Category Fiction

The assaults, the responses, the anguish, the questions, the cruelty, the concern, the reprisals, the relentless tsunami of invective and resultant anxiety.

The anger and exhaustion, which is largely the intent.

The despair which creeps in quietly underneath, simmering…

And still, with Maya Angelou, we must rise.

But not today. Not this moment.

We must protect ourselves, too, by tending regularly to our zones of joy.

Today, beauty, for beauty’s sake. (And our own.)

Though with a loop back into history near the end.

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Leoš Janáček (pronounced “Lowsh Yun-ahh-check”) was a Czech classical composer who made abundant use of his country’s traditional folk music to craft a body of work with a distinct homegrown, nationalist flavor...

“So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close,” muses coal merchant Bill Furlong, the protagonist in Claire Keegan’s finely sculpted 2021 novella, “Small Things Like These.” Furlong had been admiring the river that passes through his small Irish town, but upon approaching it, finds himself wondering “which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water.”

(Side note right off the top: “…he rathered…” Please don’t ever listen to anyone who suggests language, “mere” words, aren’t beautiful and endlessly pliable things.)

The same basic questions—distanced or closeup? gauzy appearance or sharpened reality?—run like a low-voltage current through this slim tale of 110 pages that lingers long after works of triple the length take leave of one’s consciousness with the morning mist. At barely an hour’s read and available in full here, Keegan’s tale is a case study in the sensual, aesthetic pleasures of reading for reading’s sake.

Try as...

Is it possible to kill a city, just wipe out its entire identity and reason for existence, to so decimate its population and dampen its spirit that its surviving inhabitants no longer know who they are, whom to trust and what they care about—or whether they care about anything at all?

To render it, through relentless bombardment, disrupted supplies of food, water and electricity, and concentrated but unpredictable sniper fire from the hills high above, a mere ghost of its once living self, starved of the essential human nutrients of care, security, and community that make a city not just an infrastructure of buildings and roads and utilities, but a place of identity and soul?

These are the underlying macro questions that Steven Galloway explores in his riveting 2008 novel, “The Cellist of Sarajevo.”

Profound because to insist on beauty even amidst ongoing atrocity is a radical act of freedom and resolve that can’t help but provide solace and inspiration to the besieged p...

I’ve gotten to an age where I’m starting to do some basic math on how many 400-pages-and-more books I have left in me to read. Faced with one highly regarded tome of 500 pages and two others of more or less equal interest at 250 pages each, my tendency in recent years has been to go with the latter, particularly when stretching the timeframe out to the 10 or 15 or more years I might reasonably hope to live (should I be so fortunate, every new day being its own blessing).

Sure, if I choose to limit my reading most all the time to books shorter than some self-imposed limit, I will miss out on countless enriching opportunities.

But the plethora of truly remarkable literature readily available today at every page count, from every corner of the world, pairs with my guaranteed mortality to tell me I am going to miss out on countless terrific opportunities no matter the length of the books I read the rest of my life.

Can’t read ’em all, unfortunately.

Keegan seems to know exactl...

An aging expat journalist, British-born and bred but now 20 years in his country’s last colonial outpost of Hong Kong, is battling his own sell-by date while ostensibly trying to report on the historical forces that had long been unleashed by the island country’s 1997 handover to communist China. Largely student-led protesters make nightly appearances in the streets, trying to evade tear gas and police batons as they decry the oft-predicted reality that China’s promises of a hands-off policy toward Hong Kong’s mostly democratic rule are proving empty.

Meanwhile, the journalist’s pal from his university days at Cambridge, scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family, is up to his ears in the duplicity and semi-recklessness peculiar to a certain kind of privilege. The journalist ultimately makes the decision to report on that recklessness when it leads to deadly consequences.

Or did it?

This is the basic setting for Lawrence Obsorne’s latest (August, 2022) novel, “On Java Road.”

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