So vast was my fanboy admiration of Billy Collins when I was in college, so unencumbered by facts my ambition, and so shameless my neophytic insolence, that I wrote the Poet Laureate of United States a poem.
The novel is about a suicidal, mad pursuit of knowledge – about the desire for immortality through information – and the crash that follows. It is one of those prescient books that resonates more today, with our own financial titans falling, than when it was written in 2003.
Someone asked me about the plot. There isn’t one. Gessen’s novel steps into three lives, watches them passively, and steps back out with only slightly abated passivity.
New Orleans lives and still breathes. It stays up all night dancing. It best showcases the problems and hopes most relevant to the United States today, and despite how old it sometimes look, it constantly stays young at heart.
It’s a very idiosyncratic thing, this compulsion to revisit a story so often in close succession. It isn’t systematic, it’s the impelling of magnetic force – a desire, almost a need, to imprint the very words into my mind, absorbing their content into heart and being.
The top ten reasons that e-books just can’t replace real books.
The ten periodicals that make mail delivery a joy.
It is appropriate to tiptoe into the courtyards of suffering and rebirth and listen, watch, and learn.
Book available on Amazon.com. What could being asleep for fifty years, and then awakening, teach a person about life? You might tell me to Google Washington Irving or the Brothers Grimm and see what lessons they intended, but I am dead serious when I ask this question. I ask it because in the early part [...]
I’m tired of seeing fantasy ghettoized. Genre was made to be transcended, and Jeffrey Overstreet’s The Auralia Thread seems to be doing just that.