved woman, her husband, and an astonishing number of offspring, from infants to young adults. The Faulkes Chronicle explores how children grieve, and shows how the wit and courage of even the littlest brothers and sisters can be a source of resiliance. Familial conversation composes an intimate requiem, transforming loss into comprehension. Only one of our finest writers could manage this delicate material. The Faulkes Chronicle is a brief, autumnal novel — made of momentary details yet with an encompassing grandeur.

Maura Nelson, who has a sophisticated background in science, medicine, and programming, has stumbled upon a way to execute someone using only the computers in her home office—silently, anonymously, leaving no trace of violence, so that her target appears to have died of natural causes. Maura tests her method by eliminating Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad, but this experience affects her so deeply that she doesn’t want to continue alone. She entices Jack Plymouth into a partnership to rid the world of those they decide “need to be dead.” Both a steamy romance and a cyber-thriller, My Immaculate Assassin raises disturbing and timely questions about the technology and morality of “idealistic” murder, carried out remotely.