Silas House is a New York Times bestselling author. Recent words in The Atlantic, Garden and Gun, Time, Ecotone, and more.
www.silas-house.com
Eli the Good Reading
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The discovery blogs are temporarily on hold while Silas is briefly out of the country. In the meantime, a reading from ELI THE GOOD...(double click to watch full-screen)
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Anonymous said…
I will miss these blog entries. But thanks for the video to hold us over! :P
The vast majority of books I read this year were not published this year, but I did read several 2017 releases. You'll notice that hardly any of the books I absolutely loved received major awards attention or adulation this year. The hype surrounding most of the books at the tops of the critics lists were largely lost on me. I tried reading a few of them--and I won't say which ones, as it would be bad manners to publicly put down other novelists (now if we were in private conversation that'd be another thing altogether...)--but I found them mostly unreadable, pretentious, dull, overhyped, or, most often, a combination of all four factors. So, I am only mentioning here the books I read in 2017 that I loved. My reading list this year was largely shaped by the fact that I taught in Edinburgh for two weeks this summer, so I immersed myself in Scottish literature as much as I was able. And it is an incredibly rich literature. The other twenty-two books I read this year cam
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There are two places in Southeastern Kentucky I think of as my true homes: the small community of Lily , in the foothills of Laurel County, and, fifty miles east, Rockhouse Creek , in the lush mountains of Leslie County. I will focus on Rockhouse here, mainly because it is the dark, lovely topography of my collective memory, but also because it is the epitome of Central Appalachia, the kind of place that journalists-who-don’t-know-what-they’re-talking-about always zoom in on with their statistics and opinions. In fact, Rockhouse is located just a few miles from the communities that were recently the focus of a piece called “ What’s The Matter With Eastern Kentucky? ” by Annie Lowrey in The New York Times that referred to Appalachia and the Deep South as “the smudge of the country.” Well, I am that smudge. My people are that smudge. My homeland is that smudge. And we are much, much more than that. In fact, we would fight for that smudge. Many of us
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