He has edited a number of highly praised anthologies of contemporary poetry and fiction, including Songs from this Earth on Turtle's Back, Breaking Silence (winner of an American Book Award) and Returning the Gift. With his wife, Carol, he is the founder and Co-Director of the Greenfield Review Literary Center and The Greenfield Review Press. His work as a educator includes eight years of directing a college program for Skidmore College inside a maximum security prison. in Comparative Literature from the Union Institute of Ohio. in Literature and Creative Writing from Syracuse and a Ph.D. He, his younger sister Margaret, and his two grown sons, James and Jesse, continue to work extensively in projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture, language and traditional Native skills, including performing traditional and contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers. Although his American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnic background that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots are the ones by which he has been most nourished. Much of his writing draws on that land and his Abenaki ancestry. Joseph Bruchac lives with his wife, Carol, in the Adirondack mountain foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where his maternal grandparents raised him.
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6/7/2023 0 Comments Beautiful darkness fabienIf I the reader, viewer, appreciator cannot grasp its meaning, then the creator failed the task of communication. The temptation of the everyday consumer-critic, filling Amazon and Goodreads with 5- and 1-star ratings and more than their share of exclamatories, is to complain that the work was not made accessible enough. If I don’t understand the thing, I am entirely incapable of judging its value, its ability to succeed at what it attempts to accomplish. make actually seeing the work with any clarity impossible. Just a minor and 100% glasses-correctable astigmatism. I might as well talk about how I felt about the latest Takeshi Miyazawa piece despite the fact that my cataracts 1 1 Note: I don’t actually have cataracts. What can you say about a work you can’t be sure you understood, a communication garbled in translation? Would it be fair to judge such a thing at all? If I see a movie but am mystified as to what happened in it or what it meant, it’s hardly fair for me to say either that it was great or horrible. 6/7/2023 0 Comments Mythos stephen fry reviewAnd, you’ll learn in just how many pies Zeus had his thunderbolt. You’ll learn the love story arc of Eros and Psyche. You’ll learn that there’s much more to the tale of Sisyphus than pushing (over and over) a rock up a hill. So I found this book to be a completely entertaining refresher, written in plain language with plenty of fun references sprinkled throughout.įry tells the stories, but doesn’t explain or analyze them. Though I have a base knowledge of a few gods and goddesses, and a mortal or two, most of it is long forgotten from my school days. As he says in the foreword, no prior knowledge of Greek mythology is required to enjoy this book. In Mythos, Stephen Fry retells the famous and not-so-famous Greek myths across over 300 pages with his own brand of wit, focusing on the humor of the stories and their relevance to modern day. version out today from Chronicle Books (it was previously published in the UK to wide acclaim). He has managed to combine all of these qualities together in the book Mythos, with a new U.S. Stephen Fry can be at once hilarious, melodious, and serious. 6/7/2023 0 Comments Gold pirate latitudesThe late Michael Crichton had thirteen of his novels made into films Pirate Latitudes is no exception, with Steven Spielberg already committed to direct it. Together they set out from Jamaica on an epic adventure battling a sea monster, the weather, the dreaded Spanish commander, Cazalla, and each other for both riches and their very lives. He gathers a crew like no other: a far-sighted female pirate, a mute Moor, a French assassin, an English barber-surgeon, and a Sephardic Jew skilled in explosives. It is as if the fates have placed it there, for only one man has the skill and daring to try to capture it: Captain Charles Hunter, a Puritan-born scholar from Boston turned Caribbean privateer. The year is 1665, and a Spanish treasure ship sits alone in a fortified Caribbean cove. 6/7/2023 0 Comments Dig by as kingThis fascination seems a bit like a relationship with an ex-lover, even one who has mistreated you. Sharing a snippet of Twinkle's write-up, Akshay wrote on his Instagram Stories on Sunday, “Some anmol ratans (precious pearls) of humour courtesy the pen of wrote in the column of Times Of India, “I can understand the British being invested in King Charles' coronation, but so are a large number of Indians despite our legacy of colonisation. Also read: Exclusive: Exes Raveena Tandon and Akshay Kumar share hugs 20 years after they called off their engagement Twinkle Khanna has commented on Indians who watched Charles III's coronation on screen. She compared it to stalking the social media page of an ex-lover. The actor-turned-writer took a dig at all those who were glued to the screens during King Charles III's coronation a few days ago. Akshay Kumar has shared a few “anmol ratans of humour” written by wife Twinkle Khanna in her weekly column in a daily. 6/6/2023 0 Comments Ted chiang exhalation reviewCampbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for "Story of Your Life" (1998), a Sidewise Award for "Seventy-Two Letters" (2000), a Nebula Award, Locus Award and Hugo Award for his novelette "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2002), a Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007), and a British Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Exhalation" (2009).Ĭhiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted.