This week, a new story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1988 The Remains of the Day. (Whiny voice: This week, a new story, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the...

One of the hallmarks of fiction, one of the things that often keeps us reading, is how the protagonist transforms in the story. Aristotle...

I have written about how Pat is an unreliable narrator in Silver Linings. The unnamed narrator presents Pat’s story as a sort of journal...

I have said that, in Silver Linings, Pat is an unreliable narrator. Let’s look at this more closely. An unreliable narrator is a narrator...

I'm very pleased to announce that Blue Lake Review will publish my short story "The Loss of the Whaling Ship Pequod" in their May issue....

This week a new story, Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel, The Silver Linings Playbook. I first read the book six years ago after seeing the...

What role does transformation play in Grand Central? Transformation is a key element of fiction and of memoir. “A transformation is a...

Last week, I wrestled mightily with the question of whether Grand Central is a memoir or a work of fiction, deciding that the story seems...

‘Kay. I have said that, this week, we should examine Grand Central as a work of fiction. I felt good about the clarity, not exactly smug,...

A week of sleepless nights, best beloved. I’ve been struggling with Grand Central. The personal nature of the story, a possibly...

A new book this week, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novella, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, weighing in at one-hundred and twelve...

The ending of The Moslem Wife tells us what the story is about—the point—if you will. We talked last week about how the style of the...

What is the style of The Moslem Wife? By way of review, fictional style can be thought of as the implied author, an entity who mediates...

From the outset, the Narrator entity of The Moslem Wife expresses cutting judgements of the characters, skewering their vanities and...

A new story this week, dear friends, The Moslem Wife by Mavis Gallant, first published in The New Yorker in 1976. The story is included...

An interesting thing to note about Lion is that four of the characters—Patrick, Hana, Caravaggio, and Clara—appear in Ondaatje’s next...

In The Skin of a Lion has not one but two scenes in which Patrick Lewis is sketched. Early in the story, his father Hazen “outlined the...

In a previous post having to do with a different book, I wrote about What Do You Do When I Can’t See You—that phenomena in fiction of the...

Let’s consider some implications of the narrative style of In the Skin of a Lion. Umberto Eco suggests that a text contains three...

Last week, I threatened to write about In the Skin of a Lion’s narrative structure. Going to do it today. The book is often described as...