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‘The German Money’: Family Secrets
There should be a statue of limitations on complaining about our parents and what they did or didn’t do to us or for us. By age 30, after we’ve gotten our noses bloody a few times and wallowed in as...
View ArticlePack of Brats
Lit Life” or Lit Lite? That’s the question that pops to mind after finishing Kurt Wenzel’s pseudo roman a clef, a debut novel by someone who knows the addresses of New York’s literary society, but...
View ArticleMaster of the Hall of Mirrors
Picture Vladimir Nabokov. In the hall of mirrors that is popular culture, he is the dirty man who wrote the dirty book “Lolita,” about a 12-year-old “nymphet” — he invented the term, by the way — and...
View ArticleCormac Country
While hunting antelope in the Texas desert by the Mexican border, Llewelyn Moss comes across the aftermath of a shootout between Mexican drug runners and their buyers. Amid the bullet-riddled vehicles...
View ArticleSatellites of Love
If there is anything which fuels us into moving down out of the trees and from there, everywhere, it must be passion and desire. It couldn’t be boredom, that only leads us to the television, and...
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‘Secret Anniversaries of the Heart:’ This must be the way out
In “Secret Anniversaries of the Heart,” a collection of 25 short stories by Lev Raphael, there is an aphorism from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner about the search for spirituality that sums up the thrust of...
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Prime time for prime crime
What in the name of Harold Bloom is going on at The Library of America? Over the last few years, the good people there have been issuing, alongside the expected volumes of Henry James, Mark Twain and...
View ArticleEsquivel Redefines Mexican Icon
Nearly five centuries after she helped Hernan Cortes conquer the Aztec Empire, Malinche is still a controversial figure in Mexican history. A noble-born child sold into slavery by her mother, she used...
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New voices from the South
Determining who is, what is and where is Southern fiction is as futile and ultimately defeating effort as attempting to refight the Civil War, but it’s an acceptable point of departure to what you hope...
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42 Novels: The Third Policeman, part 1
“The Third Policeman” by Flann O’Brien is my first novel in the “Douglas Adams Memorial 42 Novels” project, in which I work through my library of interesting works for the first time. Starting with a...
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