| reviewed by Charles T. Markee | [more] [back] |
It's all about books. This unusual documentary is a mystery, a quest and a peculiar immersion into the world of writing. Mark Markowitz wrote and directed this film that takes us along with him on his search for a one-book author, Dow Mossman, whose novel is celebrated in a May, 1972 New York Times Book Review as a work of genius. The Stones of Summer, published thirty years before this movie was released and its author, Mossman, virtually disappeared from the literary landscape.
Markowitz tells us the story in three parts and during his search he finds people associated with the book, the author and the writing industry in general. During these exchanges many, many literary works are mentioned and I have listed them at the end of this review. It's this fact as well as the nuggets of writing wisdom elicited from a variety of people in the world of books and publishing that makes this film so intriguing for both writers and readers. Among other things, we learn about the obsession of writing a novel and the total involvement required of the author in order to live within the novel's fictional world while it's being written.
Markowitz takes us through his discoveries and his excitement as well as his discouragement and his frustration as he runs into one blind alley after another. His obsession with Mossman's novel and the creation of this film document become a metaphor for the novel writer's obsessive task. Furthermore the occurrence in the literary world of one-book authors raises unanswered yet interesting questions about the meaning and nature of the process. It explores and discusses the obstacles as well as the motivations that exist for novel writers.
Literary Books referenced in the movie credits of Stone Reader (2002).
William Wordsworth Tintern Abbey
Dow Mossman The Stones of Summer
James Joyce Poems
Dubliners
John Seelye The Kid, Beautiful Machine
Dr. Seuss The Cat in the Hat
Ben Hogan Power Golf
Crocket Johnson Harold and the Purple Crayon
Lord Byron Collected Works
James Frederick The Darkened Sky
Dan Guenther China Wind
Doris Lessing The golden Notebook & introduction to 1972 edition
Siri Hustvedt The Blindfold
William Kotzwinkle The Fan Man
R.A. Lafferty Four Mansions
John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dances
Ross Lockridge, Jr. Raintree County
William Manchester The Last Lion
Ferol Egan Fremont
A. Yehoshua Five Seasons
Janet Horhouse The Furies
Claire Bee Chip Hilton Series
Christopher Isherwood Berlin Stories
Peter Taylor A Summons to Memphis
Virginia Woolf A Voyage Out
James Lord Picasso and Dora
Milos Forman Turnaround
Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina
Colin Dexter
Edith Wharton The Reef
Dan Simmons Hyperion Tetralogy
Ford Maddox Ford
Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn
Puddinhead Wilson
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Autobiography
F. W. Dixon The Tower Treasure
Madeleine L'Engle A Wrinkle in Time
Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea
The Sun Also Rises
Farewell to Arms
Henry Roth Call it Sleep
Leslie Fiedler Collected Essays
Love and Death in The American Novel
Waiting for the End
The Stranger in Shakespeare
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye
Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind
Edgar Allan Poe Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
James T. Farrell Studs Lonigan
W.G. Serald The Emigrants
Alain Robbe-Grillet Jealousy
Alberto Moravia
Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Joseph Skvorecky The Engineer of Human Souls
Knut Hamsun
John LeCarre
James Ellroy
Alan Furst
Raymond Chandler
Donald Barthelme Sixty Stories
Dashell Hammett
Franz Lidz Unstrung Heroes
Frank Conroy Stop Time
Midair
Body and Soul
Patrick MacGill The Rat-Pit
Tony Tanner City of Words
F.O. Matthiessen American Renaissance
Alfred Kazin On Native Grounds
Wright Morris The Territory Ahead
Kurt Vonnegut Cat's Cradle
Kay Redfield Jamison Touched with Fire
An Unquiet Mind
John A. Williams Sissie
The Man Who Cried I Am
Cynthia Ozick Myth and Metaphor
Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar
Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March
Marcus Goodrich Delilah
William Gaddis The Recognitions
Howard Mosher Northern Borders
Joseph McElroy Ancient History: A Paraphrase
Philip Roth Goodbye Columbus
Stephen King Carrie
Herman Melville Moby Dick
Lewis Mumford
Jack Kerouac On the Road
Richard Yates
Robert Coover
William Thackeray Vanity Fair
Connie Willis Lincoln's Dreams
The Doomsday Rush
The Bible
F. Scott Fitzgerald This side of Paradise
The Great Gatsby
Tender is the Night
Wright Morris My Uncle Dudley
John Barth The Floating Opera
Jorge Luis Borges Collected Essays
William Cotter Murray Michael Joe
Alistair MacLean
James Jones The Thin Red Line
Norman Mailer The Naked and the Dead
Helen MacInnes
H.G. Wells
Arthur Conan Doyle The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes
John Updike Couples
Joseph Heller Catch-22
Something Happened
Thorstein Verlen The Theory of the Leisure Class
Chaim Potok The Chosen
Emily Bronte
Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird
Thomas Heggen Mr. Roberts
Thomas Pynchon V.
Mario Puzo The Godfather
Robert C.S. Downs The Fifth Season
Maura Stanton Molly Companion
Bruce Dobler Icepick
C.D.B. Bryan
Paul Engle
John Irving
Gail Godwin
Jonathan Penner
Andre Dubus
John Casey
Jane Barnes Casey
Tom McHale
Kurt Vonnegut Palm Sunday
Mother Night
Cat's Cradle
Jose Donoso
Nelson Algren Colette Claudine at School
Cheri
Milan Kundera Testaments Betrayed
Robert Lowell
W.H. Auden
Mary Shelley Frankenstein
William Faulkner Soldier's Pay
Vance Bourjaily
Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano
Raymond Carver
John Legget Ross and Tam
Fyodor Dostoevsky The Devils
John Aldridge Classics and Contemporaries
Terry Southern Red Dirt Marijuana
Vladimir Nabokov Speak
Memory
Lolita
Frederick Exley A Fan's Notes
John Dos Passos
Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie
Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer
Chaucer
Emily Dickinson
D.H. Lawrence Apocalypse
William Shakespeare
Willa Cather
Ed Gorman Harlequin
James Webb Fields of Fire
Casanova History of My Life
The Complete James Fenimore Cooper
Charles Dickens Great Expectations
William Wharton Dad
J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Emile Zola
John Marquand Point of No Return
Hamilton Basso The View From Pompey's Head
Bernard Malamud Dubin's Lives
Reviewed June 18, 2005 Copyright 2005 Charles T. Markee
MPAA: Rated PG-13 for brief strong language.
| Copyright 2005 Charles T. Markee | [more] [back] |