![]() ![]() When you have an idea, pursue it with reckless abandon – you can edit after you've written down a hot mess. That's what they seem to keep emphasising to us. The finished product always sounds reasonable, but it's the composition of a first draft which presents problems.ĭon't think too much about what you're writing. But I'm still finding the construction of this particular sentence difficult apparently because I'm thinking about it too much (and you're reading the version that's been edited five six seven times)! This is what annoys me about my writing process. The lights are dimmed, the fire is calmly heating the room, my budgerigars are sat quietly, and the silence is perfect. ![]() ![]() It's a dark evening, and I'm sitting on a comfortable sofa with my computer on my lap. But, honestly, I think my most sincere excuse would be fear. I could always blame that controversial illness named Writer's Block (which, according to my course materials, does exist), laziness, or time. I have reasons for not writing creatively as much as I should be, but none of them are of significant value. But a writer? Well, unless you count creative writing assignments for university, not quite! ![]() Having posted regularly for over a year and a half, I can safely categorise myself as a blogger. I had a set of business cards made last year, each one reading: ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Copious photographs and subnarratives encapsulate a very wide range of contemporary people and events. Song lyrics from the Beatles, Motown and spirituals provide a cultural context. Excerpts from contemporary newspapers, leaflets and brochures brutally expose Ku Klux Klan hatred and detail Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee instructions on how to react to arrest while on a picket line. In this companion to Countdown (2010) (with returning character Jo Ellen as one of the volunteers), Wiles once again blends a coming-of-age story with pulsating documentary history. When trained volunteers for the Council of Federated Organizations-an amalgam of civil rights groups-flood the town to register black voters and establish schools, their work is met with suspicion and bigotry by whites and fear and welcome by blacks. Raymond, “a colored boy,” is impatient for integration to open the town’s pool, movie theater and baseball field. Twelve-year-old Sunny, who’s white, cannot accept her new stepmother and stepsiblings. Freedom Summer in 1964 Mississippi brings both peaceful protest and violence into the lives of two young people. ![]() ![]() I may be doing everything in my power to stay away from him, but there is no one in the world who can say no to the future King of France. ![]() I’m given strict orders not to talk to him, not to even look in his direction, but he makes this an impossible task. ![]() No reason at all to even think he was there. This time, there is no partying, no noise, no crowds. Like all the summers I’d been gone, Prince Elias is back, but this time with an incognito security detail and no friends. I hadn’t been home in years, but when I finally come back for the summer, I see that not much has changed. Anything to keep me away from the royals and their partying. If you had any ties to Marbella, it was impossible for you not to have heard the stories about Prince Elias and his debauchery.Įvery summer he arrived with his security detail and friends in tow and rented out a row of cottages near the water.Įach of those summers, my parents sent me away – summer camp and later, boarding school. ![]() ![]() This book feels like it was written in 1885, not 1985. I rarely stop reading a book halfway through. PLEASE NOTE: Some changes have been made to the original manuscript with the permission of Oliver Sacks. ![]() A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject". They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. Sacks' splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities whose limbs have become alien who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. ![]() In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" ( The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. ![]() ![]() ![]() "Small trees had attacked my parents' house at the foundation. The novel opens in Joe's 13th summer - in 1988 - as we see him and his father at work in the garden of their house on the North Dakota reservation. The narrator is an Ojibwe lawyer named Joe Coutts, son of tribal judge Bazil Coutts and tribal clerk Geraldine Coutts. It's her latest novel, and, I would argue, her best so far. Never before has she given us a novel with a single narrative voice so smart, rich and full of surprises as she has in The Round House. In more than a dozen books of fiction - mostly novel length - that make up a large part of her already large body of work, Erdrich has given us a multitude of narrative voices and stories. I've devoted many hours in my life to reading, and among these hours many of them belong to the creations of novelist Louise Erdrich. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Round House Author Louise Erdrich ![]() ![]() The illustrations in this book were prepared by his wife, Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze. In 1789, his theories were published in the influential Traité elementaire de chimie. ![]() Antoine Laurent Lavoisier is known today as the founder of modern chemistry, for his pioneering studies of gunpowder, oxygen, and the chemical composition of water. This is one of the most important portraits of the eighteenth century, painted in 1788 when David had become the self-appointed standard-bearer of French Neoclassicism. To experts illuminate this artwork's story This mishap and his status as a tax collector (the more prosaic means by which he funded his scientific research) led him to be guillotined in 1794. ![]() However, he was also involved in studies of gunpowder and a misunderstanding about his removal of this precious commodity from the Bastille in the summer of 1789 threw his alliances into question. Lavoisier was a pioneering chemist credited with the discovery of oxygen and the chemical composition of water through experiments in which his wife actively collaborated. Technical analysis has revealed that a first iteration excluded the scientific instruments and would have been a far more conventional portrait of a wealthy, fashionable couple of the tax-collector class. A landmark of European portraiture that asserts a modern, scientifically minded couple in fashionable but simple dress, this painting was nonetheless excluded from the Salon of 1789 for fears it would further ignite revolutionary zeal. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() They always chase him away! How will Raccoon ever get his paws on the delectable dish that he desires? By throwing a secret pizza party, of course. More specifically, human beings with brooms. ![]() He can’t get enough of the “gooey cheesy-ness, salty pepperoni-ness, sweet, sweet tomato-ness and crispity, crunchity crust.” Alas, there is one thing that stands between Raccoon and his pizza-human beings. From the madcap creators of Dragons Love Tacos (2012), another animal foodie shows just how far he will go to get his favorite meal. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Frank portrays Truman so well that the book’s ending feels like an anticlimax. Frank spends a large amount of time on Truman’s family life, movingly depicting his marriage to Bess Truman, who loathed Washington and fiercely guarded her privacy. It is an approach that fits his subject: Frank’s depiction of Truman is of a man perpetually outside his comfort zone, preferring bourbon and branch water in his home of Independence, Missouri, to martinis on the DC cocktail circuit. This is a character study of an introverted personality in a profession that rewards loud performance. It is a humbler, more focused book, with Truman’s pre-presidential life relegated to an extended prologue. Frank frames his subject in a different way from David McCullough’s completist, Pulitzer Prize–winning doorstopper. a book that, in its timing, acts almost as a blueprint for a liberal president to navigate a challenging world, focused through the prism of a man who was nobody’s real first choice for president and yet forged an envious record. ![]() ![]() "And then, just the way it was this morning in the hangar, I saw again, as though right then for the first time in my life, I saw everything: the unalterably straight streets, the sparkling glass of the sidewalks, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russian: Евгений Замятин, sometimes also seen spelled Eugene Zamiatin) Russian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist, whose famous anti-utopia (1924, We) prefigured Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and inspired George Orwell's 1984 (1949). In the English-speaking world We has appeared in several translations. The book was considered a "malicious slander on socialism" in the Soviet Union, and it was not until 1988 when Zamyatin was rehabilitated. ![]() ![]() Yevgeny Zamyatin (Russian: Евгений Замятин, sometimes also seen spelled Eugene Zamiatin) Russian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist, whose famous anti-utopia (1924, We) prefigured Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and inspired George Orwell's 1984 (1949). ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Rereading it, however, I was struck by how little actual violence and horror there actually is (‘though, of course, it does have its moments!) and how much of it is comprised of suggestion. I first read “The Fog” back in the late-1970s and remember it as an exhilarating headlong rush into violent lunacy. Holman is tasked to enter the deadly, yellowish fog to try and learn what he can and assist the military to trap it again. The fog is soon multiplying, spreading and apparently developing a mind of its own “consuming” whole villages and towns and creating mass insanity as it does so. John Holman, an investigator at the Department of the Environment is one of the first to be exposed to the fog, but due to rapid medical intervention he gains immunity from its effects – which turns those exposed into violent, deviant psychopaths. His recent death reminded me of how much I enjoyed his early books when I first read them and that prompted me to pick up “The Fog”. He followed this up with “The Fog” a disaster novel about a military chemical weapon that is accidentally released after an unexpected earthquake in rural England. His first novel “The Rats”, a tale of giant man-eating black rats, became an instant best-seller. Originally an art director at an advertising agency (which gave him the necessary skills to design his own book covers, illustrations and publicity) he began writing in his spare time. Legendary British horror author James Herbert died on 20 March 2013. ![]() |