Art & Culture

I read The Floating Opera when I was 18 years old, and thought it was a well-done but tame “realist” novel, a warm-up to the author’s later “post-modernist meta-fictions.” Re-reading it decades later, I think Floating is a model of what a novel can be – a delightful entry into a unique world, with a new way of seeing everyday life, imbued with a vision of love and delight at the world around in all its absurdities and pleasures.

A thin sci-fi plot that is really a platform for vulgar, soulless sex among the unmarried and unattached in their 20s and 30s at some time in the future.

Holy Trinity Church was a landmark in the tree-lined, thriving center of Duquesne, PA, outside Pittsburgh, where my cousins grew up in the 1960s. Then the town’s steel mill closed

The amusing detective work of a whimsical but charming nihilist.  Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) works as a “consultant” for the FBI, but is perfectly candid that his real mission is to seek revenge against the serial killer who murdered his family, legal procedures be damned.

Another take on the #MeToo movement. Well-written, deliberately nuanced perspective on male sexual exploitation of vulnerable women in high-pressure corporations. Identifies the victims in their own offices – at last! – but how about the the poor and powerless around the world, victims of American policies left out of  the “news”?

Jonathan Maberry, the best-selling mystery, fantasy and horror writer, shocks and terrifies the LitCrit Industry with his F… Word!

When I hear about freewriting, it feels like … freedom… at last!