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 birthday. He contacted the madame at the local brothel, who finds a fourteen-year-old girl to fulfill his needs. Since...
My Nook crashed earlier this month. For that reason, as well as others, I’m mad at Barnes and Noble right now. Since they have been my favorite bookstore for decades, I’m hoping they can pull themselves out of this rut and restore the solid reputation they have with me. Since they’re a brick-and-mortar bookstore...
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 Mountain (2005)–is well-known. When I was a young man, loving literature and always craving new writers, I would go...
At my first creative writing class, the grad student who taught it asked how many of us write fiction. All hands went up. How many of you consider yourself fiction writers? A few hands dropped, but most stayed up. How many write poetry? Most of us kept their hands up. How many of you...
When literary scholars think of Southern Writers, they tend to first think of William Faulkner. Though Southern Literature had been around since Colonial times, in the post-Civil War era, Faulkner gave it new life and vitality. He opened doors for other Southern Writers, like Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Wolfe, and Robert Penn Warren. Southern...
“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 and invoking both happy and frightening emotions. But she could’ve been talking about any great poem, and not just...
When I went to Avengers: Endgame last weekend, I had planned on my typical thousand or so words review, but having seen the movie, I decided instead to write a shorter review. What can I say about Endgame that isn’t being said a thousand times elsewhere? And the movie had so many unexpected events...
Piercing begins with a chilling scene and intensifies from there. It’s an unrelenting, violent novel that refuses to turn a blind eye to its characters’ deranged compulsions. It’s a novel about compulsions, but not the run-of-the-mill compulsions that cause most of us to overeat, drink too much, or binge out with Netflix for seven...
