And a very happy Free-For-All birthday to the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe!

Poe was born in Boston on this day in 1809, the child of two fairly prominent actors.  His father abandoned the family in 1810, leaving Eliza Arnold Poe, a skilled and well-known actress, to raise three children alone.  She passed away at the age of twenty-four of what is assumed to be tuberculosis, when Poe was three.  The three children were sent to different families to live: William Henry Leonard Poe lived with his paternal grandparents in Baltimore, Edgar Poe was taken in by (but never formally adopted by) John and Frances Allan in Richmond, and Rosalie Poe was adopted by William and Jane Scott Mackenzie in Richmond, Virginia.

Edgar lived with the Allan family until his late teens, though he clashed with John Allan frequently over money matters.  He tried enlisting in the military, and tried college, attending the University of Virginia for a year before leaving (due to lack of funds rather than a lack of intellect or ambition).  Falling back on his own resources, Poe began to earn a living through writing, for working for literary journals and periodicals, mostly as a literary critic.  Though he developed a name for himself (as a ruthless, curmudgeonly critic who may not have been nice, but was always cynically funny in his reviews), it was the publication of his poem The Raven in 1845 that cemented his reputation.   He married Virginia Clemm (pictured at left), his 13-year-old cousin in 1836 (when he was twenty six).  Biographers disagree as to the nature of the couple’s relationship. Though their marriage was loving, some biographers suggest they viewed one another more like a brother and sister, but I think it’s very fair to say that this is not a historical issue that can be conveniently swept away and forgotten.  Poe’s involvement in several scandals of a romantic nature hurt Virginia extremely, and she passed away in 1847 (also of tuberculosis) blaming the scandals for her poor health.  Poe himself was devastated over the loss of his wife, and turned to alcohol to cope with his grief.  He managed to battle back against his addictions, continue writing and working, but was found severely ill and delirious in Baltimore in 1849, wearing someone else’s clothing.  Though medical treatment was provided for him, he passed away on October 7, 1849.  Scholars have suggested a cause of death ranging from alcoholism to rabies, but the real cause will most likely remain a mystery.

To read some of Poe’s lyrical and deeply emotional poetry, click here.  Additionally, you can come into the Library and check out his stories, which form the basis of the American Gothic literary tradition–and are darned good reads, even today!

And speaking of darned good reads, here are a few of the new books that skipped up onto our shelves this week, and are eager to improve your weekend!

Pale Rider: Laura Spinney’s newest book is being called a definitive account of the Spanish Flu Epidemic that spread across the globe from 1918 to 1920, and resulted in between 50 and 100 million deaths.  The circumstances of the epidemic, and the cultural responses to it, have gone massively understudied in history (overshadowed by the First World War and subsequently international political events).  But Spinney shows here that the Spanish Flu did indeed change the world, leading to massive breakthroughs in medicine and epidemiology, changing the role of doctors, nurses, and care-givers around the world, and left a cultural mark that still resonates with us today.  Spinney is also a gifted writer, telling her story with gripping suspense, power, and humanity, driving home the cataclysm of this epidemic and the strength of the people who endured it.  The book has been at the top of a number of “Best Of” lists, and has earned rave reviews around the world, with The Times noting, “I’ve seldom had so much fun reading about people dying. Laura Spinney, a science journalist, is adept at explaining arcane scientific research in an entertaining, comprehensible way. …With superb investigative skill and a delightfully light-hearted writing style, Spinney extends her analysis far beyond the relatively short duration of the plague….Spinney finds it odd that we know so little about the worst calamity to affect the human race. So do I. There are tens of thousands of books about the First World War, yet that flu is, arguable, more relevant to our world. While global war is, we hope, a thing of the past, global pestilence hovers like a vulture.”

