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Small Press Review

Sweet Gogarty And Anaconda

How many novels have you read lately that challenge stereotypes, while giving you characters you can love and hate, with a plot and an ending that satisfy both your sense of what must happen and what you wish would happen?

Every Man An Island

Book Review

Then one day on the street he sees a “stout elderly woman in a shapeless brown tent-like dress”; astonishingly, it is the girl from the days of his youth: it is Hartley. Charles has retired to contemplate his dead past, and the past has risen up to greet him.

Chapel Hill

Eating Out

In this issue, we review nine Chapel Hill restaurants that offer “high dining,” places where you expect carefully prepared dishes, a distinctive atmosphere, and attentive service.

Doing What I Do

Studying Buddhism; Growing Trees

It didn’t take long to see that I had no talent for making money. Sure, my mother was disappointed, but I figured she’d get over it. As the years rolled by, it became apparent that trees and eastern religions were my lot in life.

No More Chores

I’m gouging (laboriously) in a drainage pipe to avoid paying $20 an hour to somebody who knows how to do it right with proper tools.

Facing The Struggle

(Part One)

I find myself angry and determined. I do want to know why so much money is poured into trying to discover the cause of cancer and so little into experimentation with other forms of treatment which give more responsibility to the patient, and which help the patient to believe in her own ability to mend disease.

Chapel Hill

Eating Out; Reaping What We Sow; and Health Center

Eating out at Chapel Hill’s foreign restaurants; a review of Cary Fowler’s new guide to traditional seed varieties; and the Wholistic Health Center workshops.

Small Press Review

The Fiction Of Curt Johnson

His heroes are frail — but also strong and unbreakable, because they cope with these realities, not blurring or distorting what is there, what they have done, or how they feel. And this rubs off on us, makes the reader braver about acknowledging the truth in his or her own guts.

Short, Fat And Dumb With Numbers

Book Review

One great virtue of a work like The Realists is that it acts as a guide through the works of these writers, and whets the reader’s appetite. One would not think to call their lives happy — as Snow points out, a “great writer has to live with the worst side of his nature as well as the best” — but they were full and rich.

Doing What I Do

Quilts

Patchwork — that extra effort — is one expression of the higher parts of the human spirit, which manage to come out under all but the most adverse circumstances.