Monthly Archives: April 2015

Scott Archer Jones’s The Big Wheel is part cyberpunk dystopian thriller, part corporate espionage thriller. It’s also an interesting study of the search for identity. Last year I reviewed Scott Archer Jones’s first novel Jupiter and Gilgamesh. A key theme I noted … Continue reading →

In his films Buster Keaton is often like Camus’s Sisyphus – he will keep pushing that boulder up the hill no matter how many times it rolls back down.  I find myself caught out short this week. I had planned … Continue reading →

“For a long time, I took my pen for a sword; I now know we’re powerless. No matter. I write and will keep writing books; they’re needed; all the same, they do serve some purpose.Culture doesn’t save anything or anyone, … Continue reading →

William Mark’s novel is a complex, sometimes convoluted, mix of abductions (both child and adult), sexual perversions, and rogue crusading that makes for a Mulligan stew of equal parts truth and lies, good and evil, and right and justice. Another … Continue reading →

R.K. Narayan’s Under the Banyan Tree is really a collection of sketches rather than short stories that bring to readers the daily life of the India of his time. They are often clever and always charming; still, from such an obvious … Continue reading →

“…it’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.” – Sigrid Undset I first came across Sigrid … Continue reading →

“And men will not understand us…and the war will be forgotten  – and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves…the years will pass … Continue reading →

“I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?” Hermann Hesse We turn in this next essay from the subtle, Zen inflected musings of Kawabata … Continue reading →

“But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: ‘I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.’ The gloom only grew denser.” – Yasunari Kawabata Reading Japanese Nobelist Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain, one is reminded … Continue reading →