“The scrapbook was my mother’s way of setting down the days so they wouldn’t be forgotten. This story is my way. No one can tell me these events didn’t happen or it was all a girl’s fantasy. The reminders are there, in that scrapbook, and I remember them all.” During the Second World War, Beth …
Continue reading The Cure for Death by Lightning: Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett A town in Scotland where the sun never breaks through the clouds, pollution hangs heavy, unemployment is high and people are in thrall to a potent drug called the brew, manufactured and sold by the drug lord, Hecate. This is the setting for Jo Nesbo’s grim, gritty reworking of …
It all began when Chris Stewart, 29 and out of work, bumps into a friend. “My great-aunt Jane has been on at me for weeks to find her a skipper [for her yacht], and I thought of you straightaway.” Which was a little odd because Stewart had never been on a boat before, never mind …
Continue reading Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat—Chris Stewart
“[T]he image of the reader is solitary. We are each alone when we enter the borderland and go on to explore what lies in it and beyond it, in the book we’re engaged with. True, we can come back and and talk about it, and if we talk well and truthfully and interestingly enough we …
Continue reading Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling—Philip Pullman
Talking About Books 