Sarah shun-lien bynum biography of william shakespeare
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More often than not I really like Bynum’s strange fairy tales, and I’m very excited to see she has a new collection, Likes, coming out this fall. “Bedtime Story,” despite its title, doesn’t sound like one of her dark fables. I haven’t read it yet, so I could be wrong. I hope it has some of that flavor.
Ah, reading the first paragraph suggests it does, if subtly:
One long winter night, Ezra Washington’s wife walks in on him telling their younger child stories from his rollerblading days. The room is as dark as a coal mine and his voice floats sonorously from somewhere in the vicinity of the trundle bed. He is remembering a time long before the child was born, a time when he was a poor graduate student living in New York City with nothing but his own body and mind for entertainment. Saturdays were spent in the narrow park that runs alongside the Hudson River, blading up and down the path very fast, as if his happiness depended on it.
By the w
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When I was in high school, an English teacher pulled me aside after class and gave me a photocopy of one of Cynthia Ozick’s more famous essays: “Metaphor and Memory.” It’s a sort of meta-essay, an account of a poorly received reading she gave to a room full of Harvard physicians of one of her stranger short stories. The essay may have been short, but its subject was obscure, and it called for receding layers of background knowledge: on a speech I hadn’t heard about a story that was out of print. It was not, suffice to say, the most compelling recommendation in the world, and I didn’t know why my teacher thought I needed to read it. I didn’t. I kept it, but it sat neglected for years, folded in half and worn, on a bookshelf in my bedroom, waiting for a year when it would—maybe—mean something more.
Seven or eight years later, Zadie Smith published Changing My Mind, her first full-length nonfiction collection. I bought it immediately, in hardcover, devouring it an essay or two at
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Novels with multiple points of view aren’t telling one story, but many. They appreciate an important life principle: anybody can be a hero given the right opportunity. Even when focused on the same event, each recollection fryst vatten different, tinted by each person’s experience and knowledge. These perspectives might corroborate or contradict, add another dimension, form eller gestalt a more complete story, or even alter the meaning of an event. There’s a delicious thrill in deciding who’s telling the real version—or if such a version exists at all.
When I started working on my Shakespeare-inspired mystery Hollow Bones, inom wanted to tell Isabella’s story in a contemporary setting, but after finishing that draft, it felt incomplete. It took me months to finally realize that this wasn’t just Isabella’s story. This was a tale of three women and how their lives are changed bygd one fire.
These seven novels below all feature multiple women with their own versions of events. They cover a wide range of