What I Know For Sure
Oprah Winfrey, 2014
Flatiron Books
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250054050
Summary
As a creative force, student of the human heart and soul, and champion of living the life you want, Oprah Winfrey stands alone.
Over the years, she has made history with a legendary talk show—the highest-rated program of its kind, launched her own television network, become the nation's only African-American billionaire, and been awarded both an honorary degree by Harvard University and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
From all her experiences, she has gleaned life lessons—which, for fourteen years, she's shared in O, The Oprah Magazine's widely popular "What I Know For Sure" column, a monthly source of inspiration and revelation.
Now, for the first time, these thoughtful gems have been revised, updated, and collected in What I Know For Sure, a beautiful cloth bound book with a ribbon marker, packed with insight and revelation from Oprah Winfrey.
Organized by theme—joy, resilience, connection, gratitude, possibility, awe, clarity, and power—these essays offer a rare, powerful and intimate glimpse into the heart and mind of one of the world's most extraordinary women—while providing readers a guide to becoming their best selves.
Candid, moving, exhilarating, uplifting, and frequently humorous, the words Oprah shares in What I Know For Sure shimmer with the sort of truth that readers will turn to again and again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 29, 1954
• Where—Kosciusko, Mississippi, USA
• Raised—Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Education—high school
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—maintains homes in New York, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Florida, and New Jersey
Oprah Gail Winfre is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011.
Dubbed the "Queen of All Media," she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is currently North America's only black billionaire. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.
Background
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, saying she was raped at age nine and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is credited with having popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study says broke 20th-century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.
By the mid-1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing a confession culture, promoting controversial self-help ideas, and an emotion-centered approach, she is often praised for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. From 2006 to 2008, her support of Barack Obama, by one estimate, delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race. (Excerpted from Wikipedia. For more information, see the full version.)
Book Reviews
The 14 years during which this book’s contents were written (in her Oprah Magazine column) were eventful ones for “The Queen of All Media.” ...The events and the span of those years lend a sense of evolving consciousness to the dozens of...essays compiled in this ribbon-markered, clothbound bible of a book. If you’ve read, heard, watched, prayed to, or memorialized the gospel according to Oprah, there will be much to delight you here, and few surprises.
Boston Globe
Gentle and supportive, while concise and sincere, these brief observations invite readers to five minutes of quiet contemplation. Ask yourself what you know for sure, Winfrey says, and “what you’ll find along the way will be fantastic, because what you’ll find will be yourself.”
Publishers Weekly
Winfrey takes each moment and finds the good in it, takes pride in having lived it and embraces the message she’s received from that particular time.... [S]he shows readers how she's turned potentially negative moments into life-enhancing experiences...and found bliss in simple pleasures.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for What I Know For Sure:
1. What does Oprah say about the importance of time? Why is time so important to her? How important is time your own life? How well do you make use of it?
2. How has Oprah's relationship to her body, specifically the numbers on the scale, affected her life? Talk about how her thoughts about her body have evolved over time. Does her discussion of weight have any resonance with you?
3. In what ways—and more importantly, why—do we allow others' perceptions shape how we see ourselves? How does Oprah suggest protecting, even enhancing, our sense of self-worth? What determines an somene's "worth"? In fact, what is individual worth, how do you define it?
4. In the book Oprah says, "Anything can be a miracle, a blessing, an opportunity if you choose to see it that way." Is she right? Is our ability to face up to our troubles—some truly dire, even fatal—a matter of attitude? Does that hold true for you or others you know? How can attitude affect outcome?
4. Talk about gratitude. What does Oprah say about its role in life? How grafeful are you—and what are you grateful for? Is it easy to feel gratitude?
5. The definition of "crisis" is a turning point. Oprah says, "Right now, no matter where you are, you are a single choice away from a new beginning." How can we apply that to the crises in our own lives?
6. Are the lessons in this book valuable? Have any of them touched you personally, given you pause, and made you examine your own life? Can reading a book like What I Know For Sure change lives?
7. How would you describe What I Know For Sure? Is it a book of practical advice...or a spiritual guide? Is it a rehash of tired ideas and bromides...or are its ideas fresh and insightful?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
The Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington, 1918
Random House-Modern Library
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375752506
Summary
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1918, The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The protagonist of Booth Tarkington's great historical drama is George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant grandson of the founder of the family's magnificence. Eclipsed by a new breed of developers, financiers, and manufacturers, this pampered scion begins his gradual descent from the midwestern aristocracy to the working class.
Today The Magnificent Ambersons is best known through the 1942 Orson Welles movie, but as the critic Stanley Kauffmann noted, "It is high time that [the novel] appear again, to stand outside the force of Welles's genius, confident in its own right." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 29, 1869
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
• Death—May 19, 1946
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana
• Education—Purdue Univesity; Princeton University (no degrees)
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (twice); O. Henry Memorial Award
Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is, with William Faulkner and John Updike, one of only three novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.
Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He was named after his maternal uncle, Newton Booth, then the governor of California. Tarkington was also related to Chicago Mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth through his wife Almyra Booth Woodworth.
Education
Tarkington first attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, but completed his secondary education at Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school on the East Coast.
He attended Purdue University for two years, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity and the university's Morley Eating Club. Tarkington later made substantial donations to Purdue for the building of an all-men's residence hall, which the university named Tarkington Hall, in his honor. Purdue awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Princeton
When some of his family's wealth returned after the Panic of 1873 his mother transferred Booth from Purdue to Princeton University. At Princeton, Tarkington is said to have been known among his fellow Eating Club members as "Tark." He was active as a student-actor and served as president of Princeton's Dramatic Association, which later became the Triangle Club.
While an undergraduate he is known to have socialized with Woodrow Wilson, an associate graduate member of the Ivy Club. Wilson returned to Princeton as a member of the political science faculty shortly before Tarkington matriculated; they maintained contact throughout Wilson's life.
Tarkington failed to earn his undergraduate degree, the A.B., because of missing a single course in the classics. Nevertheless, his place within campus society was already determined, and he was voted "most popular" by the class of 1893.
Honors and awards
Although never earning a college degree, Tarkington was accorded awards recognizing and honoring his skills and accomplishments as an author. He was twice asked to return to Princeton for the conferral of honorary degrees—an A.M. in 1899 and a Litt.D. in 1918. Princeton's conferral of more than one honorary degree on a single alumnus remains a university record.
In addition to the honorary degrees from Princeton, he was also awarded honorary doctorates from Purdue and Columbia University, as well as from several other universities.
He won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction twice, in 1919 and 1922, for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. In 1921 booksellers rated him "the most significant contemporary American author" in a poll conducted by Publishers' Weekly.
He won the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1931 for his short story "Cider of Normandy." His works appeared frequently on best sellers lists throughout his life.
Midwesterner
Tarkington was an unabashed Midwestern regionalist, if somewhat of a world traveler, and set much of his fiction in his native Indiana. In 1902, he served one term in the Indiana House of Representatives as a Republican.
Tarkington saw such public service as a responsibility of gentlemen in his socio-economic class, and consistent with his family's extensive record of public service. This experience provided the foundation for his book In the Arena: Stories of Political Life. While his service as an Indiana legislator was his only official public service position, he remained politically conservative his entire life. He supported Prohibition, opposed FDR, and worked against FDR's New Deal.
Recognition
Tarkington was one of the more popular American novelists of his time. The Two Vanrevels and Mary's Neck appeared on the annual best-seller lists a total of nine times. The Penrod novels depict a typical upper-middle class American boy of 1910 vintage, revealing a fine, bookish sense of American humor. At one time, his Penrod series was as well known as Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Much of Tarkington's work consists of satirical and closely observed studies of the American class system and its foibles. He himself came from a patrician Midwestern family that lost much of its wealth after the Panic of 1873. Today, he is best known for his novel The Magnificent Ambersons, which Orson Welles filmed in 1942. It is included in the Modern Library's list of top-100 novels. As the second volume in Tarkington's Growth trilogy, it contrasted the decline of the "old money" Amberson dynasty with the rise of "new money" industrial tycoons in the years between the American Civil War and World War I.
Tarkington dramatized several of his novels; some were eventually filmed. He also collaborated with Harry Leon Wilson to write three plays. In 1928, he published a book of reminiscences, The World Does Move. He illustrated the books of others, including a 1933 reprint of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as his own. He took a close interest in fine art and collectibles, and was a trustee of the John Herron Art Museum.
Personal
Tarkington was married to Laurel Fletcher from 1902 until their divorce in 1911. Their only child, Laurel, was born in 1906 and died in 1923. He married Susanah Keifer Robinson in 1912. They had no children. Tarkington began losing his eyesight in the 1920s and was blind in his later years. He continued producing his works by dictating to a secretary.
Tarkington maintained a home in his native Indiana, at 4270 North Meridian in Indianapolis. From 1923 until his death, Tarkington spent summers and then much of his later life in Kennebunkport, Maine, at his much loved home, Seawood.
In Kennebunkport he was well known as a sailor, and his schooner, the Regina, survived him. Regina was moored next to Tarkington's boathouse, The Floats which he also used as his studio. His extensively renovated studio is now the Kennebunkport Maritime Museum. It was from his home in Maine that he and his wife Susannah established their relation with nearby Colby College.
Legacy
Tarkington made a gift of some his papers to Princeton University, his alma mater, and his wife Susannah, who survived him by over 20 years, made a separate gift of his remaining papers to Colby College after his death.
