Last Bender

  GAHA: Babes of the Abyss is finally finished, at least, provisionally finished: I am editing the manuscript to send out to my first readers. This implies I have more readers in reserve, which is true, but we are talking 4 people here and 5 people there. And grateful I am for having them! We [...]

In my review of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square I asserted that the protagonist’s schizophrenia was a literary, not psychological diagnosis. I will admit to a certain flippancy in the comment, but I was disturbed by the diagnosis, it was not what my understanding of schizophrenia is. But it may have been close. The idea that [...]

Hangover Square By Patrick Hamilton Patrick Hamilton is a mid-century British author who was for a period a successful novelist and playwright. By the time of his death of cirrhosis of the liver, he was neglected. He had succumbed not just to alcoholism but to bitterness brought on by the failure of Marxism to deliver [...]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN             So I went to Tony’s. The drive was terrifying. I came down out of the hills and the entrance to the freeway was a maze of stainless steel bladed walls and blinking yellow eye censors on retractable necks. By the time I reached LA Yaanga my knuckles had fused for lack of [...]

SO MUCH PRETTY  Two things first: Cara is a friend of mine, and this review contains spoilers galore. I can’t pretend to any true objectivity then. But I will be honest, I felt some trepidation reading my friend’s book. It was not on account of her technical abilities as a writer. Our friendship is fed [...]

LOVING By Henry Green INTERVIEWER When you begin to write something, do you begin with a certain character in mind, or rather with a certain situation in mind? GREEN Situation every time. INTERVIEWER Is that necessarily the opening situation—or perhaps you could give me an example; what was the basic situation, as it occurred to [...]

JIM KRUSOE: GIRL FACTORY Jim Krusoe’s first novel Iceland was a devastating nightmare told in a beguiling and simple prose that promises, at the outset, to be an ironic, poppy story of obsession. It begins when the hapless hero discovers a beautiful woman swimming naked in a pool. They have sex of course, but the [...]

CHAPTER SIOUX           I knew Junior would be pissed, but I didn’t know how pissed. I didn’t sleep, I sat with a bowl of cocaine and the girls in the living room until the Priest showed up around ten one morning with contracts for the Air Stream deal to sign. The morning sun was shining [...]

GYULA KRUDY: SUNFLOWER SUNFLOWER is a novel of deep nostalgia, written in 1918 by the great Hungarian novelist, journalist and storyteller Gyula Krudy. Set in the Magyar homeland, it narrates in long meandering dreamlike passages a year in the life of its heroine, Eveline. Eveline lives in a divided world, that of cosmopolitan Budapest and [...]

Cara Hoffman’s new book, So Much Pretty, will be published shortly. She has a blog  now too, which is in my links. I’ve known Cara for a long time. If you want to know about her, read her first Blog post. She is an old autodidactical pal, sure, but she has also been a supportive [...]