What is Roxana Robinson reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Roxana Robinson, author of Dawson's Fall: A Novel.

Her entry begins:

I’ve just finished Anna Burns’ wonderful novel, Milkman. Burns does something very interesting with form: she uses no names or identifiers. The protagonist is called “Middle Sister,” and you must work out how many siblings she has. “Milkman” turns out to refer to two people, neither of whom has a name. This tactic requires you to form your own impressions and identifying characteristics. The narrative takes place in Ireland, but she doesn’t say north or south; she mentions “the right religion” and “the wrong religion,” so that the reader must...[read on]

About Dawson's Fall, from the publisher:

A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral reckoning

In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape.

Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights. He later became the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. With his wife and two children, he tried to lead a life that adhered to his staunch principles: equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence, unswayed by the caprices of popular opinion. But he couldn’t control the political whims of his readers. As he wrangled diligently in his columns with questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. Nor could Dawson control the whims of the heart: his Swiss governess became embroiled in a tense affair with a drunkard doctor, which threatened to stain his family’s reputation. In the end, Dawson—a man in many ways representative of the country at this time—was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed.

Learn more about the book and author at Roxana Robinson’s website.

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Writers Read: Roxana Robinson.

--Marshal Zeringue