Meeks is a feat of desolating literary spellcraft

Never mind whether Rubin or the dozens of other readers who lodged complaints last week are for or against the war in Iraq. His complaint about distortions is right.

To be fair, the Globe's Sunday story on the larger antiwar protest was written by staff reporter Bryan Bender and was longer (830 words) than the Monday Associated Press story (520).

“Meeks is a feat of desolating literary spellcraft, irresistible for its bleak hilarity and the sere brilliance of Julia Holmes’s prose.”
—Wells Tower (author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned)

“The world of Meeks is cruel, cold, and weird, suffocating in laws so strange they very nearly resemble our own. Julia Holmes is that rare artist who, with invention and mythology, reveals nothing less than the most secret inner workings of the real world we overlook every day. A masterful debut by a writer of the most forceful originality.”
—Ben Marcus (author of Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String)


Such distinctions -- among newspaper people, anyway -- mean that more thought was devoted to the coverage of the antiwar rally. But those differences are often too subtle for readers, who usually notice first where stories appear in the paper and how much space they were given.

A protest involving 100,000 Americans -- especially when it concerns a war that polls show most people now don't support -- deserved better treatment.

Ellen Clegg, the Globe's Sunday editor, explained that the antiwar rally had been considered for the front page but that ''other stories were stronger." The story was instead given a mention atop the news index on page 2 and noted where the full article could be found inside.

Readers would have been better served with something