Product Description
The pastures of the Karlson farm in Illnois have the charm of a landscape painting, but the horses that graze there have become the obsession of a woman who sees in them the ultimate fulfilment of her every wish - to win, to be honoured, to be the best. By the author of "A Thousand Acres". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

the horse lingo is hard to follow
I found the horse lingo hard to follow, and therefore lost interest in the book.Those first chapters moved at a very slow speed as well.

Great Book
I really enjoyed reading this book! Well drawn characters and excellent writing. The family dynamics were interesting and Smiley's descriptions had me re-reading passages for the pleasure of her writing.

Beautifully Written
Good story, excellent writing! Jane Smiley descriptions were wonderful and I enjoyed learning about the care and training of horses. Interesting and captivating novel.

barn blind
Kate Karlson is the indomitable, stubborn horse trainer who devotes her life to her calling.Her husband, who is more laid-back, and her four children recognize that there is life beyond horses and the farm, but not Kate.The oldest, Margaret, yearns after an unattainable man. Peter, the next oldest, ever the dutiful son, concentrates on horses, but is still dreamy, with his thoughts straying elsewhere. John, the third in line, is perpetually dissatisfied with life on the farm, frequently comparing their family to others.The youngest, Henry, gives up horses altogether and seeks his ownpath.Smiley's first novel is rich with details of the equestrians, their mounts, and everyday life on the farm.Kate is a complex character, if not always likeable: she drives her students, but not at the expense of their mounts.The characters are anything but the two-dimensional clichés found in many horse books making it a worthwhile read.

Disappointing
I expected to love this book, but I was disappointed.Although the setting is a horse farm, the horses are basically props moved about in the process of exploring family dynamics.The primary theme is one many people can relate to:a parent trying to live vicariously through her children, without regard to their own desires.However, I was unable to fully "connect" with any of the characters emotionally; perhaps because author Smiley relates their story in a rather detached manner herself.Even so, I might have liked this book more if the ending had not been so abrupt. Just as I was starting to really care about the characters, the climactic event occurs--and the ending comes so soon afterward that the story seems unfinished.Perhaps my expectations were unrealistically high due to having read "Horse Heaven", a more recent work, first.Everything I expected from "Barn Blind" is delivered masterfully in "Horse Heaven".For all but the most avid Jane Smiley fans, I would recommend either reading "Barn Blind" first, or skipping it altogether and reading "Horse Heaven" instead. ... Read more

Product Description
A new translation of one of the world's greatest adventure Stories

Originally published in 1864, this Jules Verne classic has wowed generations of readers with its portrayal of an imaginary odyssey into a subterranean wonderland. When Axel deciphers an old parchment describing a secret passage through a volcano to the center of the earth, nothing will stop his eccentric Uncle Lidenbrock from setting out at once. With silent Hans as guide, the two men encounter natural hazards, prehistoric beasts, and other curiosities on their perilous, astonishing, terrifying trek through the underworld. ... Read more

Product Description
In this comprehensive study of Jane Smiley's fiction, Neil Nakadate offers insight into the strikingly imaginative and intellectual range of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer best known for A Thousand Acres. He provides close readings - from the early Barn Blind to The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton - and presents the first extended account of the connections between her life and her work. Drawing on the critical record, previously unpublished interviews with the novelist, and Smiley's own prolific commentary on literature, writing, and American culture, Nakadate examines her intellectual interests, social and philosophical concerns, and penchant for taking up different creative challenges with successive books. He traces the ongoing themes of her work, including those of family, environmental integrity, social institutions, economic and political dynamics, and the efforts of women to recover their identities in an often harsh and unreceptive world. Nakadate finds that Smiley's work has been influenced by her attention to the issues and interactions of family life but also owes much to a critical intelligence that ranges adventurously across topics and disciplines. ... Read more

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What we love about our dogs.

