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
I bought and read this book prior to attending a seminar led by Mr. Brooks. The workshop was far better than the book. The book can be useful but has extremely low information density. Mainly it is a ranting manifesto … Continue reading
This booklet offers advice to writers about point of view. It defines POV as a “position” from which something is considered or evaluated (p.6). The author eventually explains that this “position” is not a spatial location (e.g., a camera placement … Continue reading