Living the Liminal

“Four And Twenty Blackbirds” (Cherie Priest)
Summary: Eden sees ghosts, but the three that haunt her life most are benevolent guardians killed in a tragedy long before Eden was born. When she goes on a quest to find out about the mother and father she never knew, Eden finds that her own story begins in the [...]

Take the Earth, place it in a kind of time bubble that slows our time down to an infinitesimal crawl compared with the rest of the universe and shut out the stars and you create a world that poses a highly unique set of challenges to the characters involved. Sort of like the whole world [...]

While I haven’t read any of his work in years, Clarke’s novels had a major impact on my teenage imagination, from Childhood’s End to Rendezvous with Rama, he made the universe wonderful even if, at times, it might be challenging or even frightening to our fragile human minds and egos. Ars Technica has a fitting [...]

I just finished reading what has got to be one of the most professional “fan-fic” books ever done. Stephen Brust, author of a number of books including “To Reign in Hell: A Novel”, “Jhegaala (Vlad)”, and “Sethra Lavode (The Viscount of Adrilankha)”, has written a Firefly novel and–here’s the ultra-cool part–is giving it away! It’s [...]

The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication. — Guards! Guards!

“Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (New York Review Books Classics)” (Georges Simenon)
I was going through a journal looking for some flotsam and jetsam to incorporate into the latest of my 10 Minute plays and came across some quotes from this book by Georges Simenon that I had noted down when I read it during the summer [...]

This is the kind of book that punches you, not unkindly, in the gut. A book about loss and redemption, sure. That’s the easy stuff kiddo. Death is almost a necessity for novelists - I mean, without death, what would the motivation for so many stories be? Auster presents another kind of death in his [...]

Just the beginning of my library . . . a dash over 200 books that I entered into Delicious Library today. Basically one bookshelf and there are 4 more to go here in the apt and boxes (probably 10 or so) in my parent’s attic.
My Books So Far . . .
I have to say that [...]

I just finished reading George Turner’s Down There In Darkness and felt vaguely unsatisfied by the novel as a whole. It was his last book, published posthumously, and hailed by some of the reviewers as a classic. There was some interesting ideas posited about morphic resonance and the concept of Dreamtime but the structure of [...]