Michelle Huneven

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Genre Bender

Michelle Huneven
Photo by Richard PhibbsMichael Cunningham’s fourth — and first post-Pulitzer — novel is the ambitious and entertaining Specimen Days. The title, it helps to know, has been borrowed from Walt Whitman’s autobiography. So from the start we are clued in that, just as Virginia Woolf’s person and writing informed Cunningham’s......
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Divine Invention

Michelle Huneven
Photo by George DuncanTwenty-five years ago, Marilynne Robinson published Housekeeping, a strange and beautiful novel about orphan sisters living with their eccentric, possibly schizophrenic aunt on the shores of Lake Coeur d'Helene in Idaho. Housekeeping was a literary phenomenon that has been re-read, compulsively, by countless creative-writing students in the......
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Divine Invention

Michelle Huneven
Photo by George Duncan Twenty-five years ago, Marilynne Robinson published Housekeeping, a strange and beautiful novel about orphan sisters living with their eccentric, possibly schizophrenic aunt on the shores of Lake Coeur d’Helene in Idaho. Housekeeping was a literary phenomenon that has been re-read, compulsively, by countless creative-writing students in......
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The Intuitionist

Michelle Huneven
On book tour in November for her new collection of short stories, Honored Guest, Joy Williams was bumped out of an airport security line and searched. Apparently, a chemical residue was found on the outside of her bag and on a notebook. It was probably Off!, she says, as she......
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Sitting on the Meat

Michelle Huneven
“I cleaned,” says Ellen Slezak, opening the door to her West Hollywood apartment. Slezak, 46, has a scrubbed, rosy-cheeked look that her age and her sly sense of humor belie. Her apartment, a roomy, older Craftsman-style flat, is quite tidy and appealing: built-ins, wood floors, yards and yards of books......
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Desperate Hollywood Wives

Michelle Huneven
Cheat and Charmer, by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Frank, is a fat, historical Hollywood novel that reads like a tell-all roman à clef of Southern California during the 1950s witch-hunts. The book’s unlikely heroine is Dinah Lasker, a long-legged, stuttering Hollywood wife — and a snitch. Rich, happily married to......

The Birthday Party

Michelle Huneven
Photo by Mark Hunter As my 50th birthday loomed, a friend in New York gave me this advice: “You’d better do something to celebrate it, or you’ll end up always remembering that you turned 50 without doing anything special.” This, she went on to say, had happened to her. “My......

Summer Sluts, Bastard Zukes and Wannabe Early Girls

Michelle Huneven
While cleaning up my raised garden beds for fall planting, I heard a feline bleating — you couldn’t call it a proper meow. I followed the noise past the row garden into the tall grass beside the garage, where my black cat Khan lazed in a cool low spot. I......
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The Gospel of Compost

Michelle Huneven
Photos by Jack Gould I’m engaged in a radical weed-control program: I am covering my entire huge back yard in fresh, hot organic compost. I’m using it as mulch with the idea that a thick layer will smother and kill the existing weeds and crabgrass, which virtually covered the property......
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Oh, Henry!

Michelle Huneven
Photo by Bruce Weber In the months after his fourth novel, The Blackwater Lightship, was delivered for publication — it would go on to be nominated for the Booker Prize in London — Irish author Colm Toibín had the idea to write a book about five years in the life......