Here's how this game works: The person who's "it" enters a quote
from a published work. It can be fiction, nonfiction, poetry,
anything. The challenge is to guess the *author* of the quote.
The first person to guess correctly is now "it" and gets to
choose the next quote. (You should wait for your guess to be
confirmed by the person who entered the quote before going
ahead and giving a new one.)

If people are having trouble guessing your author, it's considered
polite to give hints or offer up an additional quote by the same
author.

When you give a guess, it's always nice if you can indicate the
reasoning behind it. One object of this game is to learn a little
more about literature.

230 responses total.

I'll start:

        Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory,
        curving like a trout through the rings of previous
        risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.

        Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages
        are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp
        as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known
        from before the time of blindness, the remembered and
        the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.

        It is obviously very early. The light is no more than
        dusk that leaks past the edges of the blinds. But I see,
        or remember, or both, the uncurtained windows, the bare
        rafters, the board walls with nothing on them except a
        calendar that I think was here the last time we were,
        eight years ago.

        What used to be aggressively spartan is shabby now.
        Nothing has been refreshed or added since Charity and
        Sid turned the compound over to the children. I should
        feel as if I were waking up in some Ma-and-Pa motel in
        hard-times country, but I don't. I have spent too many
        good days and nights in this cottage to be depressed by
        it.

Hint: These are the opening paragraphs of a novel published in the
1980's. Remember, the object is to guess the author.

I was going to guess Brautigan because of the "trout" reference, and the
descriptive writing.  But TFinA, his seminal work was written before 1970,
so my guess is Brett Easton Ellis.  Just because.

Not Brautigan or Ellis.

The author is a Pulitzer Prize winner and has been writing fiction
since at least the 1940's. To the best of my knowledge he's still
alive, but I'm not certain of that. He'd be in his late eighties
now. (And yes, my referring to him as "he" indeed means that he's
male.)

Thomas Pynchon?

Not Pynchon.

Here's another quote from the same novel:

        It is May, only a few weeks before the end of school.
        I am in my office eating a bag lunch and grading
        papers, with the door closed. Most of my colleagues
        eat together, but I have rarely felt that I can
        afford the time. Today I am less inclined that ever
        to join the cabal. The department has delayed and
        delayed its decisions on promotion, and everybody
        is on edge. Rumors expand to fill every pause in
        the talk, rivalries and jealousies surface, we
        watch each other for clues to conspiracy or secret
        knowledge. I have told myself that I am not part of
        that expectation, hope, and dread. I have done my
        job. If they like me and feel like reappointing me,
        fine. If they don't, I will manage. Meantime I
        have themes to read.

        Bushwah, as they would have said in Sewickley,
        Pennsylvania, when Sid was growing up there. I
        would sell my fair white body in the public 
        square to stay on.

Some deft turns of phrase there. "Rumors expand to fill
every pause in the talk..."

Remmers?  Urk...it might even be me!

   shot in the dark...john updike?

Not Updike, but not a bad guess. Not Curl, either.

I don't know anything about this author other than what's in the
biographical sketch included with the book I've been quoting from.
In addition to being a novelist he has had a distinguished career
as a teacher of writing, having taught at the University of
Wisconsin, Harvard, and Stanford. One of his books from the 1970's
won a Pulitzer Prize, and another from the same decade the National
Book Award.

no way could it be jonathan kozol, could it?

Not Kozol. (Does Kozol write fiction?)

This item, agora 9, is now linked to books 53.

gay talese

 gore vidal?

Don Dellil, I don't know if I spelled his name right, he wrote a book called
"White Noise that i have skimmed that seemed similar to this style.

errr that should be Don Dellilo...

Not Talese, Vidal, or Dellilo.

herman wouk?

_White Noise_ was an interesting book.... (Sorry for drift...)

Not Wouk.

james michener?

Not Michener.

Saul Bellow?

Not Bellow.

I don't believe our author is quite as well-known as the folks
people have been guessing.

how about phillip roth?  (i don't know if he's still breathing...)

Nope, Roth is too well-known. :)

well, i guess i'll wait till someone else figures it out and try the next one.
bummer.

Hmm, perhaps this person is too well-unknown. :)  I'll keep giving
more excerpts and hints, and if nobody has it by the end of the
week, I'll reveal who it is.

Our author writes essays as well as fiction and has published a
book of essays about the American West, where he was raised. Here
is an excerpt from one of the essay, about a camping expedition in
the Rocky Mountains:

        We still followed the creek. Every few hundred yards,
        hung on that thread of bright water, was a bead lake,
        part of the leavings of the glacier that had scooped
        the broad back of this uplift. Some lakes were small,
        some were eutrophic, on their way to becoming flowery
        meadows; but at one we stopped, incredulous and
        rebellious. It was almost perfectly round, a half
        mile in diameter. Its surface, riffled by a light,
        changeable wind, was dimpled all over with the circles
        of rising trout. There was a grassy glade above a
        crescent of black-sand beach. Good God, we asked
        each other, where is the fool taking us? What's the
        matter with *this*?

