BOOKMARKS & INKBLOTS

Mission Statement:

Virginia Living strives to highlight Virginian authors who were born here as well as those who have decided to call the commonwealth home. We also endeavor to promote some of the best Southern Writing around. Homegrown authors like William Styron, Edward P. Jones, Ann Beattie, and Claudia Emerson join literary legends like William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mark Twain (among others obviously) and rub elbows with their Southern contemporaries—such as Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, Jesmyn Ward, and Tayari Jones (etc. etc. etc.).

-

We also want to show our support for local bookstores: Chop Suey Books in Richmond, Peach Street Books in Cape Charles, McKays Used Books in Manassas, Old Town Books in Alexandria, Bluebird Bookstop in Crozet, Too Many Books in Roanoke, New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville, and so many more. Furthermore, we are teaming up with bookstore employees as well as graduate students from Virginia university programs to publish online reviews twice a month.

-

We are currently reviewing: prose, poetry, and nonfiction.

FEATURED REVIEW

Horse

by Geraldine Brooks

2022 / Viking / 416 pp / $28

“To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict,” is Sartre being a classic cynic but also a truth-teller. Conflict is everything in a novel, nothing moves forward without it. Geraldine Brooks’ previous Pulitzer prize-winning novel, March (2005), occurs during a war—what better place for antagonism and drama. It is a novel that retells Louisa May Alcott’s book Little Women from the point of view of the March family’s absent father. And if conflict is the chief narrative driver, perspective is the paramount backseat driver—not only for revealing said conflict but for understanding it and its, hopeful, resolution.

Her latest book, Horse (2022), returns to the 1850s and Civil War era but jumps to the present as well. Theo is the son of foreign diplomats and a graduate student living in Washington D.C. When he sees a painting of a white-socked horse his neighbor is throwing out, he knows there’s something special there—he is, after all, doing his Ph.D. on equestrian art of the antebellum South.

...

Full Interview: HERE

Bio: Gerladine Brooks is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March and the international bestsellers The Secret Chord, Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, and Year of Wonders. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks lives in Massachusetts.