The Stars Are Still Shining: Book Life, Education, Culture, and Ideas That Endure

The Stars Are Still Shining: Book Life, Education, Culture, and Ideas That Endure
Scores of writers produced best-selling novels and exciting stories now buried by time in the out-of-print boneyard. Amy Johansson/Shutterstock
Jeff Minick
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Out of print. Can there be three sadder words for a living author?

In 1975, Farrar Straus & Giroux published Larry Woiwode’s “Beyond the Bedroom Wall.” Here was an extraordinary novel over 600 pages long, a tale of heartbreaking beauty written by a young man about a mid-20th-century American family. Novelist John Gardner, a writer who set high standards for fiction, called it “simply brilliant” and “an enormous intelligent novel,” adding that “nothing more beautiful and moving has been written in years.” Esteemed literary critic Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post ranked “Beyond the Bedroom Wall” as one of the great American novels of the 20th century.
Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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