Her entry begins:I co-lead a book group that focuses on classics, so a decent portion of my reading is driven by the need to evaluate future selections or re-read the book we are about to discuss. Right now, I’m finishing up Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale for our meeting this week. I’m not sure whether I’ve actually read the play before, but I first encountered it as a teenager in a production at the Public Theater that left me in tears of awe at the ending. I’m finding it a difficult read, and my mind is occupied thinking about how I would direct Leontes in the first half. In anticipation of next month’s meeting, I’m also reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych; it’s one of those greats I am only now getting to, and it feels apt for...[read on]About Grievous, from the publisher:
H. S. Cross returns to “a school as nuanced and secretive as J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts” (The Rumpus) in Grievous, the sequel to her coming-of-age novel Wilberforce.Visit H. S. Cross's website.
St. Stephen’s Academy, Yorkshire, 1931. A world unto itself, populated by boys reveling in life’s first big mistakes and men still learning how to live with the consequences oftheir own. They live a cloistered life, exotic to modern eyes, founded upon privilege, ruled by byzantine and often unspoken laws, haunted by injuries both casual and calculated. Yet within those austere corridors can be found windows of enchantment, unruly love, and a wild sort of freedom, all vanished, it seems, from our world.
Told from a variety of viewpoints—including that of unhappy Housemaster John Grieves—Grievous takes us deep inside the crucible of St. Stephen’s while retaining a clear-eyed, contemporary sensibility, drawing out the urges and even mercies hidden beneath the school’s strict, unsparing surface. The Academy may live by its own codes, but as with the world around it—a world the characters must ultimately face—it already contains everything necessary to shape its people or tear them apart.
Writers Read: H. S. Cross.
--Marshal Zeringue
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