Patrick Murtha
Reader
This 1896 book about life on the coast of Maine, which Willa Cather regarded so highly and was influenced by, is difficult to pigeonhole. Not quite a novel, low on “plot”, although fictional. I wouldn’t call it a short-story sequence or a collection of sketches, since the separate chapters are not all detachable (as they are in Winesburg, Ohio, for example). Certainly semi-autobiographical. But, however one chooses to characterize it, it is a beautiful, luminous book.
