Swimming Sweet Arrow (20 page)

Maureen Gibbon’s suggestions for further reading

The Professor’s House

by Willa Cather

The Awakening

by Kate Chopin

The Lover

by Marguerite Duras

The Nick Adams Stories

by Ernest Hemingway

The Diviners

by Margaret Laurence

So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

Train Whistle Guitar

by Albert Murray

The Atlas

by William T. Vollman

Winter Wheat

by Margaret Walker

Maureen Gibbon’s suggestions for viewing

Each of these films is currently available on video.

Desert Bloom

Gas, Food, Lodging

Ruby in Paradise

The Boys of My Youth
by Jo Ann Beard

“Utterly compelling … uncommonly beautiful…. Life in these pages is an astonishment….
The Boys of My Youth
speaks volumes about growing up female and struggling to remain true to yourself.”

— Dan Cryer,
Newsday

“Reading Jo Ann Beard’s prose feels as comfortable as falling into step beside an old, intimate friend…. She remembers (or imagines) her childhood self with an uncanny lucidity that startles.”

— Laura Miller,
New York Times Book Review

Dale Loves Sophie to Death
by Robb Forman Dew

Winner of the National Book Award

“A novel that profoundly satisfies both the mind and the heart.”

— Robert Wilson,
Washington Post Book World

“Like Virginia Woolf, Robb Forman Dew reaches into the flow of daily life to break open a single moment. She captures beautifully the shift and flux of feelings, friendships, perspectives, the child in the adult and adult in the child.”

—Jean Strouse,
Newsweek

This Body
by Laurel Doud

“A frisky, riveting debut…. With Doud’s brightly visceral prose and deft sense of tragicomedy,
This Body
proves equally engrossing for the senses, soul, and mind.”

— Megan Harlan,
Entertainment Weekly

“Lots of fun…. Every woman has had the fantasy of waking up in a younger, skinnier body. But what if you had to die first? And what if the body you came to one year after your death belonged to a freshly OD’d junkie?”

— Cindy Bagwell,
Dallas Morning News

Snake
by Kate Jennings

“Snake
can be read in a single sitting. In fact, this is the ideal way to absorb Ms. Jennings’s stunning narrative…. Clearly the work of a powerful imagination.”

— Carol Shields,
New York Times Book Review

“The chapters in
Snake
are short, vivid bursts of imagery, anecdote, insight…. It’s hard to believe a full-blown family tragedy can be told so wholly and well in such small, deft snatches, but then rarely has a poet’s skill at compaction been put to better use in prose.”

— Michelle Huneven,
Los Angeles Times Book Review

Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine
by Thom Jones

“True to form as one of literature’s practicing wild men of prose, Thom Jones delivers a collection that is a nutty perfection of the weird and the wasted, done to wondrous effect… Jones is a brilliant risk taker whose stories reward you with their ornery, out-there energy.”

—
Elle

“This might be Jones’s best work yet, which is saying something, since
The Pugilist at Rest
was a National Book Award finalist…. The stories in
Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine
snap and crackle like high-tension wires.”

— William Porter,
Denver Post

The Power of the Dog
by Thomas Savage

with an afterword by Annie Proulx

“Thomas Savage is a writer of the first order, and he possesses in abundance the novelist’s highest art—the ability to illuminate and move.”

—
The New Yorker

“The Power of the Dog
offers so many pleasures readers will be forgiven if they do not immediately notice that it also engages the grandest themes —among them, the dynamics of family, the varieties of love, and the ethos of the American West. Put simply,
The Power of the Dog
is a masterpiece.”

— Larry Watson, author of
Montana 1948
and
Justice

Make Believe
by Joanna Scott

“Wonderful…. There are things in
Make Believe
that take the breath away…. One cannot help urging anyone who loves writing to read this book.”

— Nick Hornby,
New York Times Book Review

“There’s something particularly magical when a full-fledged grown-up author is able to tell a story as if the words were coming directly, innocently, from the mouth or mind of a child.”

— Patrick T. Reardon,
Chicago Tribune

Evening News
by Marly Swick

“An affecting novel … utterly palpable and real. … It possesses both the psychological suspense of Sue Miller’s bestselling
The Good Mother
and the emotional acuity of Alice Munro’s short stories.”

— Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times

“A novel that might be lifted right out of the headlines—a story of a family shattered by loss when a nine-year-old accidentally shoots his half sister. … A book that lingers in the mind and heart.”

— Colleen Kelly Warren,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Here is what they never tell you about being a girl.”

This startlingly sexy novel tells a tale of friendship, passion, and survival that few readers will soon forget. From the opening scene—in which two high-school-age girls are fooling around with their boyfriends in the same car at the same time—
Swimming Sweet Arrow
speaks to us in a voice at once fresh, explicit, urgent, and confiding.

“Seductive and absorbing…. Gibbon presents the grim grace of working-class life and the erotic discoveries of youth with facile clarity.” —Kristianna Bertelsen,
Express Books
(San Francisco)

“A moving first novel—Vangie could be the blunt-spoken daughter of a Raymond Carver character. The graphic sex is neither porn nor arty erotica: it’s anthropology with a heart.” —David Gates,
Newsweek

“Slangy yet lyrical…. Gibbon’s touching, simplistic honesty gives the novel its true strength.” —Amber Cowan,
The Times
(London)

“Exhilarating…. It’s rare to find an author who can write explicitly about sex without being either sentimental or crude. But from the first startling sentences, it’s clear that Maureen Gibbon is one of those writers…. Her language is clean and sharp, and cuts like a knife through the usual.” —
Independent Weekly
(Durham, NC)