The Writer’s Market is to aspiring writers what seed catalogs are to aspiring gardeners-something to drool over and think about and have long, usually unrealistic, fantasies about. I bought my first Writer’s Market when I was in high school, submitted my first short stories and poems as quickly as I could roll them out of my old manual typewriter. What a lovely sound those keys made as they slapped the paper. I miss that once in a while. I soon moved up to an electric typewriter. I still refer to the Return key and get blank stares from people who…
Category: book review
Animlas in Translation by Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin is autistic, which means that her brain works in profoundly different ways from the brains of nonautistic people. For Temple this means that she can easily relate to animals and understand their behavior in a much more intimate manner. Humans are animals. We live and die in the exact same ways as any other animal on Earth-the big difference is that we can think about it while it is happening. Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation works on the theory that other animals are not all that different from the human animal after all. Anthropomorphism is giving human motivation…
The Night Bookmobile
The second time I saw The Night Bookmobile it was another chance encounter. Something wonderfully odd happens to people who have huge bestsellers-they kind of lose their minds. Stephen King, James A. Michener, and J.K. Rowling all decided that having a base of reader meant they could crank out stories with millions of words. Other writers have decided that this means they have been touched by God and need to do a bit more preaching than they used to. And some decide to explore other mediums besides the boring world of the novel. Audrey Niffeneggerwrote one of my all time…
The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Torture your protagonist. It’s not enough for him to be stuck up a tree. You must throw rocks at him while he figures out how to get down. ~Allen Guthrie The Tortilla Curtain would make a great Coen Brothers movie. There are a number of put upon people doing their best to get by in a world that doesn’t understand them or even want them in it. It is A Tale of Two Cities set in L.A. and follows the adventures of two men who live in very different worlds only a few miles away from each other. The Tortilla…
One Second After
“I’ll sleep with you for a meatball.” Julia Andrews said in Victor/Victoria. But that deal falls flat when there are no longer any meatballs to trade. One Second After by William R Forstchen is a blow by blow account of how one idyllic little community in the hills of North Carolina becomes a Masada under seige from the rest of America after an EMP attack knocks out all modern electronics. This is a Conservative fairy tale, where everything would have been fine if everyone had voted Republican, kept a stockpile of weapons in the basement, and drove a classic car…
Masked-Superheroes Run Amok
The first Superhero short story I remember really liking was “Übermensch!,” a 1991 short story by Kim Newman about a world in which Superman landed in a German field and became the Führer’s greatest weapon. This was a great story and I was greatly intrigued by the idea of a comic book hero in print format. I read a few other stories and even a couple of novels which featured comic book stars, but none of them reached the same heady heights as Übermensch! So I was excited to find Masked edited by Lou Anders. These are great little stories,…
Indignation by Philip Roth
“On Philip Roth’s ten-most-important list, number 1 would have to be:my dick!” ~Carolyn See Indignation is the story of college aged atheist Marcus Messner. He was raised by Jewish parents during the Korean War. He is not a very likable fellow. Nothing seems to go his way and he spends a good deal of his time complaining about the fact that nothing ever goes his way. He also spends a lot of time talking about how men his age are being Drafted into the army and sent off to be cannon fodder in Korea. So he goes to college to…
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
I liked Mark Haddon’s debut novel about a 15 year old boy who discovers a neighbor’s dog dead-impaled with a garden fork. He then sets about doing a bit of detecting in an effort to discover the identy of the killer. Following in the footsteps of Flowers for Algernon we see the world through Christopher’s eyes-a world that is at times greatly different from the world most of us live in. Christopher over explains everything-when he introduces himself he explains the history of the name ‘Christopher’ and how he doesn’t really like what it means. He is autistic, and the…
Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
Too many modern books are either parts of a series, or 700 pages long, or both. Too many classic novels suffer from the same problem, War and Peace and pretty much anything by Dickens is a long term project. Somewhere along the line a number of writers decided to bang out books that could be read in one or two sittings. Kurt Vonnegut was one of those writers. Slapstick is another good old fashioned End of The World book-Kurt Vonnegut loves that whole post-Apocalyptic thing. People die by the millions, nations crumble into ruins, and the Chinese learn to control…
My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm
For a writing assignment, Manny Howard turns his Brooklyn backyard into a small farm with plans to live off the harvest for one month-he recounts his experiences in the book My Empire of Dirt. This path is not a smooth and easy one, though our hero seems to think it will be as he sets out. Along the way Manny Howard comes up with a wide array of odd and often very optimistic ideas about what farming is and how best to raise chickens, rabbits, fish, ducks, and a large number of plants. Like all new gardeners he discovers that…