Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Gunn, Neil M.

Gunn, Neil M.

The Silver Darlings, [45] 73; Highland River, [77] 32

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20230301100053 Jim Crumley on Neil Gunn, Highland River, Slightly Foxed 77

The River and Its Source

Jim Crumley on Neil Gunn, Highland River

There are two memorials to Neil Gunn in his birthplace of Dunbeath on the Caithness coast. One is a statue and the other is a squat black typewriter. The typewriter is a mid-1930s Imperial. I have never much cared for the concept of sacred relics, but if pushed I could make a case for that typewriter. It was the one on which Gunn wrote Highland River (1937), a novel so exquisitely wrought that it conferred on his native landscape the gift of immortality.
20150301120041 Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings, Slightly Foxed Shop

The Call of the Sea

Galen O’Hanlon on Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings

It’s a wonderful thing when a book so fires the imagination that it becomes more real than the world around you, when the mind is totally absorbed, the page dissolves, and you begin to exist differently. It was mainly a thing of long childhood summers, when I was a musketeer, then a Viking, a wizard, a centaur – once even a quickfooted warrior mouse. Sadly it stopped in adolescence, when these things weren’t done . . .

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