Sifting through the dirt to get to the gold
"Captivity does things to you. It shows you how base an animal you can be. How you'd do anything to stay alive and suffer a little bit less than the day before." One of my initial thoughts after finishing the book, and a subtext to the whole relevance of the plot, was how big of... Continue Reading →
Scouting for the Reaper by Jacob M. Appel contains an unorthodox collection of short stories that center around the common theme of life and the many mysteries that casually ride shotgun, or plague us along the way. The author explores situations that arise whether young or old, male or female. The author goes about his way... Continue Reading →
"But he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can't move without killing somebody. Yet the highway suckered him on, and a sign says Pottstown 2. He almost brakes. But then he thinks." Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is getting old and it is not going gracefully. He's... Continue Reading →
"Paranoid are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations." In a post-modern world, in a town that on the surface is not unlike many others, there lives a woman named Oedipa Maas. She lives in a town that goes by the “rolls off the tongue”... Continue Reading →
"I ask you to remember, not every man that bears the mark of the castaway, is a castaway at heart." To me J.M. Coetzee's story Foe is a function of three distinct points of view that takes the reader from a manageable feeling, to a further state of evaluation, and finally to an interpretative position.... Continue Reading →
"My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply." Play It As It Lays by... Continue Reading →
"In general if you tell people something bad, they buy right into it, because it strikes them as normal. But when you make up good things, they get suspicious." Reading Etgar Keret's Suddenly, a Knock on the Door was a truly surreal experience. The majority of these stories seemed to be constructed effortlessly by the... Continue Reading →
" 'Supposedly these two women got in a fight over a man up there in front of the church. One was the wife and the other was the girlfriend. The preacher heard one of them swear she was going to knock the other one stiff.' " A ghost town in the northeastern part of Ohio... Continue Reading →
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