Purdue University's library holds many of his works in its Special Collection's Indiana Collection. Indianapolis commemorates his impact on literature and the theatre, and his contributions as a Midwesterner and "son of Indiana" in its Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre. He is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
Indianapolis Public Elementary School #92 is named after Booth Tarkington.
In an Atlantic Monthly (May 2004) essay "Hoosiers: The Lost World of Booth Tarkington," Thomas Mallon wrote of Tarkington that "only general ignorance of his work has kept him from being pressed into contemporary service as a literary environmentalist—not just a "conservationist," in the TR mode, but an emerald-Green decrier of internal combustion:
The automobile, whose production was centered in Indianapolis before World War I, became the snorting, belching villain that, along with soft coal, laid waste to Tarkington's Edens. His objections to the auto were aesthetic—in The Midlander (1923) automobiles sweep away the more beautifully named "phaetons" and "surreys"—but also something far beyond that. Dreiser, his exact Indiana contemporary, might look at the Model T and see wage slaves in need of unions and sit-down strikes; Tarkington saw pollution, and a filthy tampering with human nature itself. "No one could have dreamed that our town was to be utterly destroyed," he wrote in The World Does Move. His important novels are all marked by the soul-killing effects of smoke and asphalt and speed, and even in Seventeen, Willie Baxter fantasizes about winning Miss Pratt by the rescue of precious little Flopit from an automobile's rushing wheels.
(Autor bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/13/2015.)
Book Reviews
An admirable study of character and of American life.
New York Times (10/20/1918)
The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps Tarkington's best novel.... [It is] a typical story of an American family and town—the great family that locally ruled the roost and vanished virtually in a day as the town spread and darkened into a city. This novel no doubt was a permanent page in the social history of the United States, so admirably conceived and written was the tale of the Ambersons, their house, their fate and the growth of the community in which they were submerged in the end.
Van Wyck Brooks (literary critic and scholar, 1886-1963)
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Magnificent Ambersons:
1. What aspect of society is Tarkington taking aim at in The Magnificent Ambersons? Do you consider the novel's concerns dated in any way, or can comparisons be made to our own era?
2. Talk about George Amberson Minafer, the central character of the novel. What is your impression of him? Do you find him at all sympathetic? Do your sympathies ever change? Is the author's characterization of George flat or overly one-sided, to the point of making him a cartoonish figure? Or is George a fully-realized character with depth and understandable motives and/or explanations for his actions?
3. Was the Amberson family decline inevitable given the pace of change in the early 20th century? Consider the Morgan family fate; why was that family's outcome different? Was George Minifer's stance against modernity one of principle or of blinded stubbornness...or what?
4. Talk about the question George's friend asks: "Don't you think being things is 'rahthuh bettuh' than doing things?" Also, take notice the spelling of "rather better" as "rahthuh bettuh"—what does that imply?
5. In what way do Lucy's beliefs contrast with George's? Given their differences, why would she find him attractive?
6. Discuss the tangle of relationships among George and Lucy Morgan and Isabel and Eugene Morgan. Talk about what happens at the end when George undercuts his own mother.
7. Is progress all bad? Where do you think Tarkington stands on this question?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Purity
Jonathan Franzen, 2015
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
pp. 576
ISBN-13: 9780374239213
Summary
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom.
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother—her only family—is hazardous.
But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world—including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters—Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers—and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.
Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 17, 1959
• Where—Western Springs, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Swarthmore College; Fulbright Scholar at Freie Universitat in Berlin
• Awards—National Book Award; Whiting Writer's Award; James Tait Memorial Prize;
American Academy's Berlin Prize
• Currently—lives in New York, New York, and Boulder Creek, California
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel, The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earning Franzen a National Book Award. His next two novels, Freedom (2010) and Purity (2015) garnered similar high praise. Freedom led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine, and both novels continue to elicit the epithet "Great American Novelist."
In recent years, Franzen has been recognized for his blunt opinions on contemporary culture:
- social networking, such as Twitter ("the ultimate irresponsible medium")
- the proliferation of e-books ("just not permanent enough")
- the disintegration of Europe ("The technicians of finance are making the decisions there. It has very little to do with democracy or the will of the people.")
- the self-destruction of America ("almost a rogue state").
Early life and education
Franzen is the son of Irene Super and Earl T. Franzen. He was born in Western Springs, Illinois, but grew up in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.
He majored in German at Swarthmore College, studying in Munich during his junior year. (While there he met Michael A. Martone, on whom he would later base the Walter Berglund character in Freedom.) After his 1981 graduation, Franzen became a Fulbright Scholar at the Freie Universitat in Berlin. He speaks fluent German as a result of these experiences.
Franzen married Valerie Cornell in 1982 and moved to Boston to pursue a career as a novelist. Five years later, the couple moved to New York where, in 1988, Franzen sold his first novel The Twenty-Seventh City.
