Greg Jackson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a resident at the MacDowell Colony, and he holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. Prodigals is his first book. He tagged ten top books that can "help us to see ourselves more clearly and understand life better," including:The Boat by Nam LeRead about the other books on the list.
A Vietnamese writer in grad school weighs what use to make of his father’s experience at My Lai. A young Colombian assassin dreams of aparadise shimmering in the Caribbean beaches to the north. An ageing painter in New York, haunted by lost love and self-loathing, attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter. Told with immersive fluency, and a ravishing power and grace, these stories possess an imaginative range that reflects the ethos of literary endeavour at its best. For all the human frailty Le documents, he returns again and again to our small acts of perseverance amid violence, reminding us how hard we must fight to preserve reasonable hope and lending credence to the notion that literature might help us.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
