Kate’s 2¢: “Birds In Fall: A NovelL by Brad Kessler

“Birds In Fall: A NovelL by Brad Kessler

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

   The airplane that crashed was, of course, analogous to a big bird. Appropriately, the surviving wife is an ornithologist specializing in bird migration. The simile of the King Fisher Bird is threaded throughout the story.

   At one point, the victims’s families sit outside and look toward the moon with binoculars to see birds flying past the moon’s light.

–Thousands of birds under the  cover of darkness, riding the wind like a wave.

   It was poignant at the end to have the King Fisher awaiting his mate, ready to dive to gift her a fresh fish.

   I enjoyed this melancholy tale of sadness and hope of a brighter future.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brad Kessler (born Feb 15, 1963) is a prize-winning novelist and non-fiction writer whose work has been translated into several languages. He is best known for his novel Birds in Fall which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and his memoir Goat Song about living with goats and the culture of pastoralism.

   His second novel, Birds In Fall, was published in 2006 by Scribner. Set on a remote island off Nova Scotia, the novel is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Halcyon days. It follows the grief and recovery of ornithologist Anna Gathreaux and an international cast of characters after the crash of Swissair flight 111. Birds in Fall won critical acclaim and earned Kessler a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It went on to win the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction.

Kessler  is married to the photographer-activist Dona Ann McAdams. They collaborated on a photography-text project, the Garden of Eden that documented the lives of people living with severe mental illness in an adult home on Coney Island where McAdams worked for decades offering art therapy. The Garden of Eden won the 2002 Lang-Taylor Prize from Duke University’s The Center for Documentary Studies. The couple also co-authored A Woodcutter’s Christmas (Council Oaks Books, 2001), Kessler fictional text based on McAdams’ photo series of discarded Christmas trees on the streets of New York City.

In 1998, Kessler and McAdams moved to Sandgate, Vermont where they eventually raised dairy goats and became farmers and licensed cheesemakers. Their transition from work on paper to works on the land, and the blending of the two, culture and agriculture, is an ongoing project of their Northern Spy Farm.

Kessler teaches creative writing at the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He is a graduate of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Birds In Fall: A Novel DBC13112

Kessler, Brad. Reading time: 7 hours, 42 minutes.

Read by Mark Hintz.

Human Relations

General

Psychological Fiction

One fall night, an innkeeper on a remote island in Nova Scotia watches an airplane plummet to the sea. As the search for survivors envelops the island, the mourning families gather at the inn, waiting for news of those they have lost. Here among strangers, they form an unusual community, struggling for comfort and consolation. At the center of the story is Ana Gathreaux, an ornithologist who specializes in bird migration, and whose husband perished on the flight. 2006. Adult. Some descriptions of sex. Strong language.

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