The sweltering afternoon rendered Mylady needful of butler Edgar's scratcher. Edgar's thirst, thus whetted, was quenched by chamber maid Dolores. To her release, gardener Pietro raked her field thoroughly. Unfairly, Pietro had to promenade glistening pectorals for hours until Mylady paid lip service to his desires--leaving Mylady all needy again.

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Now that Norman Mailer has died, I can finally order some of his books! More importantly, I will even violate my rules and read fiction that is less than 100 years old!

More seriously, the review in the NY times suggested that it was high time for me to actually take a look at this giant among the late 20th century American writers. I decided to ( Read more... )

The play Birds is a tight one-act piece that was performed as part of Washington DC's Fringe Festival.

The Birds asks much of itself and delivers largely integratable pieces that, however, in the finish defy orderly resolution. I reconstruct Birds to be about how a mythologized past cannot be contained by however socially successful ( Read more... )

I had no idea that there was so much and so structurally funny literary forms for micro-fiction out there. I'd love to try my hands on some of them, but some of them sound positively painfully hard.

Slaughterhouse Five was just the thing for a seventeen year old who had grown up with detailed narratives of the Eastern Front (from Germany's point of view) of World War II ( Read more... )

What a surprise! Günter Grass, the great Anti-Nazi German author, peace activist and Nobel laureat in 1999, served in the Waffen SS! As Wikipedia so nicely puts it, his books are Vergangenheitsbewältigung, "a cathagic working-through of the past." That's really weird!

I have read many of his books with different reactions. Most famous for The Tin ( Read more... )

I read an entire piece of fiction this weekend. It was not for purposes of historiographical studies and the author was less than 100 years dead. It was in its original language and the chance that someone else might have read it in school or college is actually reasonably high.

Specifically, I re-read one of my all time favorite novellas, Joseph ( Read more... )