Author at Large
Throughout history, prisoners have written about their experiences. A few served a long apprenticeship to reading and writing and getting rejected, and then reading some more and writing some more to discover how to write their stories. I think of Edward Bunker’s five unpublished novels before the sixth was good enough. He’s not the only …
I first heard of Chiara Barzini’s novel, Things that Happened Before the Earthquake, on the Los Angeles Review of Books podcast. Like a trip through a foreign country the novel has some rough passages and its beautiful passages that makes you stop and linger at the stunning landscape of sentences. Sometimes it distorts time, place, …
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Two things that are considered priceless are human life and master works of art. In The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt weaves a tragic and wondrous spell of a boy who loses his mother in a domestic terrorist bombing at a museum. In the confusion, he listens to a dying old man who was with a young …
Denis Johnson’s last collection of short stories, published posthumously, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the crown for the dead king of writing about the addicted, the downtrodden, and those people who haunt the world while yet alive. Each story reminds me of the line Jim Morrison sang in “Roadhouse Blues.” “The future’s uncertain …
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Legendary Punk-Poet-Memoirist Patti Smith’s slim book Devotion centers on the question of “Why I Write,” which is the subject of the annual Windham-Campbell lectures at Yale University. Because Smith can’t explain the why without the how she writes, she takes us on a journey to France on book business and ends with her writing the …
Mohsin Hamid’s sentences in Exit West flow like a brightly colored fly line from a fishing rod’s guides in long iridescent and undulating curves and loops that feel breathless in the way a storyteller would tell a story with only minutes to deliver the message at the end of a long run might do, but …
In Sam Shepard’s posthumous novella, Spy of the First Person, we are the young observer or the observed dying old man confined to a mostly likely stolen rocking chair when at home or a wheelchair, whose reflections on his life, family, immigrants, medical treatment, and the people who have haunted the changing American West drift …
With Nationalism and Fascism on the rise and, and actually taking power in the United States under the guise of conservatism, readers have been turning to classic dystopian novels such as 1984, Animal Farm, It Can’t Happen Here, or The Handmaid’s Tale, and these books rocked the best seller list too. The novel that hasn’t …