On a cold winter’s night in 1964, Norah Henry goes into labour. Unable to reach the hospital in time, her husband David, an orthopedic surgeon, and his nurse Caroline, assist Norah with the delivery. Paul, the couple’s healthy baby boy, is born quickly and it is only while telling his wife the good news that David realizes something isn’t right. Sedating his wife with gas, Paul’s twin is born with Down’s syndrome, a little girl whom David names Phoebe.

Passing the child to his nurse, he instructs her to take the child to an institution and, reluctantly, Caroline agrees. When Norah awakes, David tells her that their little girl died as she was born. Miles away, Caroline finds herself unable to leave the child in the miserable institution and makes a decision that will change her life – she walks out the door and leaves everything behind to start a new life with Phoebe.

Kim Edward’s first novel, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, is not an easy novel to read. Filled with a haunting sadness, painful decisions and far-reaching consequences, the world inhabited by the Henrys is a melancholy place. Haunted by the choice he made, David Henry is physically there for his wife but emotionally unavailable. Unable to share her grief with a world expecting the delight in her son to cover-over the loss of her daughter, Norah careens through her days unable to cope. Many cities away, Caroline is faced with a world which would rather her daughter be hidden away, and finds herself unable to keep silent.

In her February 12, 2006 review in the Washington Post of Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Kim Edwards subtitles her review “How a woman mourning the death of her infant daughter finds her way back to life.” This could just as easily be applied as one of a variety of subtitles for The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. So much is encompassed in this amazing book that, only with reflection do subtleties begin to shimmer into focus.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter must be read within the context of its setting. To our modern sensibilities, the immediate disposal, upon birth, of a child with Down’s syndrome is repellent. By treating his daughter with careless disregard, David causes ripples far exceeding his expectations. Some readers will find within The Memory Keeper’s Daughter a meditation on loss and grief, traveling the lonely road with Norah as she grapples with the loss of a child she never sees, and a marriage within which this child is never discussed. Those same readers will most likely find David an unsympathetic character, whose misery is little payment for the pain he causes so many.

Others will read The Memory Keeper’s Daughter as a commentary on love and hope, focusing on the relationship between Caroline and her adopted child Phoebe. For those readers, Caroline is a force for change and rights for her daughter, insisting the world see Phoebe as a person capable of learning and of ability.

Despite some uneven writing, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is astonishing in its power. Edwards does not allow readers to hold their preconceived notions for long. The translucent dress pictured on the cover illustrates Phoebe’s presence in her birth family, the unspoken words in David and Norah’s marriage, the haunting hole with Paul where his twin should be. The unseen Phoebe, the person she will never be, is at such odds with her reality that the effect is like a slap in the face, jolting the reader out of the too comfortable pathos and anger to see hints of the complex web Edwards has woven.

Kim Edwards is the author of the short-story collection The Secrets of a Fire King, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is her first novel.

This review was published at Curled Up with a Good Book.

ISBN10: 0143037145
ISBN13: 9780143037149

Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: May 30, 2006
Binding: Trade Paperback

tags: books book reviews Kim Edwards The Memory Keeper’s Daughter Down’s syndrome

Evan Malloy realizes he died in 1992, but the how and why of his suicide eludes him. Trapped on the property of his home in Seattle, his only companion a ginger tom, Evan watches a progression of residents come and go, until Maureen Keniston moves in during the summer of 2002. Something about this troubled woman causes Evan’s memories to slowly return, casting him into the past, reliving the events leading up to his death. Told in series of flashbacks interspersed with the story of Maureen’s increasingly desperate attempts to leave her married lover, The Inhabited World explores the nature of relationships, fidelity and self-acceptance.

David Long has paced his novel in a deliberate manner. The passages revealing Evan’s reflections are long and drawn out, as days must appear to a ghost. Interspersed are short moments in the present through which the reader gradually learns of Maureen’s turbulent relationship with Ned, her lover and former co-worker. The scenes of Maureen’s life serve to propel the narrative forward as each one moves Evan deeper into reflection, slowly leading to acceptance of his history. Languid scenes at the beginning, which feel infused with golden light and naïveté, shift incrementally to become the claustrophobic darkness which binds both Evan and Maureen.

