Paulette Jiles’s News of the World has many wonderful passages. I’m partial to this one:
Maybe life is just about carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.
That’s her character Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd talking. After the Civil War, he made his living giving readings from newspapers on the frontier, the original news desert.
I saw Paulette Jiles once, just long enough to tell her I thought her novel was one of the best books ever written about Texas, just long enough for her to sign my copy.
• Sources: Paulette Jiles, News of the World; New York: William Morris, 2016, p. 121.
Miguel Salazar, “Paulette Jiles, 82, Dies; Novelist Evoked the West in ‘News of the World’”; The New York Times, July 16, 2025. It’s here:
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