Tag: book review

Short Fiction, Writers Reading

Writers Read – And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie an essay by Leila

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Agatha Christie 1939

Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None was my mother’s all time favorite book. If that isn’t true, well, she can come back from the other side and tell me about it (that statement causes me a bit more anxiety than you might think). She died fifteen years ago and lately I’ve been re-examining the crash and thud of our extremely difficult and often semi-violent relationship. Now, I never swung at Mom except once when I was nine, and she actually pulled a knife on me once when we were both considerably older. I believe “volatile” sums it up if I had only one word to choose from.

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auld author, Short Fiction

Auld Author – Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh by Leila.

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My Trainspotting experience was one of the few times that I saw the film before I read the book. And it is also one of the incredibly few times that I consider both items of equal high quality.

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All Stories, auld author

Auld Author: Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Master of Ballantrae’by Michael Bloor

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Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) had a short life but was a prolific author. His first work (a history) was published when he was just 16 and he went on to write 13 novels, 6 collections of short stories, and several books of non-fiction. They weren’t all wonderful: a sequel (‘Catriona’) to the brilliant ‘Kidnapped,’ is sometimes cited as a perfect example of an ill-advised sequel; and ‘St Ives,’ incomplete at his death, was then completed by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, mores the pity. But there are quite enough diamonds among his output to justify his global reputation.

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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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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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