An excellent novel or short story is immersive. The “story-world” becomes the reader’s world; one feels as if one knows the characters,...

All reading is re-reading, according to some very savvy folks. This sounds like a paradox, my friends, after all, reading is different...

In my exploration of Gilead, the first book of four by Marilynne Robinson, I have attempted to look more at its writerly aspects vs. the...

I think it’s fair to say that the central conflict/story in Gilead is within the relationship between Rev. Ames and Jack Boughton....

What is the style of Gilead? I find it harder to analyze Gilead as a piece of fiction because it reads like a convincing memoir and/or...

“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where? And I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why? and I...

As promised, my short story, Forgotten Melodies, has been published on the Narrative Magazine website as their story of the week. I'm...

Dear friends, I’m back. The vacation was great. We saw the house in Madrid where Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. I do want to announce a...

It is near the end of Justine that the reader is shown the “how” of Justine’s disappearance, as well as other plot points previously...

First, an apology for posting this a day late on Friday vs. Thursday. We were away on a trip, and the post was not ready. Great regrets,...

The history of the city of Alexandria, Egypt is one of frequent conquest by different empires. The British took over in 1881 and remained...

Today, let’s talk about Justine, Lawrence Durrell’s 1957 book that begins his four-novel opus, The Alexandria Quartet. The other novels...

If you wanted to write a story about the adventures of an eleven-year-old boy taking a journey to a new home on an ocean liner in the...

So in The Cat’s Table, is one of the memories that the narrator has about his younger self a memory of sexual awakening—the time when he...

Greetings. My short story, "Punched Out" was, as you know, short-listed for the Hammond House International Literary Prize. It is now...

Last time, we talked about the omniscience of the narrator in Cat’s Table. The narrator, the older Canadian writer originally from Sri...

The Cat’s Table, like other stories by Michael Ondaatje, is episodic in structure. The term episodic fiction refers to a set of episodes...

This week, a new novel, Michael Ondaatje’s 2011 The Cat’s Table. It is the story of an adult narrator telling the story of a voyage taken...

The Unconsoled begins with Ryder, a famous pianist, arriving in an unnamed European city to perform a concert. Through more than five...

One of the features of Ishiguro’s Unconsoled is that it makes use of two forms of narration. The story begins with close first-person...