Early novels
The Twenty-Seventh City is set in St. Louis and follows the city's decline from what had been its place in the late 19th century as the country's "fourth city." The novel was well received and established Franzen as an author to watch. In a conversation with novelist Donald Antrim for Bomb Magazine, Franzen described the book as "a conversation with the literary figures of my parents' generation[,] the great sixties and seventies Postmoderns." In a Paris Review article, he referred to himself as
...a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer.
Strong Motion (1992), Franzen's second novel, focuses on the dysfunctional Holland family and uses seismic events on the U.S. East Coast as a metaphor for quakes that can disrupt the veneer of family life. Franzen has said the book is based on the ideas of "science and religion—two violently opposing systems of making sense in the world."
The Corrections
The Corrections, Franzen's third novel, came out in 2001. A novel of social criticism, it garnered considerable acclaim, winning both the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The book was also a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (won by Richard Russo for Empire Falls).
The Corrections was selected for Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001. Franzen initially participated in the selection, sitting down for a lengthy interview with Oprah, but later expressed unease. In an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, he worried that the Oprah logo on the cover would dissuade men from reading the book:
So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator or whatever. I worry—I'm sorry that it's, uh—I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say "If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it." Those are male readers speaking.
Soon afterward, Franzen's invitation to appear on Oprah's show was rescinded. Winfrey announced,
Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. We have decided to skip the dinner and we're moving on to the next book.
These events gained Franzen and his novel widespread media attention. The Corrections soon became one of the decade's best-selling works of literary fiction. At the National Book Award ceremony, Franzen thanked Winfrey "for her enthusiasm and advocacy on behalf of The Corrections."
In 2011, it was announced that Franzen would write a multi-part television adaptation of The Corrections for HBO in collaboration with director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and The Whale). The project was canceled, however, because it was feared that the "challenging narrative, which moves through time and cuts forwards and back" might make it "difficult...for viewers to follow."
Freedom
After the release of Freedom in 2010, Franzen appeared on Fresh Air. He had drawn what he described as a "feminist critique" for the attention that male authors receive over female authors—a critique he agreed with.
While promoting the book, Franzen became the first American author to appear on the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King in 2000. The photo appeared alongside the headline "Great American Novelist."
In an interview in Manchester, England, in October 2010, Franzen talked about his choice of a title for the book:
I think the reason I slapped the word on the book proposal I sold three years ago without any clear idea of what kind of book it was going to be is that I wanted to write a book that would free me in some way. And I will say this about the abstract concept of "freedom"; it’s possible you are freer if you accept what you are and just get on with being the person you are, than if you maintain this kind of uncommitted I’m free-to-be-this, free-to-be-that, faux freedom.
On September 17, 2010, Oprah Winfrey announced that Jonathan Franzen's Freedom would be an Oprah book club selection, the first of the last season of The Oprah Winfrey Show. On December 6, 2010, he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote Freedom where they discussed that book and the controversy over his reservations about her picking The Corrections and what that would entail.
Purity
Purity, released in 2015, is described by the publisher as a multigenerational American epic that spans decades and continents. The novel centers on a young woman named Purity Tyler, or Pip, who sets out to uncover the identity of her father, whom she has never known. The narrative stretches from contemporary America to South America to East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall; it hinges on the mystery of Pip's family history and her relationship with a charismatic hacker and whistleblower.
Like Franzen's two previous novels, Purity was published to strong reviews: New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that it was Franzen's "most intimate novel yet" and that the author "has added a new octave to his voice." Time called it "magisterial," while Ron Charles of the Washington Post referred to Franzen's "ingenious plotting" and perfectly balanced fluency." Sam Tannenhaus of the New Republic said of Franzen that "his vision unmasks the world in which we actually live."
Other works
In 2002, following The Corrections, Franzen published How to Be Alone, a collection of essays including "Perchance To Dream," his 1996 Harper's article about the state of the novel in contemporary culture. In 2006, he published his memoir The Discomfort Zone (2006), recounting the influence his childhood and adolescence have had in his creative life.
In 2012, two years after his release of Freedom, Franzen published Farther Away, another collection of essays on such topics as his love of birds, his friendship with David Foster Wallace, and his thoughts on technology.
Philosophy
In various lectures given while on tour, Franzen has mentioned four perennial questions often asked of him that he finds annoying:
- "Who are your influences?"
- "What time of day do you work, and what do you write on?"
- "I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters 'take over' and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?"
- "Is your fiction autobiographical?"
Personal life
Franzen and Valerie Cornell separated in 1994 and are now divorced. Franzen still lives part of the year in New York City but also spends time in Boulder Creek, California. While in California, he lives with his girlfriend, writer Kathy Chetkovich.
