“I remember the first novel in English I read through was a Scottish novel called The House with the Green Shutters. […] When I read that, I wanted to be Scotch.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, interviewed by the Paris Review in July 1966
“To pick up a pen is to place oneself outside the community in the act of being self-conscious about it. As Burns discovered, it is not really possible to write about community and remain uncompromised within it.”
—read Dorothy McMillan’s essay “Rural Realism”, on George Douglas Brown’s THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS