One of the things I love most about bookselling is the opportunity to have unexpected conversations with customers about books we love. And when it's the same books, even better, particularly when the books and authors are to some extent under-appreciated or at least not as widely known as I think they should be.
Discovered yesterday that one of my favorite customers loves three authors that I do: specifically, Laurie Colwin, Vivian Gornick, and Evan S. Connell. In fact, she pointed out this article in the NY Times from just the other day, praising Connell's quiet masterful writing in Mrs. Bridge, which came out in 1959 and which I first read about twenty years ago and fell in love with. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/books/evan-s-connell-mrs-bridge.html
If you haven't read Gornick's Fierce Attachments, you need to. It is indeed fierce - about a mother and daughter and I love this book intensely, love the craft of it. She writes so well of life and women and feminism and family and more.
And then you need to devour everything by Colwin, whom I 'discovered' in the late 90s only to learn once I'd read through a couple of her novels and some short stories that she'd died years earlier at only 48 years old. She writes gorgeously -- not fussy, not pretentious-- just about family and life and also food -- not only the cooking of it but also the eating. Here's a grand NPR piece on Colwin that will give you a sense of her talent. https://www.npr.org/2014/11/24/365227833/decades-later-laurie-colwins-books-will-not-let-you-down
More on all this soon.
Til then, what authors do you love who not everyone talks about?
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