I’ve read most of the great alcoholic/addict fiction out there (The Lost Weekend, A Fan’s Notes, Jesus’ Son, Carver’s Stories), and believe them to be very accurate and handled well by writers who have lived in such hells, but none of these books seem to come as close to getting inside the mind of an [...]
Category: novel
When the Dying Think, Are They Thinking What We Think They’re Thinking?
An interesting assignment I had in one of my writing classes in college was to try and encapsulate the life of a character in one page. It seemed the character had to die in order to do this and so I wrote from a dying man’s perspective, yet I struggled to get anywhere near the end of [...]
Language of the Dead
Read an excerpt from my first novel Language of the Dead in Guernica.
The Process IS the Story
I can’t think of many novelists who, when I finish one of their works, leave me wondering what it is I just read. Sometimes it happens that the book is no good; other times it feels that the experience of reading the work, of being part of that work, living and breathing it for the [...]
The Moon and Sixpence
I picked up Maugham’ s “The Moon and Sixpence” at Chop Suey Books in Carytown. I was in the mood for a first person narrative unlike a few recent contemporary novels that have left me confused about the form. Why do so many narrators today remember what they cooked and ate and watched and said? [...]
Mo Yan and Ma Jian
“Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out”, where did you come from? I haven’t read a work of literary fiction with such excitement since first reading “The Power and the Glory” by Graham Greene, and as with Greene, I went and found Mo Yan’s (pictured left) other works. His epic “Big Breasts and Wide Hips”, [...]
The Beginning of Sorts
A web presence, good to have. There’s a photo, links to stories (support the journal, support your local book store), and links to authors I enjoy reading who have a website. My most recent story appears in Quay: a journal of literature and art. It is called “The Sufferers”. It is an uplifting summer [...]