Fear: A Memoir from The French Trenches, WW I
Fear: A Novel of World War I by Gabriel Chevallier, 1930 is such a powerful indictment of war that in …
Category Archives: Fiction
WW I: The Call of the Soil – Blood and Glory from France
Many of the novels written about World War I, by those who fought in it, didn’t appear until a decade …
Beware of Pity – Says Forgotten Austrian Novelist
“Beware of Pity.” Who would think to proffer such advice, in a novel no less, repeatedly and in great detail? …
WW I: On the Eastern Front in The Forest of the Hanged
World War I as it is written of and imagined in European and American minds is almost entirely of what …
Franz Kafka: Lost in Prague and finding “Lost in America”
The best way to get a city, for me, is to put away the maps and follow promising promenades and …
Reading Vienna
In the quieter and cooler hours between visiting museums, decoding monuments, walking the hot wide avenues of Vienna I …
Croatian Nights — New Fiction from Croatia
My literary companion during 5 days in Croatia has been Croatian Nights a joint effort of 19 stories by Croatian and British …
Reading Prague
Prague, as every traveler will tell you, is a wonderful town, full of surprises and visual delights. It is full of improbable …
Night train From Prague — a Book Left Behind
I bought Night train From Prague by Cheryl Harlick to read on my own night train to Prague, thinking it would be …
Canal Reading — In Amsterdam
The rain is pelting down as as I take my first steps around Amsterdam, the Venice of the North as some …
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk — Bravo Squad Brought Home
Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012) is one hell of a good book –in conception, language, characters and …
The Dentist as Observer – in Egypt
Alaa al Aswany, author of the remarkable novel, “The Yacoubian Building,” from which a very good 2006 film was made, …