I’ve talked about George Saunders here before. Love his work. Having just finished his latest collection of short stories, “Liberation Day,” I don’t love it any less. Like most story collections, many of these have appeared earlier in various places. My favorite of the bunch, “A Mom of Bold Action,” first ran in the […]
A writer on top
The cold, hard West
Who’s the most famous writer you’ve never read? I can think of a few offhand, but now I can cross one off the list: Annie Proulx. A good friend sent me a book of her short stories the other day: “Fine Just the Way it Is.” I’m about halfway through it. I love that […]
Big Book o’ Time
I can’t resist time-travel stories. So when I happened across The Time Traveler’s Almanac on Amazon, I hit the “buy now” button at very nearly the speed of light. If I’d been even quicker, maybe I could have read this post without the trouble of actually writing it. Or something like that. When you […]
This time with feeling
I‘m writing fiction again. As with running, it’s been awhile. After publishing a number of stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine a few years ago, I let it slide. I wasn’t happy about it, but I had my reasons. First, the financials weren’t working. Dividing payment for each story by the number of hours […]
Now available at newstands not quite everywhere
It’s nice to see my name in print again. It’s also bittersweet, since “Dead Black Cadillac” is a story I wrote a couple of years ago, and sold a couple months later, and only now appears in print in what may be the least-read magazine in America. But I’m not complaining. Well, maybe I […]
Maybe Sin City isn’t much of a muse
OK, I’ve plunged back into crime fiction, but I seem to have started at the shallow end of the pool: Murder in Vegas, a 2005 anthology of short stories edited by Michael Connelly. I found it at the library a few days ago and I was in a hurry. I like short stories, even […]
Reflections on some ancient tomes
Whenever I visit my folks’ place in Montana, I can never head back home without a sack lunch and a hundred pounds of books. Mom’s always got a lot more food around than the two of them can eat — some of it a few weeks past the sell-by date — and a lot […]