This week at
The Week magazine, novelist Amity Gaige named "The List."
One of her picks:
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
This 1927 novel raises writing about family life to the level of scripture. A wife looks out the window at her husband, a child plays in lamplight, and through the musings of the characters we feel the intoxication that results from love and loss. Woolf was an angel on earth.
Read
more about Gaige's list.
Amity Gaige is a graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is the author of the acclaimed novel
O My Darling, chosen by the National Book Foundation for its "5 Under 35" program to recognize the achievements of five first-time fiction writers each year.
Her new novel is
The Folded World.
About the book, from the publisher:
Acclaimed for her exquisite prose and crystalline insights, Amity Gaige returns with The Folded World, the story of an idealistic young social worker drawn into the lives of his mentally ill clients. Charlie Shade was born into a quiet, prosperous life, but a sense of injustice dogs him. He feels destined to leave his life of "bread and laundry," to work instead with people in crisis. On his way, he meets his kindred spirit in Alice, a soulful young woman, living helplessly by laws of childhood superstition. Charlie’s empathy with his clients — troubled souls like Hal, the high-school wrestling champion who undergoes a psychotic break, and Opal, the isolated young woman who claims "various philosophies have confused my life" — is both admirable and nearly fatal. An adoring husband and new father, Charlie risks his own cherished, private domestic world to help Hal, Opal, and others move beyond their haunted inner worlds into the larger world of love and connection.
--Marshal Zeringue
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