I enjoy writing intros quite a bit, as it allows one to put books into perspective.  I was delighted with the end result of the last one I wrote, for Heart of Darkness, and am really looking forward to writing about The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Right now I've finished reviewing the source material and am researching some of the critical views - in order ( Read more... )

I love the fact that in Hollywood, stardom is more important than anything else: it is the ultimate cynical meritocracy.  Therefore, if a dog is a bigger star than a person, then that dog will be on the credits and many people won't be (at least that was the case in 1934, before today's endless rows of credits that list everyone, including the ( Read more... )

In today's eco-conscious, safety-obsessed world, it's hard to imagine that the great high-end literary journals such as the The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post were once full of stories about cars.  In the second half of the forties and the whole of the fifties,  racing, rodding and car culture in general ( Read more... )

Those who are friends with both msstacy13  and myself may recall that she was looking for someone to write an introduction for the Flatwater Press edition of the classic novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster by Edward Eggleston.

As soon as I saw the entry, I knew I wanted to do it.  Why?  Well, I love reading classics of all shapes and sizes, whether they be ( Read more... )

The question of what happens a few months / years after the dead rise and many of your best friends become their lunch and join the ranks is one that's been explored quite a bit of late, but of the books I've read that deal with it, The World is Dead, from Permuted Press is the best.  This one contains my story "Bridge Over the Cunene", and I've ( Read more... )

I first heard the term "creative nonfiction" in 2007 at a reading organized in Buenos Aires by the US embassy in Argentina, to which they invited me because, back then, I was the editor of Argentina's only literary magazine published in the English language.  This was a pretty inclusive affair which included one self-published memoir writer, a ( Read more... )