Category: Books

  • Strange News!

    As everyone is no doubt aware, I have another novel coming out on May 3, called Strange News. The book is starting to appear at various online retailers for pre-orders now. It is available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book; if you don’t see it in your format yet, check back later. It’ll get there.

    About the book: I should tell you that Strange News is a Fantasy, which is a genre that I haven’t attempted before (except in short stories).

    This is not what the publishers call “High” fantasy. Nobody has a sword, or rides a horse to work. They don’t communicate via crystal balls or bowls of sparkly magic water. People in my book have cellphones and they take the bus. They have jobs, they have pets, they live in houses and apartments, not Hobbit-holes or castles. There are no elves, no orcs, no wizards with long beards and posh British accents. There’s just an ordinary guy with bad knees and a weakness for sweets who stumbles into something wild.

    Something that changes his world forever.

    Click here to see a list of available retailers, and a schedule of in-person events!

  • “The Woman At Front Two”

    “The Woman At Front Two”

    Image of burned-out matches.

    The woman at table Front Two does not look happy.

    This seems wildly unfair, given that she is drop-dead gorgeous and reeks of money. I am at a stage in my life where I’m sure having a hot body and a little extra cash would solve all my problems, with some self-esteem left over to share with friends and acquaintances. The woman in the caramel-colored suit and white silk blouse should be lighting up that end of the room; instead, she’s generating her own gravity, pulling the light down into herself and smothering it.

    Maybe she just needs a nice slice of cheesecake.

    “More coffee?”

    “Please.”

    I top up her cup and stand back. “Anything else I can do for you?”

    She takes a sip. I admire her bracelet, a chunky thing made of grayish-blue stones the color of a fresh bruise. She looks up at me, and I see that her eyes are the same color.

    “I think that’s highly unlikely, don’t you?” she says.

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  • Good, gooder, goodest.

    Way back in 1770 the French philosopher, historian, and poet Voltaire wrote that “Perfect is the Enemy of Good.”1 He was quoting an Italian proverb, which was itself probably derived from the Greeks or the Etruscans or somebody, but we’ll go with Voltaire because he said so many wonderful things and deserves all the credit he can get.

    This statement, “Perfect is the Enemy of Good,” seems troubling at first glance. Shouldn’t we strive for perfection, even if we know that we — flawed beasts that we are — can never achieve it? According to yet another poet, Robert Browning, “…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”2

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  • Elaine, let’s get the hell out of here.

    I don’t like country music. The yodeling vocals, the whining guitars, the relentlessly predictable lyrics about faithless babes, abusive bubbas, pickup trucks, disreputable nightspots in the middle of nowhere … An hour of this, and a visitor from another planet would marvel that everything south of the Mason-Dixon line had not long since slid off into the Gulf of Mexico, crushed into slurry under the weight of all that drama and all those tears.

    “Wait just a gosh-darned minute!” I hear someone shouting from the back row. “Yes, a lot of country music is like that, but it’s not all the same. You’re being unfair.”

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  • Truth and lies.

    • My copy is somewhat more up to date than this one.

    I was poking around among the bookshelves a day or so ago, looking for something to entertain me as the first cool weather of the season settles in, when I spotted my rather tattered Penguin Classics copy of the Histories of Herodotus.

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  • The shape of words.

    • William Tyndale, c. 1490 – 1536.

    Anyone who knows me may be surprised to learn that I own three Bibles (the Revised Standard, the New English, and the King James), as well as the Book of Mormon, the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, the Apocrypha, and an English translation of the Qur’an. I know the difference between an Apostle and an Epistle, I can list the twelve sons of Jacob*, and I can whip out a quote from the four Gospels for just about any occasion.

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  • Bam. Pow. Kablooie.

    • How to spot the bad guys? Great vocabulary. Terrible fashion sense.

    Anguish. Antagonist. Annihilate. Adept.

    What do all these words have in common?

    Venerable. Veritable. Volcanic. Variable.

    I’ll give you a hint: I had learned to use all of them in a sentence by the time I reached the third grade.

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  • On Aging

    From “Mathios Paschalis among the Roses”, by George Seferis:

    Her aunt was a poor old body, — veins in relief,
    Many wrinkles about her ears, a nose about to die;
    Yet her words always full of wisdom.
    One day I saw her touching Antigone’s breast,
    Like a child stealing an apple

    Will I perhaps meet the old woman as I keep descending?
    When I left she said to me “Who knows when we shall meet again?”
    Then I read of her death in some old newspapers
    And of Antigone’s wedding and the wedding of Antigone’s daughter
    Without an end of the steps or of my tobacco
    Which imparts to me the taste of a haunted ship
    With a mermaid crucified, when still beautiful, to the wheel.

    (Excerpted from “George Seferis: Poems”, translated from the Greek by Rex Warner, Nonpareil Books, 1960)

  • Peredur and the Empress of the East

    • Anna Komnene, Empress of the East

    I’m in the process of reading Book One of the Lady Charlotte Guest’s collection and translation of the Mabinogion, the Welsh cultural epic, and I’ve just finished the story of Peredur of the Long Lance. (Quiet, you in the back row…)

    In the course of his adventures Peredur meets (and ultimately marries) a beautiful woman known as “the Empress of Cristinobyl the Great”, who lives in “India”. This Empress is fabulously beautiful, fabulously wealthy, a sorceress, and she needs a good fighting man at her beck and call.

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  • The fine art of seeing.

    • I don’t know what you’re going on about: I see Paul Krugman.

    As I do just about every week, I stopped off on the way home from work last Friday to check a couple of books out of the Fayetteville Public Library. I usually read quite a bit, and I try to keep the beast supplied with a plenitude of reasonably nutritious fare — otherwise I start browsing things like the back of my cereal box or the ingredients list on my Twinkies, and there are some things we really weren’t meant to know.

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