Long’s ability to evoke volumes with the sparseness of his prose illustrates mastery of his craft. The choice to place all dialogue in italics, rather than quotation marks, is initially a distracting one, causing the reader to wonder if the italics signify a different narrator or voice. Soon, however, the italics help evoke the dissociative state in which Evan must exist, creating the languor that permeates this deceptively simple novel.

The Inhabited World is not the typical novel usually considered when discussing literature; however, it is an important work that compels readers to look beyond the words on the page and consider what message Long wishes to leave behind. Long has fashioned a remarkable work for those willing to enter his world.

David Long is the author of two previous novels and several collections of short stories. His fiction has appeared in many publications such as The New Yorker, earning him many honors including an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize. The Inhabited World is his third novel.

See the review, and my interview with David Long, at Curled Up with a Good Book.

ISBN10: 061854335X
ISBN13: 9780618543359
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Publication Date: July 10, 2006
Binding: Hardcover
Author Website: davidlonglit.com

Other works by David Long:
* The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux
* The Falling Boy
* Blue Spruce (Short Stories)
* The Flood of ‘64 (Short Stories)
* Home Fires (Short Stories)

tags: books book reviews Inhabited World David Long

Bluma Lennon, a Cambridge academic, is struck and killed while crossing the road in Soho. Her death, occurring while reading a poem by Emily Dickinson, is taken by her colleagues to show the dangers inherent in books and reading.

Following her death, a colleague discovers, among her possessions, a mysterious copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line, strangely inscribed and covered in what appears to be cement. His investigations lead him to Buenos Aires and the Uruguayan coast, in search of Carlos Bauer, an obsessive and dedicated bibliophile whose mania for books has led to his mysterious disappearance. And so begins the unusual and haunting tale that is The House of Paper.

Carlos María Domínguez’s The House of Paper is an obvious homage to the magical realism of Jorge Luis Borges. Domínguez has learned well at the knee of the master, integrating Borges’ playfulness with language, creation of miniature worlds and views of literature as recreation into this slender volume.

Readers should not be fooled by the miniature nature of this work for, like much of Borges’ canon, many large themes are touched upon: the nature of time, infinity, labyrinths, reality, and identity. Books create labyrinths of rooms, libraries and collections define identity, and reality is subsumed when Bauer loses the index to his massive and valuable collection of books. In describing this loss, one of Bauer’s friends resorts to the analogy of losing the ability to access one’s memories:

“Then one day, unexpectedly, you lose the sequence of these memories. They’re still there, but you can’t find them…Your personal history is lost…The worst thing about it is that the facts are there, just waiting for someone to stumble on them. But you don’t have the key. It’s not forgetfulness drawing its kind veil over things we cannot tolerate. It’s a sealed memory, an obsessive call to which there is no answer.”

Readers must decide if it is this loss of identity, and the key to his library, in the fire which leads Bauer to the madness that is his undoing? Perhaps the madness already existed and the loss of the key brought freedom for him from slavery to his books? Whether these questions are ultimately answered is left for readers to decide.

The House of Paper draws readers in and will cause many to reevaluate their relationship to their books. If cataloguing methods are stages within the disease, then most readers are far from the illness inflicted on Bauer. In his library, Shakespeare cannot be placed next to Marlowe, because of accusations of plagiarism between the two, and Martin Amis cannot sit alongside Julian Barnes because of a falling out.

Conrad’s The Shadow Line is referred to throughout the narrative and, like Conrad’s novella, The House of Paper is an ironic commentary on the nature of experience and wisdom reflected through the story of one man’s struggle with his books. Like Conrad’s protagonist, our narrator is never named; however, he is not the true protagonist in this tale, rather it is The Shadow Line itself.

“And again he pleaded for the promise that I would not leave him behind. I had the firmness of mind not to give it to him. Afterward this sternness seemed criminal; for my mind was made up,” the captain said of the delirious sailor on his sickbed, victim of a “downright panic.” In those words it seemed to me I heard the tacit appeal the book had been making to me from the very start.

