The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story is a favorite so far among my students in the "Forgotten Books" class I'm teaching this semester. It is set in the South of France in the late 1920s but was written in 1940, long after its author, Glenway Wescott, had left France. My students and I all agreed that it is a beautiful, unjustly forgotten book.…
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…