Good evening.

It is so nice to see you and thank you for joining us for another episode of Inside the Cover.

I am your host, Ted Ayres.

And as always, I am happy to have this brief time with you to have a book chat.

Tonight, I want to feature an author who has been a long time favorite of mine, Jane Smiley.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1949, and she grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.

She earned a B.A.

in literature from Vassar and then went on to earn three graduate degrees from the University of Iowa, including a Ph.D. in 1978.

While working towards her doctorate, she spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright scholar.

She was a professor of English at Iowa State University from 1981 until 1996, teaching undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops.

She returned to teaching in 2015 at the University of California, Riverside.

My first exposure to Smiley's talents was A Thousand Acres, which was published on January 1, 1991, as an ambitious takeoff on Shakespeare's King Lear.

This book tells a story of a successful Iowa farmer's decision to divide his farm between his three daughters.

When the youngest daughter objects, she is cut out of the will, setting off a chain of events that exposes and explodes long suppressed emotions.

The book takes on themes of truth, justice, love and pride and the dangerous topography of humanity.

I remember being engrossed and engaged in the story and Smiley's writing talents.

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for this book.

I also read and truly loved Smileys Moo, a novel published in 1995.

The setting of this book is a large university in the American Midwest, known familiarly as Moo U because of its large agricultural college.

By the way, could her time as an academic at Iowa State University been a possible influence on her writing?

The novel is a clever and tongue in cheek satire that follows the lives of dozens of characters over the course of the 1989-1990 academic year.

I found the book to be clever, humorous and entertaining and an insightful look at higher education.

Moo was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

I read A Thousand Acres and Moo several years ago.

The impetus for this current homage to Smiley was my reading of Perestroika in Paris, which I recently discovered in the little free public library I utilize.

After releasing my seriousness and embracing my imagination, I found myself enjoying this book, which can only be called Whimsical.

I mean, when the protagonist is a thoroughbred racehorse who finds herself living in Paris, who become friends with a raven named Raoul, an elegant German shorthaired pointer named Frieda, mallard ducks named Sid and Nancy, two dark gray rats named Conrad and Curt.

And who ends up living on the grounds of the estate where a 97 year old French lady lives with her six year old great grandson?

How can logic and reality be factors?

I tried to determine if Smiley was using these characters in this story as an allegory or as a symbolic representation of some facet of the real world.

For instance, is it possible for disparate individuals to overcome differing outlooks and understandings to actually communicate and learn from each other, or to make a better world for all concerned?

I'm not certain.

I only know the book was fun and I enjoyed learning from the animals.

In this regard, I am reminded of and would recommend Watership Down by Richard Adams, which was published in 1972.

That's our show.

We have featured Jane Smiley and three of her works.

I hope we have entertained and enticed you to find a smiley book and read.

Goodnight.