In which I am pleased and shocked

[asa book]0375502688[/asa] There’s an interview with Amy Bloom on Critical Mass (the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors). Amy Bloom, as in the person who wrote Love Invents Us and Come to Me and one of my all time favorite short stories “The Story” (The Best American Short Stories 2000, ed. E. L. Doctorow, Houghton Mifflin 2000) and many other things.

Amy Bloom has a virtual bookshelf on her website. I did not know this. I also did not know that my Homestead is on that bookshelf, in very high falutin company.* In the interview she says about the books on her bookshelf (including Homestead): “These are all great writers, lovers of the word, lyrical even when stripped down, clean and tight, even when they are blossoming. Their sentences please me as a reader, and illuminate the craft for me as a writer.”

[asa book]039592686[/asa] So now I’m all aflutter.

I should say that I’ve met Amy, but then Amy has met lots of people and many of them writers, but Homestead is on her bookself.

Ha!

Now I should say in the spirit of complete disclosure that I’m pretty sure Amy is not a big fan of the Wilderness novels, and that she probably wouldn’t much like Tied to the Tracks either. Not her kinda books. But you know what?

Homestead is on her bookshelf.

*Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy; Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body; Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy; John Derbyshire, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream; Rosina Lippi, Homestead; Margot Livesey, Criminals; Colum McCann, Everything in This Country Must; Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception; Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle; Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden