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 [...]
White Teeth book review Back in December 2000, a few months after Zadie Smith's first novel was published, winning the Whitbread award, nominated for the Orange prize, thrusting her into the media spotlight, The Guardian's Simon Hattenstone interviewed her at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) where she was writer-in-residence. Hattenstone began by informing [...]
The Hours book review I'm not sure it's possible to find any kind of weakness in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. As a work of fiction, it's as perfect in its way as anything I've ever read. And it proves, if it needed proving, that a book does not have to take up a [...]
The God of Small Things book review There is a particular kind of person I cannot stand. It's not the one who shouts into his cell phone on a crowded train - he may be hard of hearing, rather than simply rude. It's not even the one who pushes in front of me in [...]
