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Some pickups from recent travels. Some people know that I read a lot of horror literature, with a specific interest in gothic literature and the classic British ghost story. E.F. Benson is one of the most famous and highly regarded of British ghost story writers. What I didn’t know (and most people don’t) is that his two brothers also wrote ghost stories, although they didn’t have their middle…
I’m pleased to have some work featured in Broken Lens Journal Issue #11, which has returned after a hiatus with its first issue in 18 months under slightly new editorial management, with Adam Stutz as Editor-in-Chief and Isabel Yi Jimenez as Poetry Editor. I’ve been enjoying reading the writing by the other contributors, especially because this is a rare situation for me: my work is appearing in a…
I ’ve read a fair amount of the work of Charles Olson: The Maximus Poems (twice), the Selected Writings , which at one point in time was many people’s introduction to Olson’s work, Call Me Ishmael , some essays in the Collected Prose , but although I’ve looked through The Collected Poems of Charles Olson many times and owned it for decades, I’ve never read it cover to cover like I’m doing now (Rod…
Some of Raymond Chandler's short stories were published in magazines in the years before his first novel, The Big Sleep , cane out. He was 51, and a fully realized writer, by the time that first novel reached its first readers in 1939. The situation was different for Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), usually considered the last of the great triumvirate of U.S. hard-boiled detective noir writers…
I liked the concept of the novel Mort(e) by Robert Repino, a science-fiction tale about an animal revolution against human control over their lives. And there were some strong chapters, especially the first one, which really drew me in, and some others later that kept a focused intensity. Too much of this book though was long-winded world building and summarized action that often felt unnecessary.…
I had a read a few of Lafacadio Hearn’s ghost stories set in Japan in various editions over the years and never quite connected with them, maybe because I was expecting something that they didn’t offer. But rereading the stories in this more complete collection, I found them to be some of the most beautiful ghost stories I’ve ever read, equally capable of being tender and moving as of inspiring a…
A lot of people find Roberto Bolaño’s poetry less interesting than his fiction. I can see why, in some ways. The poems lack the same scope, and they feel more youthful and more romantic, even as their political concerns seem in line with what he would do later in his fiction. On the other hand, the youthfulness and smaller scope is significantly the result of the poems being the work of a young…
The similarities between these two books are remarkable. Stylistically, they both feature taut understated prose that’s remarkably precise and filled with restrained tension. Thematically, both dwell significantly and harshly on the limitations of the larger environment of writing that they’re part of: in Spicer, the failings of poetry and poetry cultures, in Chandler, the failures of the…
Let the Corpses Tan is a 2018 French film based on a crime novel by the French novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-95), who has been repopularized in the U.S. recently, at least among literary and leftist political folks, by the release of a number of his books in translation by New York Review Books. Manchette’s tightly-presented, crisp noir crime plots and characters filled with various…
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice is a powerful and unforgettable book, emotionally difficult to handle at times although nothing in it is done for shock value. It’s the true crime story of the murder at age 20 of novelist Cristina Rivera Garca’s younger sister Liliana. The murderer was identified relatively quickly, yet also never caught. But the book is much more than a…
