In "The Cross Garden" Marlin Barton combines his storytelling abilities with his vibrant description of the Southern landscape to create his most brilliant and most important novel. Sixteen-year-old James, just released from an Alabama juvenile detention center, confronts his family and friends, who try to ameliorate their own guilt as James struggles with discerning right from wrong.
This collection brings together the author's twelve best stories, all set in the same small Southern community in Alabama. The world of these stories covers five generations of one particular family named Anderson, and the range in time is from 1865 to the present. These stories are about grace in the lives of ordinary men and women. The plot lines are infinitely various, but so delicate that they have eluded some of the subtlest writers. As was once said about the writing of Peter Taylor, a master of the short story, Marlin Barton's writing is as clear as a fine pane of glass. Correctly described as unobtrusive, this style is so simple and powerful that he seems scarcely to be exercising his craft. This is the perfect definition of a virtuoso. As readers will find, there is virtuosity aplenty in The Dry Well.
Author-editor Dabnet Stuart best summarises this debut novel "as relentless as Euripides, or Faulkner, whose "As I Lay Dying" is its formal model. Its central preoccupation is the sins (or in more secular terms, 'behaviour patterns') of fathers and mothers passing into the lives of their offspring. It also reminds us how many people, living and dead, ghost our daily experience, complicating and enriching our choices. Barton includes the dimension of mercy too -- the mutual forgiveness of failures by family members who, finally, find ways to realise they can't live without each other. An impressive, uncompromising book.
Author-editor Dabnet Stuart best summarises this debut novel "as relentless as Euripides, or Faulkner, whose "As I Lay Dying" is its formal model. Its central preoccupation is the sins (or in more secular terms, 'behaviour patterns') of fathers and mothers passing into the lives of their offspring. It also reminds us how many people, living and dead, ghost our daily experience, complicating and enriching our choices. Barton includes the dimension of mercy too -- the mutual forgiveness of failures by family members who, finally, find ways to realise they can't live without each other. An impressive, uncompromising book.
This collection brings together the author's twelve best stories, all set in the same small Southern community in Alabama. The world of these stories covers five generations of one particular family named Anderson, and the range in time is from 1865 to the present. These stories are about grace in the lives of ordinary men and women. The plot lines are infinitely various, but so delicate that they have eluded some of the subtlest writers. As was once said about the writing of Peter Taylor, a master of the short story, Marlin Barton's writing is as clear as a fine pane of glass. Correctly described as unobtrusive, this style is so simple and powerful that he seems scarcely to be exercising his craft. This is the perfect definition of a virtuoso. As readers will find, there is virtuosity aplenty in The Dry Well.
A provocative introduction to the interconnected roles of intellectual property, information, and privacy--and the rules that govern them--in our lives and our global society.
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