In 2010, Franzen's glasses were stolen, then ransomed for $100,000, at an event in London celebrating the launch of Freedom. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/7/2015.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Franzen's most fleet-footed, least self-conscious and most intimate novel yet.... The stories of the characters in Purity zip forward aggressively in time, but open inward, burrowing into their psyches and underscoring what seems like Mr. Franzen's determination to build on the steps he took in Freedom to create people capable of change, perhaps even transcendence.... Mr. Franzen adroitly dovetails these story lines, using large dollops of Dickensian coincidence and multiple plot twists to construct suspense and to entertain.... Mr. Franzen has added a new octave to his voice.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Purity is a novel of plenitude and panorama.... [Its sprawl] can suggest a sort of openness and can have a strange, insistent way of pulling us in, holding our attention.... Often brilliantly funny.... This is a novel of secrets, manipulations and lies.
Colm Toibin - New York Times Book Review
Purity demonstrates Franzen's ingenious plotting, his ability to steer the chaos of real life toward moments that feel utterly surprising yet inevitable.... In Purity Franzen writes with a perfectly balanced fluency . . . From its tossed-off observations...to its thoughtful reflections on the moral compromises of journalism, Purity offers a constantly provocative series of insights.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
As in all Franzen's novels, and now so very powerfully in Purity, it is the history of his players that matters. Franzen's exhaustive exploration of their motives, charted oftentimes over decades so as to deliver us to this moment when the plot turns on the past in the seemingly smallest of ways, is what makes him such a fine writer, and his books important. He is a fastidious portrait artist and an epic muralist at once.
Bret Lott - Boston Globe
Purity is the best book the prodigiously talented novelist has written--funnier, looser, with more care for his characters.... Purity offers the sense of ease of a virtuoso giving every appearance of enjoying himself.
Yvonne Zipp - Christian Science Monitor
[Purity is] so funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent, there's never a moment you wish you were reading something else. Franzen still seems on every page of this book like America's most significant working novelist.
Charles Finch - Chicago Tribune
[Purity displays] fierce writing, and it does what fiction is supposed to, forcing us to peel back the surfaces, to see how love can turn to desolation, how we are betrayed by what we believe. It is the most human of dilemmas, with which we all must come to terms.... It remains compelling to read Franzen confront his demons, which are not just his but everyone's.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times
Franzen may well now be the best American novelist. He has certainly become our most public one, not because he commands Oprah's interest and is a sovereign presence on the best-seller list—though neither should be discounted—but because, like the great novelists of the past, he convinces us that his vision unmasks the world in which we actually live.... A good writer will make an effort to purge his prose of cliches. But it takes genius to reanimate them in all their original power and meaning.
Sam Tanenhaus - New Republic
Purity comes five years after Freedom and 14 years after The Corrections. Both earlier novels were called masterpieces of American fiction; to say the same of Purity might be true but misses the point. Magisterial sweep is now just what Franzen does, and his new novel appears...as a simple, enjoyable reminder of his sharp-eyed presence.
Radhika Jones - Time
Franzen's prose is alive with intelligence.... [T]he ride is exhilarating.
Caleb Crain - Atlantic
Purity's plot is a beautiful arabesque.... Subplots are doubled and trebled. But the remarkable thing is that the novel does not seem convoluted when you're reading it; to an astonishing degree, the melodramatic swoops of the plot are well orchestrated and thrilling.
Elaine Blair - Harper's
As with all of Franzen's fiction, there is much to admire in Purity, not least what reviewer David Gates once termed a "microfelicities," the expertly calibrated turns of phrase and pleasingly digressive cultural references and riffs around every corner. Like his last two novels, Purity bends time, easing in and out of characters' pasts and presents until, before you know it, the disparate pieces of a life suddenly fit.
Leigh Haber - O Magazine
[Franzen] knows exactly what we've come to expect from him, yet with Purity, imperfect and impolite but, yes, ambitious and vital, he proves us all wrong.
Richard Dorment - Esquire
Secrets are power, and power corrupts even the most idealistic in Franzen's exhaustive bildungsroman.... Franzen's greatest strength is his extensive, intricate narrative web.... Though the novel lacks resonance, its pieces fit together with stunning craftsmanship.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Does anyone have truly pure intentions, or are most people motivated by their own needs and desires? This is one of the questions posed by Franzen in his provocative new novel, a book rich with characters searching for roots and meaning in a world of secrets and lies. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal
Franzen has created a spectacularly engrossing and provocative twenty-first-century improvisation on Charles Dickens' masterpiece, Great Expectations.... Purity will be one of the most talked about books of the season. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
(Starred review.) A twisty but controlled epic that merges large and small concerns.... And yet the novel's prose never bogs down into lectures.... An expansive, brainy, yet inviting novel that leaves few foibles unexplored.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. From the Sunlight Project to Purity Tyler herself, how is purity defined throughout the novel? Are any of these definitions realistic, or are they steeped in youthful idealism? What is at the root of the characters’ impurities?
