The Next Russian Revolution I read this book in preparation for a class I will take in August at the University of Arizona. Reading a course’s books before the lectures gives valuable context. I also hoped the book would answer questions … Continue reading
I finished drafting my android series of novels. The first is being shopped around by an agent (fingers crossed), and the last one needs another edit for voice. But they exist. What next? I needed to rest. Finishing a novel … Continue reading
This morning I searched the news in vain for cogent political analysis. I find only reports of what happened. Donald Trump won Indiana and is indeed the presumptive Republican nominee now. Cruz is out, and Kasich too, according to early … Continue reading
Ta-Nehisi Coates Meets Thomas Pynchon “Who am I? And how can I be that person?” Those were the questions the main character’s father always asked and which the narrator, Bonbon Me, holds dear. They’re also the meta-questions he poses about … Continue reading
This little novella is a wonderful train story with a lot of claustrophobic atmosphere and terrific language. I will shelve it with my small collection of “prose poetry,” along with books like Duras’s The Lover, Winterson’s Art and Lies, and … Continue reading
King has written fifty best-sellers, many of which have become hit movies. It would be churlish therefore to deny him the mantle of greatness. Yet as a how-to book for writers, this one is pretty weak. The book has only … Continue reading
I confess, I have recently fallen off the wagon of fiction. I published a brief (1000 word) nonfiction article on the mysteries of visual perception to NFReads.com. The site publishes short nonfiction articles by authors who hope to thereby publicize … Continue reading
This is a lovely slice-of-life tale involving a housekeeper in contemporary Japan who works for an eccentric and brilliant old mathematician who, because of a brain injury, has a working short-term memory of only 80 minutes. She and her preteen … Continue reading
Noam Chomsky, giant of contemporary thought and inventor of transformational grammar and computational linguistics, has a new book out and it’s mercifully on linguistics, not politics. The core idea in his new monograph is that humans understand language hierarchically, an … Continue reading
When does a sequence of scenes not make a story? A good story is driven by causality: incident A causes incident B, either by the laws of physics, or by plausible character actions. In Joe, much of the text is … Continue reading