Peter Sís’ whimsical illustrations add much to the sense of being outside of any recognizable time while reading this compelling novella.

See the review posted at ReadySteadyBook.

ISBN10: 0151011478

Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor
Illustrated by Peter Sís

Publisher: Harcourt Books (US), Harvill Secker (UK, Published as The Paper House)
Publication Date: October 6, 2005
Binding: Hardcover

Related Books:
* Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
* Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
* The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

tags: books book reviews The House of Paper Carlos María Domínguez Experimental Literature Jorge Luis Borges Joseph Conrad The Shadow Line

Dodecahedron: A Platonic solid composed of twelve pentagonal faces, with three meeting at each vertex. It has twenty vertices and thirty edges. Definition from Wikipedia.org

Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames: a novel of sorts is composed of twelve short stories, each representing one of the pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron. The key to understanding this unique work is in the subtitle: “a novel of sorts.” Instead of creating a series of unrelated short stories, Glennon has added a new dimension to his work by applying Oulipian principles (OuLiPo is a group of French authors who create literature based on arbitrary constraints of their own making) to his collection. Glennon explains these principles in the book’s afterword:

“Each chapter was to be as self-contained and whole as any short story. As in a story cycle, each story would cast a new light on the ones that preceded it, and promote a novel-like unity of themes. What I did not want to write was a cyclical book, in which the final story is the final word, a story with more authority than all others, one that casts a sort of judgment on the rest…I envisioned a book in which each of the twelve chapters or stories represented a face of the dodecahedron…In A Frame for Frames these sides represent a relationship to an adjacent story…Each story must refer to or be referred to by each of the five stories adjacent to it.”

A further constraint Glennon puts on his work is also best explained by his own words:

“A dodecahedron has twenty vertices, points where three sides meet. In A Frame for Frames these vertices are represented by certain repetitions and recurrences in each of the three stories that meet in these points. If the elements that represent the vertices were extracted and placed in the order of their first appearance, they would form another text of sorts, which might provide another perspective for evaluating the whole.”

Glennon’s stories cover a wide range of genres; diaries of adventurers, conspiracy theories, academic essays, all leading to unexpected connections. The stories, as stand-alone tales, are entertaining but it is in their interlacings that they become luminous. A Frame for Frames consists of stories about stories, adding both a platform on which to build this three dimensional creation, and the invisible conception itself. Readers will be tempted to create a dodecahedron of their own to unravel Glennon’s creation.

The ethereal creations arise, like the shadow child in “Why Are There No Penguins?”, taunting the reader with half-realized ideas. Even if the reader never sees the creation Glennon intends, the hallucinatory threads invented by the mind are magical in their own right.

Hallucination and dream states exist throughout these stories, most apparently being in “Tenebrian Chronicles” where monks spend months each year dreaming the histories and world events they later inscribe as fact.

Glennon introduces his readers to a profound journey of the mind and senses; one that will remain in their minds as clearly as if they had eaten the pages of this mesmerizing book, like the hero in the lead story “In My Father’s Library.” The quote by Francis Bacon, which prefaces “Library,” could easily be applied to the entirety of A Frame for Frames: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

No matter how the reader dips into The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames: a novel of sorts, this book will remain with them long after the final page is consumed.

See the review posted at ReadySteadyBook.

ISBN10: 0889842752
ISBN13: 9780889842755

Publisher: The Porcupine’s Quill
Publication Date: September 2005
Binding: Paperback

The book’s cover image is a photograph of a room in the Collegium Maius, Cracow, Poland, where Copernicus studied in 1502, taken by Erich Lessing. The dodecahedron illustrations are from Wikipedia.org.

Related Books:
* 3 by Perec (Includes La Disparition [The Void], a novel written entirely without the letter E) by Georges Perec
* If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Se Una Notte d’Inverno un Viaggiatore) by Italo Calvino
* Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

tags: books book reviews Dodecahedron Paul Glennon Experimental Literature Oulipian Principles OuLiPo Platonic Solid

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand”
– The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats

Children often express their displeasure by running away from home, wandering a short distance before returning once they feel their parents have been sufficiently punished. The parents, awash with joy at once more having their child, brush off any minor personality differences as residual shock from a traumatic experience. But what if the child brought home isn’t their child at all, but a changeling?

This is the premise behind Keith Donohue’s haunting debut novel, The Stolen Child. Drawing its plot and title from the W.B. Yeat’s poem of the same title, Donohue has crafted the modern fairy tale of Henry Day and the changeling (or hobgoblin) who replaces him. One summer night Henry runs into the forest and hides in a tree. It is there that he is taken by the changelings, who have been covertly watching him. If changelings wish to reenter the world, they must find a child to replace who is exactly the same age as the changeling was when he/she left. Henry becomes the magical Aniday and the changeling who replaces him becomes the new Henry Day, suddenly a musical prodigy. The Stolen Child is the story of the two young boys searching for identity in a world turned upside down.

The new Henry slowly adjusts to the life of a twentieth-century family. Having spent more than one hundred years in the forest, he spends his time in intense concentration, “I set my mind to forgetting the past and becoming a real boy again.” Aniday spends learning a way of live beyond civilization and it is only by a similar amount of effort that he maintains the ability to read and write.

Yeat’s poem shows life in the woods as one full of innocence; however, many experts suggest that the forest of fairytales is really about the journey of sexual awakening as the child moves through puberty into adulthood. Unknown creatures, dangers and pain lurk in the dark forest, a journey of pitfalls every child must travel on the road to maturity.

In Donohue’s forest, the tribe of hobgoblins exists in a life free from memories, familial ties and responsibility. Their life a perpetual existence given to the baser instincts of the body, one in which all sense of self disappears along the way.

As decades pass, Aniday lives as a permanent child in the wilderness, making friends and enemies among the hobgoblin band, struggling for survival, and trying to remember his past. The other changelings tell Aniday to “stay away from people and be content with who you are.” By settling for the life in the forest however, Aniday would lose the innocence of his dreams of a future. Both Aniday and Henry are tormented by the fleeting memories of half-remembered paths and it is these memories that keep them tied to a search for identity – destined to lose their innocence.

Donohue has created a mesmerizing world that seems to exist shifted slightly outside of our time. The Stolen Child quickly engages the reader in the familiar rhythm of childhood fairytales, allowing the magic to infuse the carefully crafted words. It is only upon stepping outside, back to reality, that questions slowly seep into the reader’s mind.

Has Henry really lived as a changeling or could he be suffering from split personality, everything being a fantasy his illness has created? Donohue says in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune Review: “The subconscious world, the world underneath, is a real world, and it’s just as valid, our imaginative reality, as our everyday reality.” Whether readers choose to approach Donohue’s offering as it is written or choose to engage the novel on an existential level, The Stolen Child is a timeless, magical novel that will linger with readers long after they read the last page.

See the review posted at ReadySteadyBook.

tags: books book reviews stolen child keith donohue

“To me, the world of fiction has always been more satisfactory than the world of reality.” Clare Morrall

Peter Straker lives in silent penance on the Devon coast in an old lighthouse, kept company only by his two cats and the seventy-eight voices he hears in his mind and dreams. Twenty-four years ago, Straker was responsible for their deaths in a horrendous train crash and has lived in self-inflicted exile ever since. He spends his days reconstructing the lives he destroyed by gathering snippets from the families left behind.

Imogen Doody’s husband left for work one day and never came home, leaving her a bitter, cantankerous shell. Working as a school caretaker, she receives a surprise inheritance of a cottage in the Devon village where Straker does his weekly shopping. Slowly a reluctant friendship develops and with it, the opening of each to possibility.

It is difficult for any author to release their second novel after critical acclaim on the scale received by Clare Morrall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour. Morrall handles her sophomore book with grace, choosing to create a more introspective novel. Natural Flights of the Human Mind is told in the alternative perspectives of Straker and Imogen. Periodically, Morrall interrupts these perspectives with the dialogues Straker carries on in his head with the seventy-eight dead. Thrown into the tide of these shifting perspectives are vignettes of the moments leading up to the accident as experienced by various members of the seventy-eight. Like the photographs and letters Straker collects from the living relatives, these vignettes are word photographs, creating an image of the deceased that is occasionally at odds with the one conjured in their dialogue with Straker.

Straker and Imogen are damaged people living in their own fiction. Straker is filled by the seventy-eight he carries with him, so caught up in the silent dialogue moderated by Maggie, one of the seventy-eight, that his silent penance has become a fictional escape. Hidden within her rage and stubborn self-reliance, Imogene finds only further pain. Straker relies on routine and autistic patterning to stave off the world. For him, “Thoughts should be logical. They should run on straight lines so that you can see the beginning and end.” The meeting of these two polar opposites, destined from the first word to be cataclysmic, becomes a story of redemption and healing through Morrall’s deft handling of her subject.

Straker has lived for many years with his only jury being the seventy-eight and his two cats, Suleiman and Magnificent. Like their namesake, Suleiman the Magnificent, The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the cats sit as his judge, ruling him by opposing any self-deception; however, it is only in regaining his own voice and sharing his crime with Imogen that Straker begins to receive redemption.

Morrall has offered her fans and critics a novel rich in emotion and pain. Natural Flights of the Human Mind is a testament to the damage families can wreak and the repercussions for the community as a whole.

Clare Morrall’s first novel, Astonishing Splashes of Colour, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2003. The publishing world was caught off guard by Morrall’s nomination, not because she was the first debut novelist shortlisted, but because Astonishing Splashes of Colour was published by Tindal Street Press, a new publisher, and only 7,000 copies of the book were in print at the time. Morrall lives in Birmingham, England where she teaches music and continues to write.

P.S. The cover image shown is from the UK version of the book.

See the review posted at ReadySteadyBook.

tags: books book reviews natural flights of the human mind clare morrall man booker prize

Three Views of Crystal Water by Katherine Govier tells the story of Vera, a young Japanese-Canadian at a crucial crossroads in her life. The story is told against the backdrop of the days leading up to World War II.

Vera’s young life has been full of familial loss–first her father left their family to follow his pearl lust to Japan and the pearl trade, then her mother commits suicide and finally her grandfather dies. Left alone, Vera travels with her grandfather’s widow to Japan to live among the ama divers, women who live with unprecedented freedom. Used to loss, Vera exhibits a skittishness in joining the life of her new village, and she is slow to trust. Vera slowly begins to develop her own luster as she takes control of her destiny. She learns the skills of the ama divers while gaining a sense of her own identity, defined by who she is rather than by those who have left her.

Alternating between Vera’s story and that of her family, we slowly gain an understanding of what has driven them in their passion for pearls. The shadowy world of Japan fighting a battle for Asian domination is the perfect foil for Vera’s tale.

This is a quiet, intimate novel with a shifting surface, as changeable as the pearl at the heart of the tale. The language is enthralling and Katherine Govier evokes a time and location that to many is shrouded with mystery.

Three Views of Crystal Water is a window into a story overlooked by many when studying World War II.

See the review at Armchair Interviews – Three Views of Crystal Water.

Ana grows up in a small house on the western coast of Oahu, Hawaii, living with three generations of her rambunctious extended family. Like her mother before her, Ana has been abandoned, raised by this group of illegitimates, notorious within their community of poor, native-Hawaiians. The first of her family to attend college and become a physician, Ana moves to Honolulu and eventually meets Nikolai while participating in rescue efforts after a hurricane devastates the neighbouring island of Kaua’i.

House of Many Gods is told from the perspectives of three narrators; Ana, Anahola (her mother, sometimes also referred to as Ana), and Nikolai. Initially each character’s path is told independent of the others and as the novel develops, the paths move inevitably toward each other. While in the beginning the narration of both Ana and Anahola adds a great deal of confusion for the reader, further into the novel the multiple perspectives add significant depth to the story.

Ana spends much of the novel isolated, using everything as a shield to protect her heart and keep the world at arms length. When Rosie finally tells Ana the truth, that she rejects everything messy and human and is just like her mother, I wanted to curl up and escape Ana’s feelings of mortification. Kiana Davenport writes Ana with such reality that I experienced the loneliness, terror and confusion along with her.