2. The epigraph quotes a scene in Goethe’s Faust in which Mephistopheles (the Devil) says, “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” How does this notion of simultaneously benevolent and sinister intentions play out in Purity? Who are the novel’s most powerful characters? How is their power derived: Through secrets? Money? Integrity?
3. How would you have answered Annagret’s questionnaire, featured in the first chapter? What do Purity’s responses say about her?
4. Life in East Germany under the scrutiny of the Stasi is continually contrasted with Western freedoms, yet the West is also a breeding ground for corruption. What does Purity ultimately tell us about humanity’s capacity to exploit, and to redeem?
5. How are sex and trust interwoven in Purity? In the novel, is there a difference between the way men and women pursue their desires?
6. Discuss the novel’s images of mothering, especially between Katya and Andreas, Clelia and Tom, and Penelope and Purity. What accounts for the volatility in these relationships?
7. In their quest to expose the truth, are Tom and Andreas equally admirable? Is Leila’s investigative journalism on nuclear warheads more useful than the Sunlight Project’s leaked emails? Are the real-world hackers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden heroes?
8. Was Andreas right to bludgeon Horst on Annagret’s behalf? How do his motivations compare to those of Tom’s father when he rescued Clelia?
9. How did your opinion of Anabel shift as you read about her from different points of view? Is she insane or noble—or both?
10. Like Purity, the Pip who inhabits Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations faces quandaries of hidden identities and tainted money. How do the dilemmas of the Information Age compare to those of the past?
11. Under what circumstances would you turn down a billion-dollar trust fund? What do we learn about the characters through their perceptions of money and justice (such as Dreyfuss’s housing situation, which becomes a priority for Purity)?
12. What does the closing scene tell us about irreconcilable differences? What enables Purity to do better than her parents?
13. Which subplots in ;give voice to timeless dilemmas? How does the novel advance the notions of fate and obligation explored in Jonathan Franzen’s previous books?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders
Julianna Baggott, 2015
Little, Bown & Co.
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316375108
Summary
The reclusive Harriet Wolf, revered author and family matriarch, has a final confession—a love story.
Years after her death, as her family comes together one last time, the mystery of Harriet's life hangs in the balance. Does the truth lie in the rumored final book of the series that made Harriet a world-famous writer, or will her final confession be lost forever?
Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders tells the moving story of the unforgettable Wolf women in four distinct voices: the mysterious Harriet, who, until now, has never revealed the secrets of her past; her fiery, overprotective daughter, Eleanor; and her two grown granddaughters—Tilton, the fragile yet exuberant younger sister, who's become a housebound hermit, and Ruth, the older sister, who ran away at sixteen and never looked back.
When Eleanor is hospitalized, Ruth decides it's time to do right by a pact she made with Tilton long ago: to return home and save her sister. Meanwhile, Harriet whispers her true life story to the reader. It's a story that spans the entire twentieth century and is filled with mobsters, outcasts, a lonesome lion, and a home for wayward women. It's also a tribute to her lifelong love of the boy she met at the Maryland School for Feeble-minded Children.
Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders, Julianna Baggott's most sweeping and mesmerizing novel yet, offers a profound meditation on motherhood and sisterhood, as well as on the central importance of stories. It is a novel that affords its characters that rare chance we all long for—the chance to reimagine the stories of our lives while there's still time (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• AKA—Bridget Asher; N.E. Bode
• Birth—September 30, 1969
• Raised—Newark, Deleware, USA
• Education—B.A., Loyola University-Maryland; M.F.A., University of North Carolina-Greensboro
• Currently—lives in Tallahassee, Florida
Julianna Baggott is a novelist, essayist, and poet who also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. She is an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts, as well as a visiting professor at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She lives in Florida with her husband, writer David G.W. Scott, and their four children.
Early years
Baggott began publishing when she was twenty-two. After receiving her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she published her first novel Girl Talk (2001) while she was still in her twenties. Girl Talk was a national bestseller and was quickly followed by The Miss America Family (2002), and then The Madam (2003), a historical novel based on the life of her grandmother. She co-wrote Which Brings Me to You (2006) with Steve Almond, which became one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2006.
Books
Over the past dozen years or so years, Baggott has published some 20 books. Her 2015 novel, Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders tells the story of a fictitional writer's family searching for their mother's last book. Pure, the first in a dystopian trilogy, came out in 2012, followed by Fuse in 2013 and Burn in 2014, both part of the Pure trilogy.
Pen names and children's books
She has published several books under the pen name Bridget Asher—All of Us and Everything (2015), My Husband's Sweethearts (2008), The Pretend Wife (2009), and The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (2011).
She also writes bestselling novels for younger readers under the name N.E. Bode. Her Anybodies trilogy—The Anybodies (2005), The Somebodies (2007), and The Nobodies (2011)—was a People magazine pick, a Washington Post Book of the Week, a Girls' Life Top Ten, and a Booksense selection.
