• Fiction - History - Music

    Brilliant Songs #53: Leoš Janáček’s
    “The Madonna of Frýdek”

    February 22, 2025 - By 

    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. *** *** Leoš Janáček (pronounced “Lowsh Yun-ahh-check”) was a Czech classical composer who made abundant use…

  • Fiction - History

    On Standing Tall: Claire Keegan’s
    “Small Things Like These”

    January 31, 2025 - By 

    “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…

  • Fiction - History

    To Save a Country, a Culture,
    a World : Steven Galloway’s
    “The Cellist of Sarajevo”

    July 27, 2024 - By 

    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…

  • Fiction

    So Much From So Little:
    Claire Keegan’s Novella, “Foster”

    November 26, 2023 - By 

    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…

  • Fiction

    The Ennui of Age and Empire: Lawrence Osborne’s “On Java Road”

    March 26, 2023 - By 

    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…