Published in the early 1990s, this short novel by Martin Amis was nominated for the Booker Prize, ultimately losing to Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which I haven’t read. This novel begins with a description of an older doctor thinking about his recent retirement and career as he lays in a hospital bed. But the narrative voice is immediately and noticeably strange. One the one hand it’s first person narrative presumably told by the doctor, but on the other, the doctor’s name and consciousness is told […]
A sweet tea of a story
Full disclosure – I’m not a big Jane Austen fan (cue gasps of astonishment), so I went into reading this modern spin on Sense and Sensibility without much expectation. I had noticed it was reviewed here earlier this month, so when I spotted the copy at the library I was intrigued enough to pick it up. This book tells the tale of the Woodward sisters, who are left to fend for themselves after their father (convicted of embezzlement) skips the country to avoid jail time. […]
Get the chest; don’t bother about the head.
So this is an odds and sods collection of leftover James Bond stories published after Ian Fleming died, and a few years into the movie series. It includes two stories that “became films” in the sense that their titles became titles of films. The story “The Living Daylights” forms part of the movie version, but “Octopussy” bears little resemblance to that movie. “Octopussy” is a good short story in the same way that several of Agatha Christie novels are good. Rather than put James Bond […]
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky – Short Story Perfection
If you don’t yet know about the LeVar Burton podcast, “LeVar Burton Reads” let me have the distinct pleasure of being the one to tell you about it. LeVar Burton, he of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: TNG reads you short stories. AND IT IS THE BEST THING EVER. He is an amazing reading and storyteller and just brings a big ol’ story to my face. Each episode is 45 minutes to about an hour, and he reads you the story and at the end, […]