Things That Happened Before The Earthquake – Book Review Blurb

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, …

Exit West – Book Review Blurb

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 …

Excerpting Books for an Essay or Short Story

I took a couple of chapters from a novel in progress, formed them into a short story and sent it in to the Narrative Prize. I placed in the top ten and Tom Jenks at Narrative Magazine sent me back a copy with his editorial suggestions. Red Flag Warning had like six pages cut from …