Charis and Kristin at Wuthering Expectations

Sigrid Undset's "The Wife" (1921) and @marlyyoumans's "Charis in the World of Wonders" (2020), novels with surprising similarities, combined into one blog post.https://t.co/9rTmaJzWIH

"His breath ruttled as he blew outward and sent the plants to trembling."

— Amateur Reader (Tom) (@AmateurReader) June 16, 2020

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I am so pleased that two of my books have been discussed at the stellar Wuthering Expectations! Please take a look at the new post on Charis in the World of Wonders. See posts on both Charis and The Book of the Red King HERE.

The Fool rejoices...

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

"The Book of the Red King seems to me like a major work, 

if that is a term anyone still uses in the context of poetry."

--Amateur Reader at Wuthering Expectations

So pleased to have the marvelous, wide-ranging Amateur Reader (aka Tom) make a post about The Book of the Red King. (He also mentions a post from novelist Scott G. F. Bailey--always insightful--about the book, and some remarks from poet and novelist Fred Chappell.) I love how he does not insist on pinning down meaning but lets the book keep its strange freedoms.

And here it is. 

Good wuthering

I'm very glad to have landed a spot on Amateur Reader's Wuthering Expectations end-of-year lists because I love that site. If I had all the time in the world to read blog posts, I would never  miss a post of that one. Here's the quote from the "Best of the Best" section The Wuthering Expectation Best Books of 2015 - the noodles they make for me:

Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education; A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman; Little, Big, John Crowley; Life Is a Dream, Pedro Calderón de la Barca; Germinal, Émile Zola. The confusion of the two dinners at the end of the first act of Richard Bean’s and Carlo Goldoni’s One Man, Two Guvnors; Rosso Malpelo digging for his buried father in Giovanni Verga’s “Rosso Malpelo”; Richard Jefferies falling in love with a trout; Mark Twain getting his watch fixed; John Davidson on the beach with his dogs; Lizzie Eustace trying to memorize Shelley in The Eustace Diamonds; the scene in Marly Youmans’s Thaliad where the little kids in the van drive away from the little boy – no, even better, when they go back for him; and the end of “All at One Point” in Calvino’s Cosmicomics when Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 creates the universe in an act of generosity – “Boys, the noodles I would make for you!” – which may perhaps be an allegory for what all of these writers were doing for me this year.

I also love this and am so amused because my friend Paul Digby has mock-reproached me (for three years!) about what happens to Gabriel in Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing, 2012.) This despite the fact that some of Fr. Augustine Wetta's students at the St. Louis Priory School gave Gabriel some fanfiction-style adventures of his own...

You can find Amateur Reader on twitter (@AmateurReader) as well. He's worth a follow. And Paul? He's the lovely fellow who has made videos for some of my poems, which you can find here:

Follow Marly's board Digby videos: videos by composer-videographer Paul Digby for poetry by Marly Youmans on Pinterest.

You can also find some recordings of Paul singing at the same Pinterest account.

Related:

• Maze of Blood at Favorite Books of 2015, "Books and Culture Magazine."
• Glimmerglass at Books for Christmas: the Headmaster Recommends, The Imaginative Conservative.
• Excerpt from Thaliad at quarrtsiluni (with Gabriel)
• Another excerpt from Thaliad at Mezzo Cammin (the final poem on the page)