Little Century is a book I’d recommend to anyone who embraces the dark and bright sides of life with equal gusto.

At age 65, she re-enrolled at Stanford to finish the degree she’d abandoned 47 years earlier. Her writing teacher, John L’Heureux, was impressed by her writing and personally invited her into the Stegner Fellows program upon her graduation. Doerr published the award-winning Ibarra when she was 74 years old.

Orientation is not about “alienation,” modern-day or otherwise, nor about the effects of a particular cultural transition or economic decline; it’s about loneliness. About the awful, persistent distance between you and me, between me and me, between each of us and the spiritual-whatever in the universe; all of which keeps us wondering what the hell this life is about, and how we will survive it. This seems an important distinction to me, and what has allowed Orozco’s work – some of it 16 years-old – to debut with full emotional resonance.

One indisputable factor that deprived us of more opportunities to luxuriate in Lampedusa’s gifts was a diagnosis of lung cancer at the age of 60. The diagnosis came just a few months after he finished the novel, two publisher rejections already in hand, a third which would arrive weeks before he died in July of that year.

While Gay himself might prize being considered among the Southern greats, his stories of desolation and beauty -- brimming, yes, with the familiar Gothic elements of violence and darkness of hearts -- feed and trouble our souls, whether or not we come to the text already knowing the “timeless tolling of whippoorwills, both bitter and reassuring,” or have passed ugly nights in a honkytonk, or keep a rifle or a pistol (or both) under the bed (as most of Gay’s characters do). “You need to know what a man’s capable of. You need to know what things cost.”

"I suppose I qualify as a late bloomer but I don’t feel like one. The term has connotations of stagnation, finally followed by some kind of transformation. I’d probably prefer to equate myself to a fine wine or good cheese, something that takes time, passion, and dedication to mature perfectly."

I myself am hesitant to use the word “late” (or “older,” for that matter) in reference to writers over 40. Late relative to what and according to whose definition of early or on-time?