Category: Writers Reading

Writers Reading

Writers’ Read. It’s a Mystery to me by Doug Hawley

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Real Ones

Dashiell Hammett is famous for The Maltese Falcon and the Thin Man Series.  Not remembered today, but Red Harvest is an example of something different from him.  It happens in Poisonville / Personville (fictionalized Butte Montana) where crime ran rampant in the street.  Most crime stories and mysteries have involved a single bad guy or a small gang.  Hammett was a leftist, but worked for the Pinkertons which were sometimes involved in strike breaking, which was an obvious conflict.  Later in life he was jailed for his beliefs.

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All Stories, Writers Reading

Writers Read. A Most Unfortunate Incident by Geraint Jonathan

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Apparently, in the Russian original, Dostoevsky is a very funny writer, his novels rich in comic turns, witty wordplay and, not infrequently, downright farce. That this may be lost in translation is often all too evident from the many English translations to date. (For some reason, as David Foster Wallace somewhere points out, Dostoevsky’s characters are still made to say things like “The devil take it!”, rather than, say, “To hell with it!”; such archaic expressions abound, lending a stiffnecked quality to even the most anarchic of situations described.) That said, however, there’s barely an English translation of Dostoevsky’s 1862 novella, A Most Unfortunate Incident, that does not carry at least some of the tale’s comic heft; other translations are titled, variously, An Unpleasant Predicament, A Sordid Story, A Nasty Anecdote, A Disgraceful Affair;  but for my money, it’s Ivy Litvinoff’s translation from 1971 carries the day.

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All Stories, Writers Reading

Writers Read by Michael Bloor

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Re-Reading John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

In my generation, every child in Britain grew up knowing at least three stories – the Christ story, that of Robin Hood, and that of King Arthur and his knights. The Arthurian Legend has been told and re-told by many different tellers for around one and a half thousand years.

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Short Fiction, Writers Reading

Writers Read: The Dead Zone by Stephen King

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The Dead Zone by Stephen King

1979

The Dead Zone was the first SK novel I ever read. The first book of his that I read, given to me by a neighbor, was a short collection called Night Shift. Lots of good stuff there, my favorite being Gray Matter. It made me double check my beers for a long time.

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Writers Reading – Review by Dale Willliams Barrigar 

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Kafkaesque

Franz Kafka has a sixty-something-word story called “The Watchman” in the translation from German. In this piece, the narrator keeps running back and forth in front of the watchman in order to taunt him, while also being terrified that he might be arrested at any moment, but unable to desist. In sixty or so words, Kafka encapsulates the outcast outsider, the paranoid underdog known as the modern human being: the contemporary everyman.

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