Summer reading
Sam Tanenhaus, the gaffer at the NY Times book review, writes about summer heat and literature.
In William Faulkner’s fiction, the “ardent and unheeding sun” pours down mercilessly on parched country roads and backwoods hollows. “Heat quivered up from the asphalt, giving to the familiar buildings about the square a nimbus quality,” Faulkner writes of a sleepy town in his novel “Light in August.” Elsewhere he describes the grim fates dealt in “the bloody September twilight.”
