[Bookworm_Girl]

While searching for books to nominate this month, I found Starting Over: Stories by Elizabeth Spencer. I didn't nominate it because it was not available in ebook in the UK and won't be released in paperback until July 31st. Bad timing!

From Goodreads:

On the release of her first novel in 1948, Elizabeth Spencer was immediately championed by Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty, setting off a remarkable career as one of the great literary voices of the American South. Her career, now spanning seven decades, continues here with nine new stories. In Starting Over, Spencer returns to the deep emotional fault lines and unseen fractures that lie just beneath the veneer of happy family life. In “Sightings,” a troubled daughter suddenly returns to the home of the father she accidently blinded during her parents’ bitter separation; in “Blackie,” the reappearance of a son from a divorcee’s first marriage triggers a harrowing confrontation with her new family; while in “The Wedding Visitor,” a cousin travels home only to find himself entwined in the events leading up to a family wedding. In these nine stories, Spencer excels at revealing the flawed fabric of human relations.

I found another book that sounded interesting, Island Sojourn by Elizabeth Arthur. It was difficult from the sample to tell how literary it would be and if it would appeal to others. However, I thought I would share it in this thread.

From Amazon:

In Island Sojourn, Arthur has a painter's eye for recording the world's voluptuousness, a philosopher's ability to get inside the objects of experience, and a writer's sensitivity for handling feelings...Her journal can join other works on life in the Canadian wilds, such as Wacousta, and Roughing It In The Bush, as a powerful witness to the wilderness experience. Literary Guild of Canada

Arthur labors at tracking down essences and essential relationships in the progresses of wind and water, or human and animal...There are magnificent, stormy crossings to and from the island, both threatening and intimate;there are heart-stopping visions of an eagle, of swans contemplating the end of fall, of the shooting and soft death of a moose...Vigorous, scouring reportage which places Arthur firmly in line to join the Hoaglands and Dillards and other astringent precisionists. Kirkus, March 1, 1980

About Elizabeth Arthur:

Elizabeth Arthur was born in New York City, and has lived in Vermont, Wyoming, British Columbia and Indiana. She is the author of five novels - Beyond the Mountain, Bad Guys, Binding Spell, Antarctic Navigation, and Bring Deeps-- as well as two memoirs, Island Sojourn and Looking for the Klondike Stone. Her work has twice been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1990 she was the first novelist selected for participation in the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, under the auspices of the National Science Foundation.

Her novel Antarctic Navigation also sounds interesting, but it is 800 pages. It was a New York Times Notable Book and received a Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books.

From Goodreads:

The dazzling landscape central to this multifaceted tale of adventure and aspiration is the white Antarctic vastness known as the Ice. The story told is of an expedition to the South Pole, led by a young, ardent American woman, Morgan Lamont - an expedition inspired and haunted by the tragic journey, eighty years before, of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. For Morgan, Scott's life, his dream, his death, and the very concept of Antarctic navigation are obsessive emblems of the search for integrity in a morally precarious age. Freed by her mother's quixotic and frightening sacrifice and the generosity of a hitherto estranged grandfather, she sets out to fulfil her own dream - to vindicate Scott by recreating his historic polar expedition.