2003
First Published
4.00
Average Rating
210
Number of Pages
Willow Temple, combining six of the most "notable and moving stories" (Robert Taylor, Boston Globe) from the 1987 collection The Ideal Bakery with six new stories written in the years since, is Donald Hall's most important short fiction collection to date. "From Willow Temple" is the indelible story of a child's witness of her mother's adultery and of the earlier shocking loss that underlies it. The other stories, too, are reminiscent of Alice Munro and William Maxwell in their mastery of form, their deeply observed portrayals of the interior worlds of only children, and their ability to trace the emotional fault lines connecting generations. In three stories we see David Bardo at crucial junctures of his life, beginning as a child drawn to his parents' "cozy adult coven of drunks" and growing into a young man whose intense first affair undergirds a lifelong taste for the heady mix of ardor and betrayal. Hall's short stories give a "breathtakingly successful" (Chicago Tribune) account of the passionate weight of lives.
Avg Rating
4.00
Number of Ratings
38
5 STARS
34%
4 STARS
42%
3 STARS
13%
2 STARS
11%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Donald Hall
Author · 51 books
Donald Hall was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of sixteen—the same year he had his first work published. Donald Hall published numerous books of poetry. Besides poetry, Donald Hall wrote books on baseball, the sculptor Henry Moore, and the poet Marianne Moore. He was also the author of children's books. Hall edited more than two dozen textbooks and anthologies. His honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Silver medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry. Hall also served as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989. In December 1993 he and his wife poet Jane Kenyon were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, "A Life Together." In the June 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress' fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
