#24. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks [obviously!], edited by Elizabeth Alexander

2005, Library of America (American Poets Project)

This book is really intensely interesting.  Gwendolyn Brooks was a very important Modernist, and this volume showcases many of her better-known short works, but it also samples from each of her books ( Read more... )

I'm awful at doing writeups, so this list has just been sitting on my desktop for ages making me feel guilty for not doing writeups.

Soo, I will just put the list up with brief one-liners on whether I liked it or not, and I'd be happy to discuss more in comments.

5) Silver Pheonix by Cindy Pon ( Read more... )

Title: Interpreter of Maladies
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Pages: 198
Rating: 3 stars

I feel truly ashamed to give a book that won the Pulitzer three stars, but while I recognize that the writing was excellent, the subject matter good, the stories , the balance well kept between the short stories....I didn't really enjoy it. I liked a couple of the short ( Read more... )

A Soldier's Play, Charles Fuller
1982

This play won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  It's set in an Army training camp in the deep South (Louisiana) in 1944, during the Second World War, and it is, at least in one sense, a murder mystery.  Vernon Waters, a black sergeant who was responsible for a group of black enlisted men, has been found shot to ( Read more... )