In 2007, also as N.E. Bode, she wrote The Slippery Map, as well as The Amazing Compendium of Edward Magorium That book was the "prequel" to the 2007 film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, starring Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and Jason Bateman.
N.E. Bode was a recurring personality on Sirius XM Radio for two years.
She penned two other children's books under her own name, Julianne Baggott—The Prince of Fenway Park and The Ever Breath, both in 2009.
Other works
In addition to fiction, Baggott has published three collections of poetry—Lizzie Borden in Love (2009), Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees (2007), and This Country of Mothers (2001). Her poems have been published in major literary publications, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry.
Baggott's work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Glamour, Ms., Real Simple, and read on NPR's Here and Now and Talk of the Nation. Her essays, stories, and poems are highly anthologized. She also writes haiku, which is one of her many passions.
Philanthropy
In 2006, Baggott and her husband co-founded the nonprofit organization Kids in Need-Books in Deed, which focuses on literacy and getting free books to underprivileged children in the state of Florida. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/5/2015.)
Book Reviews
Many things are hidden in Julianna Baggott's intricate, tenderhearted novel about a writer, her children and a legacy of loss. Love letters, folded into origami cranes that never take flight, are tucked under a mattress. A newborn child, mute and sallow, is spirited away from her mother and secreted in an institution. A young man supports himself as a professional hider of things, until he too must go into hiding. A wife is lost, a husband is lost, a mother is lost and so is a father. Indeed, an entire book, Harriet Wolf's seventh novel, has disappeared. And, like so many precious lost things, it may be hiding in plain sight. All this sounds somber. But in groping for what's lost, Baggott's characters also stumble across pleasure, joy—and recognition.
Dominique Browning - New York Times Book Review
[Recent] mania for literary treasures provides the perfect moment for Julianna Baggott's new novel, Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders. In a daring bit of whimsy, Baggott has imagined what it would be like to have written a phenomenally popular series, a collection of novels that everyone has read.... [T]he chapters narrated in Tilton's fairy-like voice are the novel's most interesting and creative. Baggott conveys her fragmentary understanding of what's happening as she responds to the literal meaning of everything anyone says to her. This is easy to get wrong; the risk of mocking a young woman with special needs is high here, but Baggott captures Tilton's oddness and charm with real affection. Hearing her internal voice, we can tell that she enjoys a rich imagination, seeded long ago by her famous grandmother.... As a novel about learning to love and forgive, Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders offers some sweet moments of reconciliation.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Julianna Baggott can do anything with words. Anything, I tell you.... Wonders is deliberately, playfully strange. It has been made scrumptious with oddities of every conceivable sort....Baggott takes the time to speak truly-about love, about books, about fame, about what it is to be alive.
New York Journal of Books
Julianna Baggott's latest novel refuses to be confined to only one genre. Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders is a captivating multigenerational family saga, a love story, and a mystery-tinged with a bit of fantasy.... Baggott's mesmerizing tale of the resilient ties of motherhood and the bonds between sisters will resonate with a wide variety of readers.
Bookpage
[A] bleak and gorgeous]y rendered dystopian tale.... Harriet Wolf is long dead, but rumors of a final, revelatory book left unpublished are still very much alive.... [A] narrative that delivers a powerful sense of the meaning of motherhood and the bonds between sisters.
Library Journal
[I]t falls to [Harriet Wolf's] family to puzzle out how to continue to live and love in a real world that is not as enchanting as that of her novels. Moments of heartbreak balance moments of hilarity in Baggott's ambitious portrait of a family created from equal parts secrecy and love.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Saint Mazie
Jami Attenberg, 2015
Grand Central Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455599899
Summary
Meet Mazie Phillips: big-hearted and bawdy, she's the truth-telling proprietress of The Venice, the famed New York City movie theater.
It's the Jazz Age, with romance and booze aplenty—even when Prohibition kicks in—and Mazie never turns down a night on the town. But her high spirits mask a childhood rooted in poverty, and her diary, always close at hand, holds her dearest secrets.
When the Great Depression hits, Mazie's life is on the brink of transformation. Addicts and bums roam the Bowery; homelessness is rampant. If Mazie won't help them, then who?
When she opens the doors of The Venice to those in need, this ticket taking, fun-time girl becomes the beating heart of the Lower East Side, and in defining one neighborhood helps define the city.
Then, more than ninety years after Mazie began her diary, it's discovered by a documentarian in search of a good story. Who was Mazie Phillips, really? A chorus of voices from the past and present fill in some of the mysterious blanks of her adventurous life.