Some of us just "feel incomplete without the company of a dog or two," as Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Edward Albee puts it in this timeless collection of great writing about dogs. In fact, millions of us wouldn't dream of living without dogs, none more so than the renowned dog-devoted authors of Dogs We Love. From Ann Beattie debating whether to upgrade from "occasional dog sitter" to full-time dog owner to Bob Shacochis fretting over how to welcome a second dog into a one-dog household, these 18 tributes convey with wit, insight, and passion the love that makes the bond between dogs and dog-people so powerful. Accompanied by the humorous, endearing photographs of Robin Schwartz, Dogs We Love gives image and voice to the enduring, undiluted emotions that our canine companions inspire. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Interesting collection of dog stories
I enjoyed these essays. It is a book you can pick up, read a short essay and put down. I kept it on my night table for night time reading.Just enough for bedtime.
Amusing stories.

Charming--a collection of essays by good writers about their dogs
This small book contains essays as well as heart melting pictures of dogs. Mind you, these are real dogs, the kind who relentlesslycontinue to hunt for slippers and chew them to bits and bits, dogs who have problems like blindness and still--still--make us smile and love them.

As Cynthia Heimel reports "Let me see if I can say this without being a nasty booger-head. Some people are morbidly warped and don't like dogs at all. We shall not even discuss such deviants. Some people love only their own dogs...These people are dog-impaired...And then there are the dog-besotted, the dog-goofy, those lunatics who worship at the Holy Church of Canine" (p 95).

Each essay discusses some new and entertaining aspect of dogs and dog ownership. The yellow stains on the carpet. The drool. The big eyes that gaze into your with love.

A book to savor.

what could be better? GREAT writers, "training" their sights on their own dogs
This is a chunky, endearing, handsome book that's just confirms everything we most love about dogs. But these are MASTERS of prose here, as well as being "masters" of their family dogs. So just imagine the novelists and short story writers you love sharing stories of their own canine companions. Jane Smiley on her golden's insatiable fetching, Armistead Maupin on his dog's uncanny ability to interfere with anything romantic, Merrill Markoe on her small dog's undeniable love affair with her slipper. There's Danny Shanahanwriting and illustrating a short guide on how to read your dog's behaviors. There's--well, there are sheep dogs, mixed bred wonders, Labs, bull dogs, unruly dogs, cockers, spaniels...and a pack of other dogs photographed in black and white by Robin Schwartz that make this book the perfect gift to give or keep. Plus the book's profits are part of Rosen's ongoing efforts to support animal welfare agencies. ... Read more

Product Description
The Broom Closet explores the sacred, psychological, erotic, and sometimes murderous power of housework, using surprising examples from postfeminist novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan. By juxtaposing the novels and their authors' lives with general social and historical context, the book outlines the many ways domestic ritual continues to shape women's consciousness-and either foil or reflect women's creativity. ... Read more

Product Description
This fully updated edition of the only book-length study of Jane Smiley serves as a comprehensive survey of the innovative author’s literary career in relation to her social, intellectual, and creative convictions. Smiley’s fiction ranges in setting from medieval Greenland to an Iowa farm to Hollywood and in subject matter from Thoroughbred racing to the savings and loan scandal to contemporary domestic life. A sense of common trajectory and coherence emerges from a focus on the author’s ongoing themes—including those of family, environmental integrity, social institutions, economic and political dynamics, and the efforts of women to establish their identities in a harsh and often unreceptive world. In paying due attention to such issues and interactions, Neil Nakadate also explores the boundaries of Smiley’s critical intelligence, which ranges adventurously across numerous topics and disciplines and stems from a host of literary influences. To that end Nakadate notes Smiley’s affinity with Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and others, but he also makes clear that her evolving realist’s vision is insistently contemporary. In the spirit of Updike and DeLillo, Smiley provides fresh insights into the ethos and direction of American life as generations succeed each other and the twenty-first century begins to take shape.

