Last week in my “Forgotten Books” class we read some stories from Kay Boyle’s The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories. The title story dominated our discussion. (See the end for where to find "The White Horses of Vienna.") It was published in Harper’s magazine in 1935 and won the O. Henry Award for best story that year. Today it’s a rather…
I had one of those "A-ha" moments in my "Literature of War" class this week (and I don't mean the band). Light bulbs were going off---for me anyway. We've been talking a lot about the stories and histories that have been forgotten or suppressed. This week it started with no one in the class knowing the work of Katherine Anne Porter. That happens…
My class "The Literature of War" has now moved on to WWI. Most of the students freely admitted that they knew almost nothing about it. That's not surprising, considering that even during the recent 100-year commemorations of the war, there was almost no mention of it in the American media. In Europe, the war was front and center in people's minds from 2014…