Christopher Hart
Unhappy Thanksgiving
Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of the hugely successful In the Heart of the Sea, the extraordinary story of the Essex, an early inspiration for the greatest of all Great American Novels About A Fish, Moby-Dick. Now he has taken as his subject another myth, indeed the founding myth of the United States: that of the Pilgrim Fathers and the first Thanksgiving, when they sat down with their friends the Indians and ate turkey and pumpkin pie and cranberry jelly together, and a great nation was born.
And that, as the author points out here, is where the traditional, optimistic accounts of the Mayflower adventure usually end. Because after that, things began to go awry. The immigrants and asylum-seekers bred faster than the natives,
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'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
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Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553