Nakadate’s study is organized around close readings of Smiley’s major fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Thousand Acres. Nakadate also examines her key essays and nonfiction as a means of adding an additional perspective on her novels. The volume’s updated biographical material benefits from an unpublished interview conducted with Smiley in 2008, and the citations and extensive bibliography have also been updated, making this new edition an ideal point of entrance for readers eager to understand Smiley’s complete body of work. ... Read more

Product Description
The first of two thematically linked novellas, each investigating the dream of the perfect family. It gives voice to a mother, loving but unsure of her love's value. In forfeiting her powerful husband, she fears that she has done her children irrevocable harm. The second novella is "Good Will". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

good comedy
Before reading this book I did not know that women could write comedy well.It is full of comedy.I particularly enjoyed the characters of Dr.Bo Jones and Gary.

What are universities but a collection of prima donnas, eccentrics, andteachers?
The faculty, students, and workers at Moo University are a collection of ingredients in a "stone soup."You know, the soup that has everybody donating an ingredient or two (along with a stone).How does the soup turn out?

Jane Smiley develops a cast of memorable characters in Moo.Who can forget the passions of Chairman X, Earl Butz' appetite, the glorious righteousness of Professor Gift, or the actions of Mrs. Walker in running Moo U.?Learn that The New York Times is "the mouthpiece of Satan" (p. 329), according to some students.

What I found most delightful was that Smiley did her research into Costa Rican cloud forests, and economic theory, and organic horticulture, and hogs.The individual characters had their areas of expertise, and Smiley let this expertise shine through.Then these prima donnas, these eccentrics, collapse into the gravity field of the story.

The eruptions, conniptions, and competition in academic life is closer to this that many readers will know.

Spooky.

Thank goodness for the Mrs. Walkers to keep everything running.

For serious?
Any novel that breaks the cliche rule as early as this one does, "satire" or not, desperately needs a rewrite. A random gust of wind from a randomly open window just happens to blow a key piece of paper behind the radiator, and "that was what started it all?" Really? What's next? Someone gets hit on the head and develops amnesia? Two antagonistic characters get handcuffed together? I made those up, but they wouldn't have been out of place in this thin, shallow, Three's Company episode of a book.

It's hard to believe that Smiley has spent any time at all around real academics. Her ideas of subtlety and humor are what a freshman creative writing major might come up with. She has confused complexity with simply introducing and moving around gobs of characters, none of whom are very interesting and who frequently sound like one another.

[SPOILERS]
Everything ends happily when a bunch of people get married. This could have been handled in the best tongue-in-cheek tradition of a Shakespeare comedy, but instead Smiley really seems to present this ending straightforwardly. Also, Earl the hog is a symbol of decadent capitalist consumerism, and I guess the moral of the story is that decadent capitalist consumerism will have a heart attack if it runs too fast. Har har har.

If this is representative of the kind of writing that won her a Pulitzer, then it seems I've missed my calling.
... Read more

Product Description
A collection of the best lectures from writers' conferences on the art and craft of finding and using artistic inspiration features the work of Jane Smiley, Gary Snyder, Miroslav Holub, and Mary Clearman Blew. Original.Amazon.com Review
These fourteen thought-provoked essays originated as lecturesdelivered at a variety of writers conferences. In "Can MothersThink?," JaneSmiley addresses "the failure of literature to includemothers" and argues that such authors as Toni Morrison,Sue Miller, Alice Walker,and LouiseErdrich are creating "a new literature, the literature ofreal, live motherhood." Gary Snyder, atthe Art of the Wild Conference in Squaw Valley, claims that likeecosystems, "consciousness, mind, imagination, and language arefundamentally wild," while over at the Paris Writers Conference,Julian Gloaglaments the tentativeness of students who "haven't been trainedto think." Michael Dennis Browne proposes that it is a sense ofconstantly failing to reach perfection that propels us to continuewriting; DonaldJustice, similarly, discusses the elusiveness of the ideal. Thanksto editor KurtBrown, we can consume the lean, nourishing meat of the conferenceswithout having first to pick our way through the fat. --JaneSteinberg ... Read more