are familiar with Ms. Arnow's most popular novel -- The Dollmaker. Made into a TV movie in 1983 starring Jane Fonda, it told the story of a Kentucky family's difficult move from their farm to a Detroit housing project.) It was Hunter's Horn, however, that first brought Ms. Arnow national fame, and the book finished that year close to William Faulkner's A Fable for the Pulitzer Prize. Joyce Carol Oates has called this novel "our most unpretentious American masterpiece."

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Tad Friend, author of Cheerful Money, named a "7 Best Novels About WASPs" list for Flashlight Worthy.

One novel on the list:

The Great Gatsbyby F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald was a wistful snob, ever anxious about his place in the firmament: as a youth, finding his father listed in theSt. Paul Social Register as a “grocer,” he penciled in the word “wholesale” before it. And in this book he transmutes that anxiety into Jay Gatsby's poignantly ardent social climbing. The self-made Gatsby longs, tragically, for the approval of those who — as Ann Richards once said of George H.W. Bush — were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Frederic Raphael is probably best known as the author of Glittering Prizes and its sequel Fame and Fortune. This month, he publishes a third volume in this series, Final Demands. He also collaborated on Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

"Dialogue in a novel is like stained glass, the surrounding prose is there to frame and support it," he tells the Guardian in