In fact “Inferno” has gathered all necessary conditions for good edition: cine plot, fashion for medieval, religious theories, Robert Langdon. Filmmakers are going to screen the book and of course it will be interesting to watch. “Inferno” is really interesting, fascinating and worth reading, if you like mysteries, puzzles and unexpected plot twists.
I started drafting I Will Never Forget sitting in Mom’s eerily quiet room. What most likely began as a cathartic tribute to a remarkable woman gradually took form as a memoir of love. The rough draft was half completed when she died in July 2011. Already retired from my “day job” I literally cocooned for days recording in black and white the colorful stories of my life, thanks to my mom.
My debut mystery novel Dream of the Dead is the start of a new detective series based in the West End, London’s world-famous entertainment district. Like the Oxford colleges of Colin Dexter, or the racecourses of Dick Francis, the charming theatres of the West End might initially seem an unusual environment for a crime novel. It’s certainly an exuberant, expensive, exhilarating area. But is it dangerous? After all, anyone who knows London tends to think of the West End as a pleasure ground for the masses. The colossal shops of Oxford Street and Regent Street. The glitzy restaurants of Soho and Covent Garden. The tourist magnet of Leicester Square. And, of course, the gorgeous theatres of St Martin’s Lane and Shaftesbury Avenue. Hardly a place teeming with criminals. Or so it would seem… Yet take a guess at which area of London also has the highest crime rate? Guess which part of the capital you are most likely to become a victim of violence? That’s right. The West End. STATISTICALLY SPEAKING… Many famous places typically thought of as being in ‘London’, from touristy sights like Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, or 10 Downing street, to prestigious universities, billion-pound corporate headquarters,…
People write books for a zillion reasons and that is what makes the written word so incredibly interesting and unpredictable. The reasons and the possibilities are infinite making each story unique, not only in origin, but in its direction, too. Kill Daddy was written for an accumulation of reasons and is intended to speak to all who would like to listen. Primarily, Kill Daddy was brought to life in answer to a question I was repeatedly asked at various functions upon my return to Portugal: What was Africa like? Each response I gave was inadequate, or required too much time to explain. Feeling as though I were doing a disservice to all the wonderful people I had just spent 2 years living with, I decided that I had to write down the full answer, which would inevitably be a book. The next surprise was all the memories that came tumbling down when I was only a couple of chapters into writing about my experiences. An epiphany, a realisation that if I was to do the story justice, I would have to go the whole way: Why did I go to Kenya in the first place? Because I was a lost…
My family members heard the story and were amazed. “You have to write about it,” my mother determined. I had my doubts. This is the problem with true stories: they aren’t credible. Readers would consider the story absurd if they read it in a novel. “Give me a different story,” I asked my sister. “That’s all I’ve got,” she said, and took a bite of chicken.
The publisher is giving away one copy to three (3) winners of The Gods of Heavenly Punishment–to enter fill out the Rafflecoptter form at the end of the post. On Writing Unlikable Places A few months back, like many writers—and women writers in particular, I suspect–I followed the literary debate over “likable” characters with some interest. For those who might have missed, it all started with an interview Publishers Weekly sat down to with novelist Claire Messud, and their guileless assertion that Nora, the unambiguously furious main character of Messud’s novel The Woman Upstairs, wasn’t someone they’d “want to be friends with.” As Jennifer Weiner later put it in Slate in her thought-provoking response to the exchange, Messud all but “flipped the table”: For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends,…
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” – Sun Tsu Recently I had the pleasure of reading the novel, The Pilgrimage, by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho—also the author of international best seller The Alchemist. In the novel, Coelho’s fictional self takes on a physical and spiritual quest to find his mystical sword on a pilgrimage from the south of France to a small town on the west coast of Spain called Santiago de Compostela. I’m going to paraphrase a huge lesson that Coelho learned while on his journey. The only way to deal with our physical enemy or the enemy that lives within, is to accept him as a friend and listen to the advice and lessons that he teaches us, never allowing him to dictate the rules of the game. But if we are to keep the enemy from dictating the rules of the game, it is first necessary to know what you want and then to…
What would you sacrifice in the name of faith? What would you choose when faced with impossible choices—the salvation of your soul, or the lives of millions? I often write about choice and sacrifice, thrusting ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances and presenting them with difficult choices. I also wonder what I would sacrifice for another person: money, freedom, my health, even my own life. I especially marvel at people who do give up their lives for others. I had friend, a soldier, who threw his body onto a grenade to save the lives of his comrades. I was in living India at the time—trying to find myself—when I heard this sad but heroic story and gained much-needed perspective on my own quest. I went through most of my life thinking the greatest sacrifice a person can make is giving up their life in service to another. But times and values change. Now it seems that many people have a greater attachment to their faith then their lives; they would more quickly die for their God than their fellow man—regardless of the consequences. Acts of terror, random shootings, myriad crimes that we could hardly imagine a few years ago are not…
Kevin J. Anderson’s Darksaber is the second novel in the unofficially named Callista Trilogy. Introduced in Barbara Hambly’s Children of the Jedi, Callista
I knew Nora Ephron’s work without knowing that I knew it. She wrote, and sometimes also directed, some classic movies, such as When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. None were favorites, but I liked most of her movies. When I was shopping for some reading material for a long trip, I was excited when I stumbled upon one of her books, “I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.” I wanted to get a feel for her writing and her voice — independent of what came across on the Silver Screen, which can be clouded by acting choices. Buy this book in paper or electronic format* Though the book is not new (it was published in 2006), it was a national bestseller when it was published, and it continues to hold up as a popular book because of the author’s legacy and because of the broad appeal it has for women. I guess, too, I was feeling a bit reflective about aging when I picked it up. Though I am almost half Ephron’s age when the book was published, I am still starting to see the stamp of time and…