At the same time, since Davenport has so cleverly told the story from multiple perspectives, I also want to reach out and shake Ana out of her self-indulgence and guardedness. House of Many Gods captures the imagination, drawing the reader into the search for self experienced by each character.

House of Many Gods is a character driven novel but it is also a work specific to its time in history and the peoples under siege. Oahu and Russia are characters that are shaped by their time and events. History shapes both people and countries and perhaps this is the most important message Davenport shares with us, drawing the parallels of history between native-Hawaiian and Russians peoples.

While Davenport skillfully plays with techniques, using three narrators and three languages throughout the book, her techniques never interfere with the narrative. This is a mature work that will stand up well to repeated readings and study.

Read my review at Armchair Interviews – House of Many Gods.

Emma Gant, fresh out of college, has set her feet firmly on her own path. Leaving behind an impossible family situation, she charts her course for Miami to take her place on the staff of the Miami Star and by the side of her married lover.

It is the summer of 1959, Cuba has been betrayed by Castro and floods of Cuban refugees are arriving in Miami. Emma is quickly enmeshed in the lives of those sharing her hotel. Her predetermined plans for her life quickly falter as different views on life make inroads into her consciousness. With her lively intelligence and curiosity, Emma is determined to keep control of her own situation.

In Queen of the Underworld, Gail Godwin helps the reader experience Emma’s search for her essential “Emma-ness”, set against a background of chaos, both historical and physical. The concept of “usurpation” is one on which Emma spends a great deal of time. All around her is a physical reminder of this, displaced Cubans now calling the hotel home. However, Godwin draws out this theme in Emma’s work, relationships and in the relationship with her married lover.

The use of language in this work also operates on several levels. Emma’s neophyte status in the world means that, despite her desire to be seen as a woman of the world, she is continually faced with concepts, history and words she does not know. Daily she is reminded that she can’t understand the spoken word around her in her new home and wonders how she would react if she not only had to face a new life but also one where she could not speak the language. Godwin has plotted her story in a way to show the similarities between Emma’s life and those of the Cubans around her, using this mirror to reflect to Emma how she is both the usurper and the usurped.

Emma is an engaging heroine drawn vividly to life by an author of great talent. The passion and questioning exhibited by Emma mesmerizes the reader, drawing you into a life beginning surrounded by utter change.

Read my review at Armchair Interviews – Queen of the Underworld.

Good opening lines and paragraphs are tough to find but Paul Auster came up with a doozy for The Brooklyn Follies: “I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there…” The I is Nathan Glass; divorced, retired insurance salesman, estranged from his daughter, lung cancer patient (in remission) who’s looking for a place to die. To wile away the moments until then, Nathan begins by consigning to paper the human blunders, foibles, inane act and embarrassments committed by himself and others. He calls these his “Brooklyn Follies.”

Soon after his arrival in Brooklyn, Nathan runs across his nephew Tom, working at a local bookstore. A scholar destined for greatness, Tom has derailed and after years of penance driving a taxi cab, has chosen to sell rare books. What follows is a story of redemption, lost souls and the lives that intersect with Nathan and Tom’s saga.

Nathan is a lovable rogue. He exists in the calm eye of a storm while all around him chaos rules. His reentry into Tom’s life helps Tom regain his will to live and slowly reengage life. The novel thrusts the reader into this storm, disorienting the smooth flow of plot by adding new characters and continually altering the pace. The chaos is thrilling and serves to absorb the reader more fully into the search of the main characters.

Near the end of Brooklyn Follies, Auster shares a thought that permeates the novel: “Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear.” Nathan goes on to wonder who publishes books about the forgotten one. Auster has answered that question with The Brooklyn Follies, a novel chockfull of forgotten ones and little lives. Redemption for Nathan and another enthralling read from a master novelist for those of us fortunate enough to enter his Brooklyn.

As Auster reminds us, “Never underestimate the power of books.”

Read my review at Armchair Interviews – The Brooklyn Follies.