Ĭhiang's first eight stories are collected in "Stories of Your Life, and Others" (1st US hardcover ed: ISBN 0-7653-0418-X 1st US paperback ed.: ISBN 0-7653-0419-8). He is a graduate of the noted Clarion Writers Workshop (1989).Īlthough not a prolific author, having published only eleven short stories as of 2009, Chiang has to date won a string of prestigious speculative fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990), the John W. He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, near Seattle, Washington. He graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. Ted Chiang is an American speculative fiction writer. In this story, William becomes a Poirot-like figure seeking to solve the mystery of the gardener’s murder (he has not been murdered but might have been if William’s indefatigable logic had held sway – this is an adjective Crompton would surely have used herself). Intertextual references proliferate in Crompton’s writing. Schutte has published all of the mid-twentieth century BBC Just William radio plays written wholly by Richmal Crompton, plus the BBC recording of the above story, following his own research in the BBC Written Archive a decade ago, along with some of Crompton’s unbroadcast manuscripts. Indeed, both Aesop and Crompton wrote fables that reflect on life and encourage us to think about our own. In the recording, Ginger declares, “Aesop wrote gables didn’t he William?”. William Brown decides that a local murderer lives in a gabled house. In February 1947, a comparison between the recording of the BBC radio play, “The Mystery of the Elms” by Richmal Crompton, and the only available copy of this script, which is taken by David Schutte from Crompton’s original manuscript, illustrates a change that may have been made by the BBC editors, or more likely by Crompton herself. Now the last hope for humanity is to find a cure. With control of the world population hanging in the balance, the Orchid Alliance and the Immari descend into open warfare. The Immari envision a world populated by the genetically superior survivors-a new human race, ready to fulfill its destiny. Immari International offers a different approach: do nothing. It treats the symptoms of the plague but never cures the disease. Industrialized nations offer a miracle drug, Orchid, which they mass produce and distribute to refugee camps around the world. The remainder devolve.Īs the world slips into chaos, radical solutions emerge. Nearly a billion people are dead-and those that the Atlantis Plague does not kill, it transforms at the genetic level. A pandemic unlike any before it has swept the globe. Kate Warner awakens to a horrifying reality: the human race stands on the brink of extinction. Diana Gabaldon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Outlander “Well-constructed and tightly-wound as a fine Swiss watch-DEPARTURE has non-stop action, an engaging plot and, of course, wheels within wheels.” “I finished the book fast because I just couldn’t wait.” “.reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton.” "This is apocalyptic sci-fi at its best." The race to stop the Atlantis Plague has begun.īuy now and continue the worldwide bestselling series that began with The Atlantis Gene (note: Kindle Unlimited subscribers can also read for free). 6/6/2023 0 Comments Cat screenplay bookHe describes them in a clear way that made sense to me as a fledgling fiction writer. It converted me from a pantser to a plotter, and it’s no coincidence that the first book I actually finished was conceived using the beat sheet.īlake Snyder’s beat sheet has 15 beats. The masterpiece of Save the Cat! is the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. It helped me understand for the first time that story has a universal structure. It is a meandering and surprising historical ghost story, so different than many Disney movies, yet the beats are all there, just the same.įor me, reading Save the Cat! was an epiphany. One good example was Seer of Shadows by Avi. And I’ll be darned if all of the beats weren’t there in just about every novel we read. The Middle Grade Lunch Break group read Save the Cat!, and for several months afterwards, as an exercise, we applied the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet to the middle grade novels that we were reading. Zootopia, for example, is a model Save the Cat! movie: it has a strong theme, shows good character growth for all of the characters, not just the main character, and hits all of the plot points Snyder describes.īut the beat sheet isn’t just for movies. It’s especially easy to see in Disney and Pixar films, as well as other kids’ movies. Many movies do use the beat sheet, created by Blake Snyder. You might think that Save the Cat ! is just a book about screenwriting, given that its subtitle is “The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.” 6/5/2023 0 Comments The ten loves of nishinoThe reader only hears from Mr Nishino through the stories his lovers tell, never directly. The stories are not told in chronological order, but move from adulthood to high school and to his older age. The plot of The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino is simple – Mr Nishino’s lovers (all women) talk about their love affair with him. The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino is filled with that calmness, yet is rich in detail and atmosphere. It seems to be on the whole both calmer and stranger than fiction originally written in English and deal with people’s quirks more lovingly. Thanks Allen & Unwin for the copy.Īs many readers of my blog will know, I have a deep love and affection for Japanese fiction. Why I chose it: Japanese fiction is wonderful. The good: The different characters and their memories of Mr Nishino. But his greatest asset could be his downfall… In brief: Mr Nishino has a great capacity for love and women love him. |