Willa Cather – Jenny McPhee

May 22, 2020

Silver Linings (65) The Lyric Essence of the Moment

I want to recommend four classic short stories I have recently read or listened to that, though written long ago, capture, in their own particular and peculiar way, "The lyric essence of the moment," a phrase taken from... Willa Cather's short story "A Death in the Desert" which I listened to this morning on The …

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May 9, 2013May 10, 2013

My May Column at Bookslut: TWO AMBITIOUS MIDWESTERN GIRLS: WILLA CATHER AND MARY MACLANE

For my fifteenth birthday my mother gave me Willa Cather's My Ántonia, a novel I devoured and adored. The subject -- the life of immigrant homesteaders in early twenthieth-century rural Nebraska -- was curious and compelling for a girl growing up in 1970s suburban New Jersey. The women in her story were unusually complicated, unpredictable, and …

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