        Ospreys watched us from their dead snags. Envying
        them their habitat, promising ourselves that if we
        didn't like where the packer stopped we would make
        him bring us back here, limping, pooped, and
        irritable, we reluctantly went on.

        Finally we heard a bell and saw the hobbled horses
        grazing among big, well-spaced trees. The packer,
        driving picket pins with the butt of an ax and
        setting up a stained white tent, gave us a cheerful
        greeting. Beyond him, the trees thinned out to
        nothing at some kind of edge. Still not sure we
        didn't want to go back to the black-sand beach, we
        went to the edge to look.

        The land fell away at our feet; the sky opened like
        a hot air balloon filling, a gust of blue. Twenty
        feet below us was deep water; spread out before us
        was an oval lake. We were between curves of blue
        like a clam between the valves of its shell. Nobody
        said a word. We watched the breeze move on the water,
        darkening the blue; we saw how the blude shaded into
        green under the forested far shore; we felt, as much
        as saw, how infinite the sky was, with clouds and
        snow peaks dreaming at its edge, and none of us
        would have argued with the packer's choice.

Edward Abbey

Nah.

Dunno Edward Abbey, but it's not him.

   i'm tempted to say colin fletcher, but he's originally english.

Well it's a good thing you resisted the temptation to say Colin
Fletcher, because it's not him. :)

Here's an excerpt from another essay, in which the author talks
about being a writer in the West:

        As a writer from the West, I discovered long ago how it felt
        to be misinterpreted. Even well-intentioned people who came
        to praise often saw in me, or expected from me, things that
        I was not prepared to deliver, and misread things I *was*
        prepared to deliver. Now and then I used to put on my
        armor and break a lance against the windmill of the cowboy
        myth that dominated not only much western writing but
        almost all outside judgment of western writing. We rode
        under the shadow of the big hat, but as they used to say
        of Ronald Reagan, we were big hat, no cows. Nothing could
        convince them in New York or Massachusetts that there was
        anything of literary interest in the West except cowboys.

        Now even the cowboys annually gather in Elko, Nevada, to
        read their poems to one another. Some of those, maybe
        most, are real cowboys such as I knew when I was young--
        hired men on horseback with hands so callused they would
        hardly close. Some are more literary.

        Real cowboys have more brutality and less chivalry in them
        than the literary kind. Some of them have been subverted
        by literary propaganda and believe their own myth. Others,
        I am sure, are trying to do what any writer is trying to
        do: render the texture and tensions of their own lives,
        their own occupation, their own place. Their trouble is
        that if they write with honesty about exploitation,
        insecurity, hard work, injuries, and cows, none of which
        make even a walk-on appearance in _The Virginian_ and
        most of the horse opera it has spawned, they will find a
        smaller and less enthusiastic audience than if they had
        written about crooked sheriffs and six-guns.

        Not being greatly sympathetic with literary cowboys, I
        have myself written only two cowboy stories in a long
        life. Both of them are grim little dramas of work,
        weather, and cows, with no six-guns, no sheriffs, no
        dance-hall girls, no walk-downs, not even a saloon. One
        of them, "Genesis," is probably as good a story as I
        ever wrote; but its audience was considerably smaller
        than that for Hopalong Cassidy.

I'm tempted to say "Tony Hillerman" but it isn't him.  I'm trying to remember
who wrote "All The Pretty Horses," but can't.  Thomas McGuane is another
not-so-western western writer, but I don't think it's him either.

Not Hillerman or McGuane. I don't know if the author wrote "All the
Pretty Horses."

Just learned that the author is deceased; died in 1993.

In addition to his literary achievements, he was an educator who
founded a respected writing program at Stanford University.

Okay, the weekend is over and nobody got it, so I'll give the
answer. The author is Wallace Stegner. His writing credits include
the novels _The Big Rock Candy Mountain_, 1943; _Joe Hill_, 1950
(I assume the same Joe Hill that was the basis for a movie and a
Joan Baez song); _Angle of Repose_, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize), _The
Spectator Bird_, 1976 (National Book Award); and _Crossing to
Safety_, 1987 (the first couple of quotes are from this). Also the
nonfiction works _The Sound of Mountain Water_, 1969; and _Where
the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in
the West_, 1992 (from which I took the other quotes).

Since nobody got this, I suppose the next quote is up for grabs.
If you've got one, go for it.

Did the song _The Big Rock Candy Mountain_ (which has a line that I
remember as "The lemonade spring where the bluebird signs") arise from the
novel, or vica versa? I learned the song in the 40's (Outing Club
material) but haven't known its origin. 

I have had this one particular short one stuck in my head for a while, so 
I will grab this excellent opportunity.
It's fairly easy, you guys should get it in moments.

        Upon the bed I gave her her ballad.  
        Her lips replied without words.

Have fun!

Re #36: I don't know what the relationship between the song and the
book is. 

(Dunno the author of adania's quote either, alas...)

Lemon icecream
Cinnamon Tea
There I wanna be where the livin' is free.
Won't you come along with me to the Bigrock Candy Mountain.
Thats where I'd like to be.
By the Soda Water Fountain adn beneath the yum-yum tree

No I don't have  a guess for your author, I just burst into song now and then.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss