Eh. I am pretty much reading anything that costs me zero dollars, so I thought I try one of the Amazon Original Stories. I have read Taylor Jenkins Reid before so I thought this be at least a good read, even though it’s a short story. I liked the idea of writing letters back and forth, but though two of the characters were beyond boring, and hated the last letter that was sent. It pretty much makes one of the characters totally crap and actually […]
“We are the farting children of Heaven, blessed be our slippery viscera”
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 […]
“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, […]
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 […]