Jane smiley biography

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Toggle the table of contents. Madison Julius Cawein poems 3. Ella Wheeler Wilcox poems 4. William Wordsworth poems 5. Robert Burns poems 6. Edgar Albert Guest poems 7. Thomas Moore poems 8. Robert Service poems. Smiley is able to telescope certain incidents, unravel personalities in a few paragraphs, [and] delve into a kind of folkloric metaphysics.

The Greenlanders, while an ambitious work, was soon to be overshadowed by one of Smiley's most notable accomplishments. A Thousand Acres is a subtle account of a family's disintegration that plays out against a painstakingly detailed backdrop: Midwestern American farm life during the unsettled economy of the early s, a time when many family farms were lost during a wave of bank foreclosures.

Jane smiley biography

As Donna Rifkind commented in her Washington Post review, despite this less-than-epicsetting, Smiley's novel "has all the stark brutality, if not the jane smiley biography grandeur, of a Shakespearean tragedy. The correlation to Shakespeare is no accident; as Smiley has explained, A Thousand Acres is a deliberate recasting of King Learthe Elizabethan play-wright's drama of an aged king bordering on madness and conspired against by three daughters plotting to take control of his kingdom.

Filtering the motivations of the three daughters through a more jaundiced view of patriarchal control and feminine subjugation, Lear's eldest daughter, Goneril, becomes Ginny, the woman at the center of this farm family's narrative. In the opinion of Jack Fuller, reworking the plot of King Lear was a gamble. But Smiley avoids this by the mounting brilliance of her close observations and delicate rendering of human behavior.

Through Ginny's eyes, Smiley shows the deleterious impact of father Larry Cook's decision to divide his multimillion-dollar farm among his three daughters, who include the embittered Rose and the emotionally distant Caroline. As the divided enterprise deteriorates, marriages fall apart and family relationships are crippled by suspicion and betrayal.

She's good in those small places, with nothing but the family, pulling tighter and tighter until someone has to leave the table, leave the room, leave town. As the Cook family saga unfolds, Smiley gently yet skillfully reveals her feminist and environmentalist sympathies. In Moo, Smiley leaves the strains of family relationships to poke some fun at campus life, which she explores at the fictitious Midwestern agricultural college, nicknamed Moo U.

Moo received mixed reactions from reviewers. While Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Richard Eder commented that Smiley wields a "considerable wit" and "provocative intelligence," he also faulted the novel for being "a playful takeoff on too many things, all crowded together and happening at once. She has written a generous and, therefore daring book.

Smiley has transformed the genre by embracing a different tradition altogether" and "has created what modern novel readers have until now been able only to dream about, that elusive, seemingly impossible thing: a fresh literary, modern twentieth-century nineteenth-century novel. Discussing the novel with Lewis Burke Frumkes of Writer, Smiley explained that the novel "takes place in the mids, mostly in Kansas and Missouri.

It's about a tall, plain woman without any prospects, and a man, associated with an abolitionist group from New Englandwho passes through Lidie's town in Illinois. There Lidie must confront primitive frontier living conditions, conflicts about free labor versus slavery, and the "worst winter in a hundred years. Starr E. Smith, writing in Library Journal, called The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton "believable period fiction," and Donna Seaman credited it in Booklist with exploring both "the bloody conflict over slavery and the simultaneous awakening of the feminist movement within in the parameters of a love story.

In Horse Heaven Smiley explores the contemporary world of thoroughbred horse racing at tracks throughout the world from to Horse Heaven contains a large cast of major charactersm—more than two dozen humans, a number of equines, and a dogm—and a complex plot with many inter-weaving storylines. Trainers, jockeys, owners, gamblers, an animal jane smiley biography, horse fanciers, and assorted racetrack hangers-on share center stage, exploring their own lives and others through love affairs, business dealings, friendships, and betrayals.

Yet as Paula Chin noted in People, "it is the hearts of the magnificent thoroughbreds that Smiley describes most movingly. Among Smiley's four-legged protagonists are the savage stallion Epic Steam, the delicate and insecure Froney's Sis, the aging Mr. Horse Heaven received generally positive reviews. Seaman found the work "electrifying," while Women's Review of Books critic Maxine Kumin described it as "exuberant, often hilarious.

Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Most Anticipated Books of ! Jane Smiley. Books by this author. More about membership! Full Interview. Read-Alikes All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Jane Smiley but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.

How we choose read-alikes. Sarah Blake Sarah Blake is an American writer. View all 42 Read-Alikes. From the author of the bestselling Clytemnestra comes another intoxicating excursion into ancient history. When kings fall, queens rise.