Christmas comes but once a year and yet the Christmas spirit can endure throughout the year, given the proper attitude and the right books! There are some words that only the heart can express. Those words must be chosen with care, by the writer and by the reader! This holiday season offers us a time to look ahead and to look back, hopefully and happily, at some gifts from writers of yore. The fables of Jean de La Fontaine are little chef d’oeuvres of charm, humor, wisdom, co

This past summer I was reading a pamphlet-like book, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov (which I highly recommend). There was no date for the...

I’ve not read the novel of that name by Charles Dickens. In fact, I’ve read very little by Dickens. When you are going through hard...

I am recalling an online review of the new translation of Dr. Zhivago. The reviewer had seen the 1965 film five times and thus thought...

J'étais Mademoiselle Tanisse. I was Miss Tanis. The classroom was small, but not too small for a large dark, rectangular, wooden table...

By using the word, young, in this title, I do not mean of a less mature chronological age. I mean “novice” or “beginning.” In that sense,...

One morning at breakfast, Dear Husband read to me a quote from Charles Schulz : “Sometimes I lay awake at night and ask, ‘What have I...

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771. He was crippled with polio as a boy and, as a result, he had a permanent limp. Also as a...

Summertime and the raccoons are coming! They are coming into my detached garage, the nighttime abode for my two cats. The other morning, I went out to see the felines in the garage. I noticed that the water bowl was filled with mud and the pale yellow sheet that covers the Cat Table (under which resides The Cat Bed) was covered with dried mud and rather long claw prints. Annabella, the green-eyed cat, was so jealous! This black Burmese cat walked quickly (scampered) into the

We live in troubled times. Some of these troubles have been self-produced, others manufactured by people willing to feed off of the fears...

I have attempted several times to read the first volume of seven of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), the novel by Marcel Proust. Even as I type the title, I feel overwhelmed. The first volume is Du côté de chez Swann, or Swann’s Way. I read about fifteen pages of it one summer; tried another summer to go past those same fifteen pages; and then a third attempt was even less successful. I do not recall if the final try was in the summer, or if I made it p

June 2014 For many years I aspired to be a short story writer. I wrote several short stories and asked friends to read the drafts of...

Perhaps it was because I was born into a Greek tragedy that I somehow managed to avoid reading any of those classic plays. I, however,...

St. Patrick's Day 2014 During the early spring of 2010 while I was writing the draft of THE DAWN (which was at that time called...

It is a difficult, demanding hunger - the need to create. One must fill the senses with the sense of exhilaration, even joy, in the...

W. Somerset Maugham W. Somerset Maugham, William Somerset Maugham, the British doctor-turned-writer, is one of my favorite novelists. He was born in 1874 and died in 1965. He lived within a duration that produced many wars, quite a few revolutions, many changes in travel and in technologies, and many assaults upon languages and literatures. His reputation as a popular, best-selling writer, as well as the highest paid author during the 1930s, led his peers and critics to carp

Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was a very conservative (in its original meaning), upright Victorian male who never lost his mid-Western view of life or his delicate sense of propriety, even when drunk. The reason why he could so ruthlessly chronicle the chaotic, destructive, careless, immoral Jazz Age (a term of his invention) was that he was so outside of it, even when he was in the middle of it. He was never able to bridge the gap betwee

As the year comes to an end and holidays are celebrated, I would like to offer some gifts in a literary vein to anyone who enjoys good...

During my many years of study to become a novelist, I encountered these forms of writing that purported to be fiction and were even...

It was not until I moved West from the East that I learned about Louis L’Amour, and it was a rather chance encounter that informed me of...