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The Library Is Open

A blog about books and writing, through rainbow-tinted glasses. Every book gets a gay rating.

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  • Review: The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey

    October 24, 2021 by James Whitmore

    A grim, aching study of women’s guilt and men’s rage.

  • Review: The Essential Emily Dickinson (selected by Joyce Carol Oates)

    October 17, 2021 by James Whitmore

    Strange, precise and elusive poetry.

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The Labyrinth starts strongly, with Erica Marsden visiting the place where she grew up, an asylum where her father was chief medical officer. She soon settles at a nearby coastal community, close to the prison where her son is serving life for killing five people. It’s a grim, aching study of women’s guilt and men’s hatred, even when there are some puzzling narrative choices.
“Hope is the thing with feathers”, is basically all I knew of Emily Dickinson before reading this selection of 100-odd of her poems. I came away with a sense of the profound strangeness and precision of her poetry.
For someone who professes to like books, writing and reading, I am oddly impatient with books about writing. So I was surprised to enjoy this short-but-full answer to why Deborah Levy writes.
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