The Night Market: Much like Poe himself, Jonathan Moore possess a unique talent for the dark, the twisted, and the macabre.  This newest of his mysteries is a gripping and twisted tale that is gruesome and delightfully clever.  t’s late Thursday night, and Inspector Ross Carver is at a crime scene in one of the city’s last luxury homes. The dead man on the floor is covered by an unknown substance that’s eating through his skin. Before Carver can identify it, six FBI agents burst in and remove him from the premises. He’s pushed into a disinfectant trailer, forced to drink a liquid that sends him into seizures, and then is shocked unconscious.  On Sunday he wakes in his bed to find his neighbor, Mia—who he’s barely ever spoken to—reading aloud to him. He can’t remember the crime scene or how he got home; he has no idea two days have passed. Mia says she saw him being carried into their building by plainclothes police officers, who told her he’d been poisoned. Carver doesn’t really know this woman and has no way of disproving her, but his gut says to keep her close.  In a fast-paced story that will keep fans of Blake Crouch and Lauren Beukes delighted, Moore unfolding a mid-bending, Twilight Zone-esque story that earned a starred review from Kirkus, who described it as “A sharp and scary near-future thriller that delivers a dark message about society’s love affair with technology…Unsettling, stylish noir…[The] utterly shocking revelations in the third act are the stuff of nightmares. You’ll never look at a flock of sparrows the same way again.”

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine: Anne Applebaum won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of Stalin’s gulags, and she turns that same sharp historic eye and extraordinary research skills to one of the world’s worst man-made famines.  In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them.  Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Harrowing, horrifying, and absolutely necessary, this book is a landmark in Soviet history, and also a deeply personal, moving story about the ability of humans to endure.  The Washington Post hailed it as a book sure to become “the standard treatment of one of history’s great political atrocities . . . She re-creates a pastoral world so we can view its destruction. And she rightly insists that the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian peasants was part of a larger [Soviet] policy against the Ukrainian nation . . .  To be sure, Russia is not the Soviet Union, and Russians of today can decide whether they wish to accept a Stalinist version of the past. But to have that choice, they need a sense of the history. This is one more reason to be grateful for this remarkable book.”

A Hundred Small Lessons: A moving, evocative tale that spans generations, Ashley Hay’s newest novel focuses on the power of women, family, and love, to overcome the most profound of obstacles.  When Elsie Gormley leaves the Brisbane house in which she has lived for more than sixty years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, eager to establish their new life. As they settle in, Lucy and her husband Ben struggle to navigate their transformation from adventurous lovers to new parents, taking comfort in memories of their vibrant past as they begin to unearth who their future selves might be. But the house has secrets of its own, and the rooms seem to share recollections of Elsie’s life with Lucy.  In her nearby nursing home, Elsie traces the span of her life—the moments she can’t bear to let go and the places to which she dreams of returning. Her beloved former house is at the heart of her memories of marriage, motherhood, love, and death, and the boundary between present and past becomes increasingly porous for both her and Lucy.  RT Book Reviews loved this book, saying “Hay truly encapsulates how our lives are interwoven. We are sent on a journey through the decades as small events and echoes of memories overlap, intersect and suddenly converge into a beautiful portrait spanning the past, present and future. Every word has a purpose and resonates…Readers will fall in love with the vivid landscapes of Brisbane and the impeccable, lyrical language that seeps from the pages.”

Woman at 1,000 Degrees: Literature has really been giving the elderly and the long-lived their due lately, and this story by Icelandic novelist Hallgrímur Helgason, gives us the newest of our aged heroine, Herra Björnsson. Herra,  has two weeks left, maybe three—she has booked her cremation appointment, at a crispy 1,000 degrees, so it won’t be long. But until then she has her cigarettes, a World War II–era weapon, some Facebook friends, and her memories to sustain her.  And what a life this remarkable eighty-year-old narrator has led, from her childhood in the remote islands of Iceland, where she was born the granddaughter of Iceland’s first president, to teen years spent living by her wits alone in war-torn Europe, to love affairs on several continents, Herra Björnsson wed and lost husbands, had children, fled a war, kissed a Beatle, weathered the Icelandic financial crash, and mastered the Internet. She has experienced luck and betrayal and upheaval and pain, and—with a bawdy, uncompromising spirit—she has survived it all.  A poignant, uproarious, and utterly memorable tale, Helgason’s novel earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, who described it “Helgason’s sad and funny novel begins in 2009, as 80-year-old Herra Björnsson lies dying in a Reykjavík garage, still in possession of a live hand grenade from World War II . . . In her unsentimental, unsparing narrative, she offers insights into Icelandic culture and character, including a riff on reticence and a brief summary of Iceland’s financial meltdown. Like the Icelandic landscape, she can be both appealing and treacherous.”

