Fiction Mid-Week: Ella Leffland

In college I picked up a remaindered book of short stories that has remained among my most cherished books. Last Courtesies was the uneven and breathtaking 1980 fiction debut of Ella Leffland, author of an acclaimed novel-biography of Hermann Goring and a 2000 novel, Breath and Shadows, that's on my summer reading list.

I don't yet know whether the rather private Ms. Leffland's work has stood the test of time in either her life or mine--and in the reading life, those are two distinct kinds of time--but I can't help but envy a plot line like this one: "[A]n eighteenth-century bishop and his mercenary sister quarrel over their brother, a cantankerous dwarf; in the eighteen-nineties, a languid young housewife slowly goes mad as her horrified husband looks on; and two middle-aged American siblings find themselves opposed, in different ways, to the electronic age..."

If the movie options are out there, and if the cantankerous dwarf is at all sexy, may I suggest my current crush Peter Dinklage to play him?

(speaking of which, he appears with my other virtual squeeze, Vin Diesel--sadly, who had to grow hair for the part--in Find Me Guilty).

I'm sorry. We were discussing quality fiction. How did this become about me?

Please don't answer that.

[image of leaves from a linden tree inspired by Leffland's story of the same name, via philographikon]