The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays
Welcome ... Each story illuminates Lee’s quintessential talents ... [A] scintillating sense of humor ... Reinforces Lee’s indelible voice, contributing a rewarding addition and resource to the slim canon of her literary legacy.
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A conversational, even gossipy voice attending to amusingly eccentric characters. They are charming, the stuff of choice dinner-party anecdotes and the humorous shorts popular with midcentury magazine readers, but not especially substantial ... Most of the nonfiction in The Land of Sweet Forever is even more dispensable.
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If people want to read the lesser scribblings of a favourite author, it is surely a victimless crime. However, like most such books, it has little to offer to those who aren’t diehard fans ... The short stories, written in Lee’s youth, are all badly underdeveloped. Most fail to work even as vignettes ... On the positive side, there is already wit and charisma in the voice ... Juvenelia ... If we regard this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But it’s more properly seen – and will surely be read – for the light it sheds on Lee’s life. As such, it’s obliquely fascinating, largely because it radiates repression.
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