This is a story collection by the Missouri writer Daniel Woodrell, best known for Winter’s Bone, which of course brought Jennifer Lawrence into our lives. I feel like anytime you mention an American Southern writer–and yeah it gets complicated when you’re talking about Missouri, I know–you are compelled to mention what state they’re from. That’s why we all know Faulkner is from Mississippi along with Larry Brown and Eudora Welty; we know that Georgia gave us Flannery O’Connor and Alice Walker; we think of Zora Neale […]
It was a silly show, all capering women and monkey-faced men.
This is an early British spy thriller (1915) from the writer John Buchan, who would go to write a couple dozen other novels and apparently become Governor-General of Canada in the mid 1930s, which is odd. Even odder is that this is happening at the same time Alfred Hitchcock is making a film version of this novel starring Robert Donat, a big star at the time. Weird. Ok so the novel is an engineer who becomes embroiled in a German plot. To do what?! General […]
“Of course I do,” returned Arthur, a little irritably. “You mean that it is a double-bedded room, and that one of the beds is occupied?”
This is a collection of shorter pieces by Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. I recently read his early novella A Rogue’s Life. These stories are for the most part from the same era as that novella. The lead story here is “The Dead Hand” and at first I thought it was going to be a kind of cheap thrill of a story. A man goes to a hotel off the main road and is offered a solid, if suspicious, […]
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn’t enough for you.
This is a short collection of dramatic monologues by the Irish/French writer Samuel Beckett. So, I need to start off by stating that I couldn’t possibly rate this post because I am definitively ill-equipped to offer judgment of what I read here. I will discuss what I felt about it and the interesting aspects of the production (this is an audiobook) but otherwise, I will leave the criticism to those who know about these things. There are four pieces in this collection. In the first, […]