{"id":2113,"date":"2015-05-13T20:31:57","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T14:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2015-05-13T20:31:57","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T14:31:57","slug":"on-kent-harufs-our-souls-at-night-the-last-waltz-in-holt-colorado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/williamjcobb.com\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/05\/13\/on-kent-harufs-our-souls-at-night-the-last-waltz-in-holt-colorado\/","title":{"rendered":"On Kent Haruf's "Our Souls at Night": The Last Waltz in Holt, Colorado"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I felt a mixture of sadness and readerly pleasure upon opening Kent Haruf’s final, posthumous novel, Our Souls at Night<\/em>, to be published by Knopf this month. I first encountered Haruf’s fiction in 1999, when I was assigned his novel Plainsong<\/em> to review for the Houston Chronicle. Ever since then I’ve read all of Haruf’s fiction, with perhaps Eventide<\/em> (2004) being my favorite. I also had the good fortune to come to know Haruf, as I live in Colorado about an hour south of where he had a house near Salida. He was a soft-spoken, kind man, who worked as a teacher for many years, and, when I met him, was retired. He confessed to me that he was glad to be done with it. One of the main characters of Plainsong is a teacher, as is Louis Waters, the (retired) hero of\u00a0Our Souls at Night.<\/em>
\n <\/em>Simply put, it’s a terrific book\u2014understated, lyrical and deft\u2014focusing on the lives of people who are often overlooked in the world, the denizens of a small town on the eastern plains of Colorado. I reviewed it for the Dallas Morning News<\/em>, and will post my review here when it appears, in a couple weeks I would guess. Meanwhile fans of Haruf’s fiction should know that they won’t be disappointed wit this new novel. To me it’s better than Benediction<\/em> (2013), his most recent novel before this.
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So I felt a mixture of sadness and readerly pleasure upon opening Kent Haruf’s final, posthumous novel, Our Souls at Night, to be published by Knopf this month. I first encountered Haruf’s fiction in 1999, when I was assigned his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,29,1,38],"tags":[55,85,95,114,178],"class_list":["post-2113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booksfilm","category-the-west","category-uncategorized","category-writing","tag-book-reviewing","tag-fiction-writing","tag-good-fiction","tag-kent-haruf","tag-the-west"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t