Like Dante’s Inferno, Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods begins in a dark forest, ends on a mountain, and passes through nearly every form of sin in between. The hero of this third novel by the author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons is no middle-aged poet, though. She’s a young woman named Luce, most of whose life has been a recurrent dark night of the
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In July 2010, I wrote a blog post about Letters of a Woman Homesteader, by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, whose wonderful letters, written in the early 20th century, described her life as a Wyoming rancher. The book had been one of my longtime favorites, and writing the post gave me great pleasure. I’ve always admired Elinore Stewart, not only for the obvious
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Sandy Denny’s song Who Knows Where the Time Goes has been much in mind lately, as I’ve listened while commuting to Judy Collins narrating her recent autobiography, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. Denny, who died in 1978 at age 31, has now been gone longer than she was here. Collins, who I think was the first American artist to cover Denny’s signature tune,
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