Inspired by the life of a woman who was profiled in Joseph Mitchell's classic Up in the Old Hotel, Jami Attenberg's Saint Mazie is infused with Jami's wit, bravery, and heart. Mazie's rise to "sainthood"—and her irrepressible spirit—is unforgettable. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Raised—Buffalo Grove, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., John Hopkins University
• Currently—lives in New Orleans, Louisiana
Jami Attenberg is an American writer of fiction and essays. She grew up in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University with a degree in Writing.
Her early works were published in numerous zines and in a 2003 chapbook called Deli Life. Her first book, Instant Love, a collection of interconnected short stories, was published in 2006. That work has been followed by a series of novels:
2008 - The Kept Man
2010 - The Melting Season
2012 - The Middlesteins
2015 - Saint Mazie
2017 - All Grown Up
2019 - All This Could Be Yours
Attenberg's work has appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including Nerve and The New York Times. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Adapted from Wikipedia. First retrieved 10/28/2012.)
Book Reviews
Full of love and drink and dirty sex and nobility.... Attenberg takes Mitchell's witty, colorful piece and spins it into something equally lively and new.
New York Times Book Review
[F]resh and witty.... Saint Mazie looks deep into the spirit of generosity. Jami Attenberg's Mazie lives a very big life in a very small space, turning her darkest experiences into something inspiring.
Wall Street Journal
Attenberg is a nimble and inventive storyteller with a particular knack for getting at the heart of outsized characters.... [she] proves her chops as a historical novelist by perfectly capturing Mazie's jazz-age voice, which ranges from clipped and vulgar to melancholy and lyrical. Attenberg also sidesteps many of the pitfalls of the form: no day-by-day plodding through the decades, no unedited research notes masquerading as dialogue. She resists any plot twist or final revelation to provide a tidy psychological explanation for Mazie Phillips-Gordon sainthood.
Washington Post
Delightful . . . [an] often ebullient tale about the simple pleasures of a working life.... Thanks to the wonderful Jami Attenberg (with an assist from the legendary Joseph Mitchell) Mazie does live on, an actual 20th century New York City saint.
NPR
Attenberg captures Mazie's voice so vividly you can close the book and still hear her talking. She is a tremendous achievement.... [A] bold, magnificent book about family, altruism, women and freedom, as well as a love letter to New York and a timely social manifesto for the 21st century.
Guardian (UK)
Attenberg's style, at turns lyrical and blunt, is a strong match for Mazie.... This voice-pleasantly tinged with jazz age argot, refreshingly modern in its honesty, and always intimate-is Attenberg's great achievement in Saint Mazie.... [A] boisterous, deep, provocative book.
Boston Globe
The real-life Mazie first appeared in a 1940 New Yorker profile by Joseph Mitchell and later again in his seminal collection, Up in the Old Hotel. Now Mazie's latest, and perhaps more powerful incarnation, is in the novel Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg. Here Mazie continues to grab the lapels and hearts of readers—and we are all the more glad for the shake-up she gives us.... Achieves immortality in the minds and hearts of readers.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
[I]ngeniously constructed.... An attentive character study that also happens to be rich in city lore and period detail, Saint Mazie is an edifying, companionable and moving novel.
Kansas City Star
Attenberg has an impressive ability to capture unique voices and make these characters authentic and distinctive.... [T]he voices in Saint Mazie ring out and linger, bringing to life this specific place and time in New York-and American-history.
Dallas Morning News
A winning novel and a lovely tribute to a New Yorker whose only claim to fame is her outsized kindness. Her Mazie is richly imagined and three-dimensional, and in these pages she lives forever.
Los Angeles Times
The hugely talented Jami Attenberg, most recently author of The Middlesteins, has built a novel based on an imagined diary of Mazie Phillips, a Bowery movie-theater proprietress.
New York Magazine
Tender-hearted and loose-living, Mazie is the unlikely guardian angel of New York City's Depression-Era down-and-outs. You'll love this smart, touching novel that brings her world to life.
People
Boisterous and compassionate.
O Magazine
A funny, touching novel.
Vanity Fair
An exuberant portrait of an unforgettable woman and the city she loves.
BBC.com
Impressive.... Attenberg excels at developing Mazie's voice as she grows from an impetuous, witty girl, into a shrewd-yet-selfless character. But the book is largely about the silent tragedies of womanhood, and the different forms love and loneliness can take.... What Saint Mazie is most concerned with: how to be a human being.
Bust Magazine
Mazie, the good-time girl is also a woman who cares deeply about the less fortunate, and this plays out most endearingly in her friendship with a pious nun.... [A] vivid picture of life during the Depression.
Publishers Weekly
Grand, bigmouthed, bighearted Mazie Phillips spends her days as proprietress of the Venice, an old-line New York City movie theater, and her nights on the town. Then the Depression hits, and she opens the Venice to anyone in need.
Library Journal
Early 20th-century New York and its denizens portrayed through the fictional diary of a nonfictional heroine.... Too much concept and not enough story, but Mazie might win your heart anyway with her tough-talking mensch-iness.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)