Kirjahaku

Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren't enough to make it through a life. Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry--though not the life--of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken-at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. As she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has, Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother. First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.

The Queen would like me to introduce her. Well, here goes. She is from the twelfth century: however time means nothing to her. She enjoys twenty-first century amenities. Her heart is resolute that war is obsolete. She goes about her days like the free spirit she is. As the writer of these ditties, I discovered her one day when she helped me put down in words the opening poem about earrings. It gave me a giggle and I wondered who she was and what else she had to say. I read this first poem to an author friend (who was reading the Wall Street Journal and having his breakfast coffee on the back deck.) His response was "That took courage." That did it, I was caught in the space of framing my thoughts through a 12th century perspective and The QUEEN began to speak. I like to play around with rhyme. Poets have carte blanch anymore to follow no rules. The disciplines of old are no more. The little book, The Queen, is an example.