Stella Gibbons "Cold Comfort Farm"; it mentions none of her other works—while providing her "bêtes noires" Morgan and Mary Webb with full entries. To Gibbons, "Cold Comfort Farm" became "That Book" or "You-Know-What", its title never mentioned. Despite her growing irritation and expressed distaste for it, the book continued to be lauded by successive generations of critics, Boston described it as "one of those rare books of comic genius that imprints itself on the brain and can never afterwards be eradicated". A more negative view of the book has been expressed by the literary critic Mary Beard, who considers it "a rather
The Narrows (Petry novel) The Narrows (Petry novel) The Narrows is a 1953 novel by African-American writer Ann Petry. “The Narrows” is the name of the African-American section of the fictional town of Monmouth, Connecticut, in which most of the novel's action takes place. Though less famous than Petry's earlier novel, "The Street", "The Narrows" is her longest novel and, critic Hilary Holladay argues, her most complex: “"The Narrows" represents the full flowering of Petry’s preoccupation with human relationships.” The novel is written in the third person, narrated from the perspective of several different characters, often in flashback episodes. The epigraph in "The Narrows"