(The bookstore as a forest…the bookstore as battlefield…with a nod to death) From: If on a winter’s night a traveler… by Italo Calvino Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which…
Baker, Nicholson, Traveling Sprinkler, Blue Rider Press (Penguin Group), New York, 2013 (291 pp. $26.95) Nicholson Baker is the anti-Mailer who knocks Mailer into the first row without throwing a punch, he’s that force-field mysterious. Everything about Baker—his perilous imagination; a style that hot-foots it…
I’m happy to announce that with the help of Jim Story of Newport Beach, The Moon When Water Freezes is now available across a wide array of e-platforms. This includes not only Amazon of course, but also Nook platforms, Kobo, Apple, Google, and others, through…
Fate awaits us at the crossroads in the form of a drunken driver, a mutant gene, or a cortical flub. Destiny, on the other hand, is visible only up close and is never a surprise. Fate is your father disappearing into the dictator’s prison. Fate…
Englund, Peter. The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (tr. Peter Graves), Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 (540pp.$35) Groom, Winston. Kearny’s March: The Epic Creation of the American West 1846-47, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 (310pp.$27.95) Knopf…
I’m very pleased to announce that with the help of Jim Story in Newport Beach I’ve launched Jack’s Boy on Nook, Apple and Google.
Fated by their enthusiasms, admirations, wonderments and assorted devotional attitudes towards “great writers”, seeing books as spiritual beacons, rallying cries or, worse yet, jelly doughnuts of wisdom, youthful readers full of ardent focus, often forget that the mistral of a real Fate is right behind…
Just as the reading life launches us toward the eventual battlefields of marriage and romantic love, even as it forces us to acknowledge that cancer wards and mental hospitals abut our future, as it thwarts our youthful expectations of happiness, lending us its violent nightmares,…
Smith, Douglas. Former People, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012 (464pp.$30) The sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989 opened many of its locked and shuttered government archives, libraries and spy vaults to historical view. Building on the epochal work of Alexander Solzhenytsin and…
“He was a weakling, a trembling mouse of a boy, with dirty hands and greasy locks, and pus trickling out of his ear. He gorged himself with sticky sweets. His schoolmates avoided touching the books he had been using.” Thus is a young Nikolai…