As many of you know, I’ve been focused on my Intentional Fathering project, and writing little beyond that which doesn’t wind up in a notebook (where it belongs), or transmogrified into a pseudonymous scrap of fiction in some literary venue with a smaller budget than this shoestring blog I can’t bring myself to pull the …
Now that Spring has sprung in my neck of the woods, I’m pondering what I might cut down, burn, plant, fix, and build, which—because I am more reader than farmer or carpenter—turns my mind to books. So here’s a few books, essays, and stories I’ve enjoyed during my winter hibernation that I think might interest …
A lot of people are talking about a short story in The New Yorker right now. A short story. If you care at all about writing and literature and the seemingly inexorable Western slide into voluntary aliteracy, this seems like a good thing. But so maybe “Cat Person” isn’t for you. Some people want to read …
Ten stories you can read if you don’t like men with hairy bellies and cats Read More »
Some of you may like my latest essay on the Good Letters channel at Patheos. It covers everything from Oliver Stone to a young Whittaker Chambers, with a slight dose of literary criticism mixed in. Here’s an excerpt: I’ve been reading recently published short fiction—in journals, in anthologies. It seems that everyone took Baxter to …
Finally, fiction from me that doesn’t involve death or melancholy or predestination or anything else likely to induce heavy drinking. It’s all dialogue, and I wrote it years ago whilst sitting utterly uninspired and bored in a large corporate bureaucracy. And the good people at Work Literary Magazine saw fit to publish it. Here’s an excerpt: …
Look, it’s not like The Hobbit is Holy Scripture. It’s not even, last I checked, part of the Apocrypha. It seems to me that the standard for judging Peter Jackson’s film rendition, then, ought to be whether it succeeds as art, rather than its faithfulness to Tolkien’s book. If we view the film as an …
I took some time off writing here because I didn’t have anything to say. The truth is I went through a spate of those long, dark soul-nights, the kind where you don’t sleep except for a few snatches of time, and always you feel either feverish or dead, and mostly you wish you were the …
I’m in the midst of a writing frenzy at present, so for your reading pleasure I present an excerpt from Flannery O’Connor’s “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” which may be found in the volume of her speeches and essays, Mystery and Manners. This came to me some weeks ago courtesy of Adam DeVille, who …
