“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
After soaking up the last few chapters of Stephen King’s magnificent opus The Dark Tower, I had this overwhelming urge to recategorize my bookshelf to make room for this final book in The Gunslinger series. Frodo et al will have to settle for the [...]
OK, first I have a confession and an apology to two fine men: Mr. Stephen King and Allen J. Holt.
More than a few years ago, when I was just a pretentious grad student of English, I found myself drunkenly accusing Mr. King of being a flashy contemporary writer whose ouevre wouldn’t stand the test of [...]
One of the things that struck me over and over again in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997, St. Martin’s Press) is the fact that the reader is, in encountering the text, a participant in the unraveling of a history. And in so doing, the reader realizes the absurdity of believing that history and truth [...]
On the first page of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ short novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the reader is given the climax of the story–the murder of Santiago Nasar. Using an inverted story structure, however, doesn’t keep the reader from wanting to finishing the novel. Marquez blends first-person point-of-view with journalistic elements of discovery to glean [...]
