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
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
Revenge of the Robots RUR is a play, first produced in 1922, remembered for introducing the word “robot” into the English lexicon. The story is, lifelike robots are manufactured by the millions to be servants and laborers so humans will … Continue reading
The first chapter of this novel was brilliant and won me over. A sophisticated city couple retreats to their country cottage in England, where they try to be friendly with the country-bumpkin neighbors who own an estate, and significantly, several … Continue reading