Stephen McCauley doesn't need cheap tricks. Other writers rely on brassy scenarios and embarrassingly trumped-up plots to hold their readers, but McCauley just digs deeper into his characters' lives and finds literary gold. On tour last year for his funny, sad, and moving sixth book, Insignificant Others [[Kindle
]] he said he felt he had taken the comedy of manners as far as he could go and was working on a historical novel set in the first part of the 20th century. Until then, revisit his superb True Enough, his effervescent debut, The Object of My Affection, and all the books in between
. You must also read his riveting, knockout piece, "Let's Say," about his uneasy truce with his difficult, antigay father in Patrick Merla's collection Boys Like Us
. A couple as handsome as they are talented, McCauley and longtime partner Sebastian Stuart (a Ferro-Grumley Award winner for The Hour Between) live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Is it unforgivable to call Branwell the fourth Brontë sister? Born a year after Charlotte, a year before Emily, and three years prior to Anne, Patrick Branwell Brontë was kept home for schooling while the girls were sent off to boarding school. A child of great promise, he trained as a painter and, not surprisingly given how things turned out, his most important work is a portrait of his three writer siblings. (That bizarre gap in the portrait is where Branwell put himself; following a quarrel, his father rubbed him out.) To support himself, Branwell took a job tutoring a Lancashire family's sons, a railway clerk position, and another job tutoring a boy named Thorp Green. From each employment Branwell was dismissed. He returned home, drank heavily, contracted tuberculosis, and died at thirty-one. For a "marvelous free and direct telling" of his life, read the novel Branwell by Douglas A. Martin. PW says the book "offers a tender, tragic portrayal of a doomed artist and homosexual avant la lettre" and "this volume's beautiful declarative sentences are perfectly fitted to this famously imaginative, headstrong family; they bring Branwell Brontë's world to light."
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