Word: snow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...conferences. Guterson, known for his flannel shirts and the home schooling of his four children, was until recently a high school teacher who cited as his inspiration the schoolroom classic To Kill a Mockingbird. But in the midst of this unpresuming existence, his meticulously researched yet crackling debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), became one of the fastest-selling literary novels of the decade, moving more than 2.5 million copies in paperback even as it won critical prizes. (The movie version will be released this fall...
...miraculous debut and the succeeding five years of expectations. "I'm scared enough when I sit down to write," he says disarmingly, "that there isn't a lot of extra fright that goes with having a best-selling novel behind me." Besides, East of the Mountains was started before Snow Falling on Cedars had fallen onto nearly every bedside table. Yet the fact remains that bookstores are filled with 500,000 hardbound copies of a novel whose main virtue is its uneventful drift...
...through the autumn landscape--"the prairie smelled of sage and of the dampness held in the earth"--he goes back in memory to his boyhood days of picking apples, his teenage courtship of Rachel, his service in Italy during World War II. Though the narrative is as vagrant as Snow Falling on Cedars was rooted, Guterson's gift for spinning atmospheric spells has not deserted him, and moment after moment flashes into life with the quick vividness of a photograph: the men in war going out "in mattress covers sewn into snow tunics and in creepers made of tightly knotted...
...snow is most oppressive if you live in the dreaded Quad. The three Quad Houses are roomy, clean, attractive...and 15 minutes from the rest of campus. Quadlings will quickly bond while waiting at shuttle stops...
Your laundry room. If there's one in your house, savor every wash. Soon you'll be trekking three miles through the snow just so you can get that pizza grease stain out of your khakis before throwing them in the industrial dryer that will shrink them beyond all recognition...