Memories of My Melancholy Whores begins with its protagonist and narrator declaring the objectionable goal of wanting to have sex with a teenaged virgin. It’s the gift he wants to give himself for his ninetieth […]
Where do you begin with a writer like Larry McMurtry? His name, I fear, is not a household name, but his work–from The Last Picture Show (1966) to Lonesome Dove (1985) to the movie Brokeback […]
“Poetry,” one of my literature professors had said long ago in class, “is about mixed emotions.” She was talking about Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” a short poem loaded with both positive and negative imagery […]
“The book can’t complete with the screen,” Philip Roth said in a 2009 interview with Tina Brown for The Daily Beast. “It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. it couldn’t compete with the television […]
According to Wikipedia, when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it became the world’s first best seller. Since book publishing was, at best, only a toddler, since copyright laws were nonexistent, and […]
Frequent readers will know that I love my horror movies and that I’m constantly searching for new ones to enjoy. So you’ll understand why, back in 1987, when Hellraiser was released, I felt tempted to […]
Earlier this year, to fulfill a goal to up my reading game, I devise what will no doubt go down as one of the greatest literary plans in history. I will read twenty novellas or […]
Everyone, at least every book lover, has their favorite bookstore. Though mine is Auntie’s Books in Spokane, many others living in the Northwest tell me theirs is Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. All […]
Though The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the first novel by Neil Gaiman that I’ve read, I wasn’t as unfamiliar with his work as I had believed when I read it. With […]
When I travel, I take the train. A few days before Halloween, I found myself at an Amtrak Depot that offered a book exchange. Leave a book; take a book. They had a jar for […]
