Excerpt from the Short Story, “Black Crater, White Snow”

Black Crater, White Snow, illustration from The Evolution of Reptilian Handbags and Other Stories

by Melanie Lamaga from the collection The Evolution of Reptilian Handbags and Other Stories,  now available from Amazon. Jade I slide to the barn on a skin of blue ice, sky layered rose and gray. Almost dawn. The wind, a white knife, cuts through my red down coat. Pinfeathers escape—a flock of tiny geese vanishing […] Read more »

Waking the Dreamer

A Short Story by Melanie Lamaga I have a story you won’t believe. No one does. And I planned it this way. I know what I look like now, after so many years alone in the woods. But once I was part of the hustle and flow, a regular man like you. True, I had […] Read more »

Briar Rose by Robert Coover, a Review

A Postmodern Fairy Tale with a Wicked Sense of Humor “He is surprised to discover how easy it is. The branches part like thighs, the silky petals caress his cheeks. His drawn sword is stained, not with blood, but with dew and pollen. Yet another inflated legend. He has undertaken this great adventure, not for […] Read more »

Shakespeare, the Sexy Fantatist

Most people will never read Shakespeare after wading through Romeo and Juliet and maybe Hamlet in high school, and that’s understandable. Elizabethan English is a bit of brain twister. It’s a shame, though, because unlike many greats of the past that we know we should read because it’s good for us, Shakespeare should be read […] Read more »

Review of The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende

[amazon_image id=”0553383809″ target=”_blank” size=”Medium” link=”true” container=”” container_class=”” ]The House of the Spirits: A Novel[/amazon_image]The House of the Spirits is a classic, magical realist epic, somewhat in the style of Garcia Marquez. The story follows the Trueba family, living in an unnamed South American country, presumed to be Chile in the years leading up to and […] Read more »

John Irving

Colorful, Complicated Characters Inhabit Worlds By Turns Domestic, Surreal, and Absurd. In other words, realism. In my opinion, often it is only through the particulars of an artist’s vision that we can begin to delve into the irrational motivations, tendencies, and quirks that many of us (and our culture) have but which (at least until […] Read more »