Until next week, beloved patrons…..Happy Reading!

And a very happy Free For All birthday to Anna Margaret Ross,  who is alleged by some to be the worst poet in the world.

McKittrick was born on this day in 1860, in Drumaness, County Down,  Ireland, where her father was the principal of Drumaness High School.  She herself became a teacher, securing a position at a school in Larne, County Antrim.  During her first visit to Larne, she struck up a friendship with the station master, and they married in August, 1887.

It was Anna’s husband who financed the publication of her first novel,  Irene Iddesleigh, as a tenth anniversary present, launching her notorious, if not quite illustrious literary career.  She went on to write three novels and dozens of poems under the pen name Amanda McKittrick Ros.  In a biographical essay, McKittrick wrote She wrote: “My chief object of writing is and always has been, to write if possible in a strain all my own. This I find is why my writings are so much sought after.”  She also predicted that she would “be talked about at the end of a thousand years.”…Well, she was, but perhaps not in the way she might have wished.  Mark Twain read her novel, and called it “one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time.”  An 1898 review called it “the book of the century”. ..again, not in a complementary way.  But she very well may have had the last laugh–according to McKittrick, she earned enough money from her writing to build herself a house, which she named Iddesleigh.  

Ros believed that her critics lacked sufficient intellect to appreciate her talent, so we’ll let you read them for yourself and judge.  This is the opening sentence of her novel Delina Delaney:

Have you ever visited that portion of Erin’s plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

If you’d like some more, McKittrick’s last novel, Helen Huddleson, features characters who are all all the named after fruits, including Lord Raspberry, Cherry Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, the Earl of Grape, and Madame Pear. Of Pear, Ros wrote:

…she had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with sapphires of scandals….

And finally, here is her poem about Westminster Abbey.  C.S. Lewis and his writing group, the Inkblots, used to have a competition to see who could get through McKittrick’s poetry without laughing.  See how you fare:

On Visiting Westminster Abbey

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with ‘blue’
Undergoes the same as you.
…
Famous some were–yet they died;
Poets–Statesmen–Rogues beside,
Kings–Queens, all of them do rot,
What about them? Now–they’re not!

And now, on to our books, which are, we think it’s safe to say, of an entirely different class than Mrs. McKittrick’s…

No Time To Spare: Ursula K. Le Guin has taken readers to imaginary worlds for decades, creating and re-creating the science fiction genre. Now she’s in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice—sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical—shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula’s online writing, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters to her now, her concerns with this world, and her unceasing wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”  This is a book that any reader, from sci-fi fans to literature devotees, will be able to adore.  Le Guin’s commentaries on life, feminism, race, and the world at large are precious and insightful and wonderfully accessible, even though they contain huge, big, beautiful ideas.  Critics are over the moon about this collection, with The New Republic noting that this book “feels like the surprising and satisfying culmination to a career in other literary forms…Even in the familiar relationship of an old woman and her cat, Le Guin finds an ambit for challenging moral insight and matter for an inquisitiveness that probes the deep time of evolution…Blogs may not be novels, but a blog by Le Guin is no ordinary blog, either. It is a comfort to know, as reality seems to grow more claustrophobic and inescapable, that she remains at her desk, busily subverting our world.”

