Author Archives: Kate Krueger

December 23

Lettered Ladies Book Club: My take on Tolstoy, the Purple Chair, and the Act of Reading

posted by

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch To read one book every day for a year: that is the kind of goal I can get behind. As a professor, I read for hours every day, but those hours are usually scattered upon student papers, historical and theoretical works, and […]

»»
October 30

Vampires, Scarecrows, and Human Silkworms, Oh My!

posted by

Vampires in the Lemon Grove Stories by Karen Russell Vampires and monsters tend to be predictable. Pale and pretty, driven by bloodlust and romantic yearning, their recent pop-culture ilk have been a bit dull. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a surprising or unusual story of the macabre. Karen Russell makes me feel […]

»»
October 10

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

posted by

“He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into the low places. Like that—and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the […]

»»
October 09

The Delights of Poison and Bicycles

posted by

Reading a Flavia de Luce mystery by Alan Bradley is like sneaking into a room you’re not supposed to enter and discovering a strangely carved chest of drawers with secrets inside. It is thrilling, delectable in the possiblities it offers, slightly dark and dangerous, and unabashedly fun. Flavia is the kind of eleven-year-old girl I […]

»»
August 30

In memoriam: Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

posted by

Digging   Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.   Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down   Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm […]

»»
August 27

On Homesickness and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic

posted by

Most of the time, there is a veritable ocean of territory between where I am now and my childhood home. I am often struck by homesickness, a tilt in my gut. I strain to see snow and evergreen but come up against moss and magnolia instead. Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic was the last book I picked […]

»»
July 19

China Miéville’s Mental Calisthenics

posted by

Miéville stretches me. Reading his fiction is like doing yoga of the imagination. With each twinge and contortion, I discover mental muscles I didn’t know I had. His fiction defies categorization: it is fantasy and horror and science fiction and biting sociopolitical critique, all in one heady jumble. Miéville has won several Arthur C. Clarke […]

»»
June 16

On Summer Reading

posted by

When I was a teenager, I had one surefire way of earning what seemed like a ton of money for only a week of work: I organized and ran our family garage sale. While a Tupperware container full of crumpled dollar bills and grimy quarters may seem like a reward in itself, there was a […]

»»