Victoria Shorr is a writer and political activist who lived in Brazil for ten years. Currently she lives in Los Angeles, where she cofounded the Archer School for Girls, and is now working to found a college-prep school for girls on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.Shorr's new novel is Backlands.
Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:
Funny you should ask—I am on a Coleridge bender at the moment, and it's all I want to talk about. It started this winter, when someone mentioned Alathea Hayter's Voyage in Vain, about Coleridge traveling to Malta to escape home—and opium. Something caught my imagination—I knew little of Coleridge beyond what we all know, "Kubla Khan," the interrupted opiumVisit Victoria Shorr's website.dream. I picked up the book, and found myself immediately drawn—as were so many of Coleridge's contemporaries—into a life of seething, half-thrilling, half maddening poetic passion, and the era of the Sublime—almost a voyage itself, far away from our own "Get Comfortable" lives and times. I then went on to the two volume biography by the brilliant Richard Holmes—I'm on Volume Two, but holding out hope that it will last forever. If it doesn't, I'll turn to Susanna Hecht's Scramble for the Amazon, about Euclides da Cunha, the great Brazilian writer, who chronicled a tragic popular uprising in the Backlands there in the 1890s, helped map the Amazon, and lived to be killed, Brazilian-style, in Rio, by his wife's lover.
The Page 69 Test: Backlands.
My Book, The Movie: Backlands.
--Marshal Zeringue
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