Inspiration for the Libby Speaks stories In the past I’ve posted six “Libby Speaks” stories to this website. I removed the sixth, but today I’m restoring a revised version. I’ll include links to the previous five at the end of this post. The
Literature
Superbloke: Publishers’ Summaries and the National Library Service
1 Publishers’ summaries are promotions for readers looking for something new. You find them on Amazon, Audible, Goodreads and most other bookseller websites. Their most notable characteristics are cliches, exaggeration and urgency—altogether,
An Anthology That Leaves the Best for Last
For Artificial Divide, (2021) Robert Kingett and Randy Lacey collected sixteen stories by visually impaired and blind authors. As I lament in my essay “Twilight of a Stockbroker” (2017), there is almost no fiction created by blind authors in which
What Is It With the Apocalypse?
Why do I have such a visceral aversion for dystopian fantasy and apocalyptic fiction? After a friend convinced me to read Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), a debut novel that has lately garnered a lot of renewed attention, the reasons for my resistance
Shall I compare thee to a sweltry day? Poem and Commentary
Shall I compare thee to a sweltry day? By Johann Sebastian Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a sweltry day? Thou art more dismal and less temperate. Long ago flow’red the darling buds of May That now droop and wilt, green fuses past
Vladimir Putin and Self-Hatred
So many human qualities can be inversions of what they seem. Hatred of someone else can be hatred of oneself. To punish another can be to engage in self-punishment. The subject of inversion came up the other evening during the rebroadcast of Dick