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But What Are They Eating?
"The fragrance of freshly milled wheat berries has a depth and liveliness unlike anything else, flowery, sweet, beery, faintly green and earthy. As the grain shatters beneath the grating stones and the new flour empties from the mill, an aromatic dust cloud wafts up speaking of a symbiotic...
Decadent Review – Rags of Time
"All good science fiction draws us into the author’s dreamworld, but seminal science fiction possesses something beyond riveting plotlines..." Rags of Time: Studies in Fictional Travels in TimeMore From the Blog
How a Novel Began to Spin a Web Around Me
Writers are often asked where a story or novel came from. Is this true? Did this happen to you? One would like to respond to such sweet curiosity with something definitive, “Oh, I took this from an article that appeared in the New York Times on October 4, 1965.” But rarely is the muse so...
Svetlana Alexievich: Voices from Chernobyl
As I have been reading my way through Powell’s Bookstore “25 Books to Read Before You Die, World Edition, 2016,” I have been choosing my selections from the list somewhat randomly. For some time I’ve had my eye on Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl and finally last month got around to...
Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude
Czechoslovakian writer Bohumil Hrabal comes out of a long tradition of wicked satirists. Think of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, and, in our era, Günter Grass (The Tin Drum), Raymond Coover (The Public Burning), and Terry Southern (The Magic Christian). Or, even more contemporary, Saturday Night Live....
Eileen Chang: Love in a Fallen City
Eileen Chang is, for me, a problematic writer. She is a very good writer, and I want to like her writing more than I do. The reasons are complicated. But first, let’s establish some facts on the ground. Chang was born in Shanghai, 1920, and raised bilingually, Chinese and English. Her family,...
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
“It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.” One thing that helped me decide when I contemplated doing a series of blog posts based on PowellsBooks Blog, “25 Books to Read Before You Die, World Edition, 2016,” was seeing on the list a book by Italo Calvino. I had previously read...
Ryunosuke Akutagawa: Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of Japan’s most celebrated writers, cut his life short at age 35, by suicide (1892-1927). During his short career of 12-15 years Akutagawa (pronounced Dyu-noss-ke Ak-ta-ga-wa) produced stories that continue to be read seriously both in Japan and in the West. For us, his...
Reading Across the Lines
It is 1925 in Ilheus, a sleepy town in the province of Bahia in southern Brazil, and Nacib the Arab’s longstanding cook—for him personally as well as for his café—has up and left him for family matters, as she has threatened to do for years. On this same day that Nacib loses his cook, Colonel...
The Life and Slow Death of a Former Pennsylvania Steel Town
The Washington Post writer Nicole Crowder published an article recently describing the process that award-winning documentary photographer Pete Marovich used to come up with a poignant, perhaps unsettling look at how the Pennsylvania steel town of Aliquippa...