Life is shredding here in the Easy Bay, in some ways figuratively and in other ways -- well, it's really is coming apart. I won't bore you with all the mundane details. For that you can read my blog THE STREET: pictured. The example I want to share is of a rather sad incident that happened some days ago -- on the night I attended the opening of an…

This afternoon, I read a brief essay about Gertrude Stein and the years she spent in southern France during WWII, published on  Truthout. Not exactly a book, but certainly the content of that brief essay was…

Teju Cole’s Open City is a first-person fiction written in an open style as a meditation on the everyday life of a young psychiatric resident, practicing in NYC.  Briskly identified on its front cover as a novel, Open City is perhaps more of an anti-memoir than a novel. I say perhaps because I think it travels beyond the novel and beyond the anti-memoir. Writers have long used the first person voice and…

When someone mentioned Jane Gardam's 2004 novel Old Filth  as a book with a protagonist who seems to have stepped from the pages of Dickens into the 21st century, I was interested, but now after reading the book I remember my grandmother's warning comparisons are odious.

I knew of Gardam as a prolific and…

Reading Tea Obreht’s remarkable first novel The Tiger’s Wife is a bit like reading the surface of a sunlit lake brushed across by jasmine-laden wind or like eating a delicate gold filigree that has been artfully arranged across the bittersweet chocolate icing of a raspberry torte. I know that anything I have to say about this wonderful book may end up sounding facile and perhaps a bit silly, but let me say that to…

Is adaptation the right word to use when discussing how one transforms a 500+ page novel so that it might sing on the silver screen for a couple of hours, no more? 'Adaptation' somehow suggests change, difficult perhaps but in the end agreeable, as if the words of the book will find happiness or at least usefulness when mouthed by actors enclosed by light. But sometimes a book doesn't easily adapt, and the cultural…

The winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Arvind Adiga’s first novel White Tiger is currently published with five pages of quotations from glowing reviews that one can thumb through (or not) before reaching the title page. After reading an interview with him, I should imagine such bold promotional glitter doesn’t puff his chest but he may find it mildly amusing.  The comments range from “a satire as sharp as it gets”…

After writing about the Stein Opera and St Ignatius, I recall a poem I wrote long ago that found its way into one manuscript and then wiggled its way out. It remains in my files as a singleton, altered somewhat from its original state, but that’s not surprising. I include it anyway. We all change as we age:

Spiritual…