Tag: book review

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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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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Auld Author – The Bad Place by Dean R Koontz- by Hugh Cron

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Okay, this is a weird one.
I have a story about a story that has fuck all to do with the story.
Please bear with me.
I’d like to write about Dean R Koontz’s ‘The Bad Place’.
As I have said before, with any of these that I do, I want to tell you more why the book has stayed with me rather than all the technical stuff. I have read six or so of Mr Koontz’s books and have enjoyed them. He does have a tendency to use
children and dogs within his plots. (The dogs, I can forgive – Kids not so much!)
But this book stands out due to it being so random. Here comes the story within a story, well sort of. Years back I read something that stated Bobby Darin had said that he could write anything. Someone, a DJ, I think gave him the line ‘Splish Splash, I was taking a bath’ and well, we know the rest. The reason that I mention this is, I reckon (Wrongly, I might add!!) that Mr Koontz was bet that he couldn’t get these topics into a story.
Telekinesis.
Inter-Planetary travel.
Vampirism.
And hermaphroditism.
By fuck he did!
I give you ‘The Bad Place.’
What a bonkers but entertaining book!!
And I don’t want to spoil anything but I do need to give you one line.
When the MC knows that the evil guy was coming for him, he tried to warn his pal. They were both in a unit for Special Needs. He told his friend, ‘There’s a bad thing coming’ and the wee soul replied, ‘What, poached eggs?’
May sound like fuck all but it makes me laugh every-time I think on it!!
Koontz isn’t my favourite horror writer, I prefer King, Laymon and to me, the best ever, the late great James Herbert. But for something so inventive that, in my mind, has a link to Bobby Darin, I would suggest that you have a look at this book. It is by far, the most inventive book that I have ever read.

Hugh Cron

Hugh

Short Fiction

Auld Author  – Hwang Sunwŏn (1915-2000) by Bruce Fulton

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Hwang Sunwŏn was born near Pyongyang, the capital of present-day North Korea, and was educated there and at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he majored in English literature. He was barely in his twenties when he published two volumes of poetry. His first volume of stories appeared in 1940. He subsequently concentrated on fiction, producing seven novels and more than a hundred stories. In 1946 he and his family moved from the Soviet-occupied northern sector of Korea to the American-occupied South. He began teaching at Seoul High School in September of that year. Like millions of other Koreans, the Hwang family was displaced by the Korean War (1950-53). From 1957 to 1993 Hwang taught creative writing at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.

Among modern Korea’s short story masters, Hwang Sunwŏn reigns supreme. He was the preeminent short story writer in a nation that prides itself on its accomplishments in that genre. His coming-of-age story “The Cloudburst” is known by every Korean with a middle-school education. And he is the Korean short-fiction writer best represented in the English-speaking world, attracting some of our finest translators. This is the legacy; how did it come about?

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Auld Author – The Physician by Noah Gordon by Diane

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Just like most of our visitors and writers, I couldn’t even begin to count the number of books I’ve read. My first real favourite was Heidi, which I read over and over and from that point on I never stopped reading. I’ve read some brilliant works, and I have read some dross. I have this thing where I’ve started, so I’ll finish, but I am slowly weaning myself out of that mindset. There are only so many years in a life after all and too many good books.

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Auld Author – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith – By Leila

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“They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.”

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

There was a good film of the same name based on Betty Smith’s autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which came out shortly after the book was published in 1943. But as it went during the days of the Hays Code of “decency,” much of the book could not be filmed due to content that the movie people figured viewers would be offended by. This involved a wildly over-sexed female character, pedophiles, alcoholism, antisemitism, children pulled from school to work after sixth grade, suicide, racism and persevering only for the sake of survival, for no greater aim than to prolong the misery. Some of those topics (especially the gentle father’s self destruction via the bottle) were addressed passingly while others were let alone.

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