Iceland — Volcanoes and New Fiction
Friends and I spent a most memorable two weeks in Iceland at the beginning of September, 2017. Not only was …
Category Archives: Fiction
Croatia — The Sorrows of Separation
The news from Spain and Catalonia this week has made my blood run cold. Plebiscites, exuberance, declarations of independence. The …
The Long March – William Styron
Long before William Styron became famous for The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979) he wrote a slim …
Tadeusz Borowski — The Camps are Us
Massacre and genocide have been on the scroll of human history since cracked skulls left their sure signs, then in …
Zone of Emptiness – A Japanese Novel of WWII
Zone of Emptiness by the Japanese novelist Hiroshi Noma, when it was published in 1952 after years of military censorship, …
“A Long Long Way” – the Irish in WW I
Some books are so damn good it seems a sin to write about them. Just go read it, that’s all! …
The Irish in WW I – a preview
I am some way into Sebastian Barry’s 2005, A Long Long Way. The language is so inventive and surprising that …
“Schlump,” a Novel of WW I
The New York Review of Books has an absolutely terrific line of books under its imprint, culled from around the …
(Many ) A Day in Dublin with James Joyce
Ulysses is, well, only a Dublin day, yes, but seven years in the writing and possibly as long to appreciatively read it. …
James Baldwin: The Voice and the Image
Listening to Adam Lazzare-White read James Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain, is as close to being in a …
The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Somehow, in all my years of reading, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, 1952, never entered my great river of books, even having …
Andre Malraux — Man in his Violence
Andre Malraux was the quintessential adventurer-intellectual of the between the World War years. Man’s Hope was on 1960s high school …