Ethan Frome book review "I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story". The story, as we will learn, is the strange, sad case of the reclusive Ethan Frome, a New England farmer who, decades earlier, suffered a terrible [...]
Tess of the D'Urbervilles book review There's something about the start of a new year that makes me want to look back - in this case, quite a ways back, to England during what was known as the Long Depression of the 1870s. A financial crisis linked to a dramatic fall in grain [...]
The Landlady short story I feel the need to explain myself. I’m not a bad person but if you were to judge me by the attacks I’ve endured on social media for the past few months you’d be inclined to think me a monster. Or at the very least a heartless, money-grubbing landlady. I’m not. [...]
The Reader book review "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana, The Life of Reason The Germans have a word for the struggle of those born after the Second World War to overcome the negatives of the past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung can be defined as the public debate that continues to this day [...]
The Color Purple book review "He never had a kine word to say to me. Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn't. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around. Then he grab hold my titties." This is what Alice Walker calls "folk speech", the [...]
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas book review "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and [...]
The Secret History book review If every new writer's career had as auspicious a start as that of Donna Tartt, we would all be writers. And we would all, I think, be rich. In the early 1980s, while a student at Bennington College, Tartt began working on a novel. As she wrote she shared [...]
I wrote this piece not long after my husband, Ken, died in 2016. Earlier this year I submitted it to the Timeless Wisdom International Writing Challenge sponsored by Exisle Publishing. It has been chosen to be published in the book, Love and Loss, a collection of short stories to be published in April 2020. Check it out on [...]
Get Shorty and the 10 Rules of Writing Elmore Leonard, who died at the age of 87, was one of the most visual writers America has produced. It's no wonder that 26 of his novels and short stories have been adapted for the screen. He had a deceptively simple style that brought his characters [...]
Mother's Milk book review Patrick Melrose is a well-born, forty-something London barrister who, having burned through his inheritance, is now reduced to having to work for a living. Married with two young sons, Melrose is what is commonly called a "survivor", although his actual survival is frequently in doubt. As a young child he [...]