Where the Wild Coffee Grows: Coffee is one of the largest and most valuable commodities in the world. This is the story of its origins, its history, and the threat to its future, as told by Jeff Koehler, who wrote the fascinating history of Darjeeling tea.  Deftly blending in the long, fascinating history of our favorite drink, award-winning author Jeff Koehler takes readers from the forests of Ethiopia on  the spectacular journey of its spread around the globe. With cafés on virtually every corner of every town in the world, coffee has never been so popular–nor tasted so good.  But diseases and climate change are battering production in Latin America, where 85 percent of Arabica grows. As the industry tries to safeguard the species’ future, breeders are returning to the original coffee forests, which are under threat and swiftly shrinking.  This book, at once a fascinating history and an environmental warning, will captivate foodies, armchair travelers, and science-minded readers alike.  In fact, the Smithsonian rated it as one of the ten best books about food in 2017, calling the book “A deep dive into the fascinating history of coffee that meanders from the once-isolated, deep forests of Ethiopia’s Kafa region to the warm embrace of your local bodega. Coffee’s path to world domination is anything but straightforward and this story might be unwieldy in the hands of a lesser talent, but Koehler is more than up to the task. A must-read for coffee enthusiasts.”

Bryant and May: Wild Chamber: Fans of Christopher Fowler’s delightful Peculiar Crimes Unit Mysteries–wait no longer!  Detectives Arthur Bryant and John May are back on the case in a wonderfully quirky locked-room mystery.  Helen Forester’s day starts like any other: Around seven in the morning, she takes her West Highland terrier for a walk in her street’s private garden. But by 7:20 she is dead, strangled yet peacefully laid out on the path, her dog nowhere to be found. The only other person in the locked space is the gardener, who finds the body and calls the police. He expects proper cops to arrive, but what he gets are Bryant, May, and the wily members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit.  Before the detectives can make any headway on the case, a second woman is discovered in a public park, murdered in nearly identical fashion. Bryant delves into the arcane history of London’s cherished green spaces, rife with class drama, violence, and illicit passions. But as a devious killer continues to strike, Bryant and May struggle to connect the clues, not quite seeing the forest for the trees, putting innocent lives, the fate of the city’s parks, and the very existence of the PCU in peril.  This series is a treat from start to finish, and if you haven’t started it yet, it’s definitely a recommendation, from us and from The Guardian, who gushed “[Fowler] takes delight in stuffing his books with esoteric facts; together with a cast of splendidly eccentric characters [and] corkscrew plots, wit, verve and some apposite social commentary, they make for unbeatable fun.”

Hiddensee: Gregory Maguire gives us another alternative version of the classic tales we’re grown up hearing–this time, the tale of the man who would become Dr. Drosselmeier, who crafts the Nutcracker in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story (that became Tchaikovsky’s beloved ballet).  This is a story rooted in, and told like a Bavarian fairy tale, mixing stories about elfin folk and forest creatures with deep questions about death and life, disadvantage and power, and the hope that remains even when everything else seems destroyed.  It’s a wonder-full, intriguing tale, unlike others that Maguire has told, but still full of his trademark whimsy and insight, and earned a starred review from Kirkus, who described it as “A delightful, mystical, mythical confection by zeitgeist whisperer Maguire… A splendid revisitation of folklore that takes us to and from familiar cultural touchstones into realms to make Freud blanch. Wonderful.”

The Girl in the Tower: Katherine Arden continues her tale, rooted firmly in Russian folklore, but featuring a marvelous unique heroine, who grew up hearing the tales of her people and family.  Vasilisa’s gift for seeing what others do not won her the attention of Morozko—Frost, the winter demon from the stories—and together they saved her people from destruction. But Frost’s aid comes at a cost, and her people have condemned her as a witch.  Now Vasilisa faces an impossible choice. Driven from her home by frightened villagers, the only options left for her are marriage or the convent. She cannot bring herself to accept either fate and instead chooses adventure, dressing herself as a boy and setting off astride her magnificent stallion Solovey.  But when the Grand Prince of Moscow anoints her a hero for her exploits, Vasilisa realizes she cannot reveal to the court that she is a girl, for if her deception were discovered it would have terrible consequences for herself and her family.  This is a glorious fantasy/fairy tale, full of heart, hope, emotion, daring, action, and adventure that is winning rave reviews from readers and critics alike.  Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review, cheering it as a “sensual, beautifully written, and emotionally stirring fantasy . . . Fairy tales don’t get better than this.”

Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!