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Brian Hall grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and attended Harvard College. After getting his bachelor's degree in English in 1981, he ran away for two years, bicycling and camping in western and eastern Europe. On his return, he wrote his first book, Stealing from a Deep Place: Travels in Southeastern Europe. Seven books have followed, five of them novels. He worked freelance as a journalist for a short time, writing for Travel-Holiday, the New York Times Magazine, and the New Yorker. He teaches at Colgate University and lives in Ithaca, New York.
Brian Hall's website
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Brian Hall discusses his novel Fall of Frost
Your relationship with the figure of Robert Frost is one of deep attachment mixed with some ambivalence. Can you talk about what first drew you to Frost? What specifically appealed to you about his poetry?
I've always preferred poetry that has a good deal of surface lucidity. It's hard to write poetry of this variety that feels weighty as well as good, because it's really the thought that counts; that, and a good ear. You can't hide behind an elaborate form or allusive obscurity. Perhaps this sort of poetry appeals to me because it's closest to being a purified and heightened form of what I strive to create in my prose: concision, wit, insight, close listening, and an awareness of the multiple meanings of every word you use. Frost was fantastically good at hearing how common words fight with each other and with themselves, tugging in several directions toward different goals. He also was blessed (in his art, anyway) with an uncommonly large store of
"negative capability," which happens to be the attribute of artists that I most admire.
I was drawn to write about Frost when I came across a brief mention of his trip to the U.S.S.R. to meet with Khrushchev. I hadn't ...
Novelist, biographer, and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London on October 5, 1949.
He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, and studied at Yale University as a Mellon Fellow, where he completed Notes for a New Culture: ...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
Fall of Frost
Try:
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
by Peter Ackroyd
Sonny Brewer is the author of the novels, The Poet of Tolstoy Park, A Sound Like Thunder, Cormac - The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, and The Widow and the Tree. Brewer also edited the anthology series Stories from the Blue Moon... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Fall of Frost
Try:
The Poet of Tolstoy Park
by Sonny Brewer
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