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'Wolf Hunt' a Great Pastiche

10/22/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.
​Graham Joyce
Author of The Silent Land
​Born October 22, 1954
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G. Joyce

MY BOOK WORLD

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​Brandon, Will. The Wolf Hunt: A Tale of the Texas Badlands. A Derrick Miles Mystery. No City: Gale, 2021.

Full disclosure moment: I am part of the Lubbock, Texas, Ad Hoc writing group of which the author speaks in book’s Acknowledgements page. I mention this fact, not to tout my involvement in the enterprise but to give some context. The author brought bits and pieces of this work in its infancy to our group. Some of it, like all our writing, was rough, a work-in-progress, but always what was generated created great interest on the part of all members. We can’t wait to read more was a common comment. What Brandon has realized here goes far beyond, in my opinion, what might have transpired in less capable hands. This book succeeds in being so many things: a pastiche of the highest order, writing “in the style” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles; a bit of a cozy mystery; and a great bit historical novel.
 
Setting the novel in nineteenth-century Texas but always with an eye to England, where its murder victim hails from, the author creates an admixture of American and British English diction born of a particular period. Historical details give great interest and credit to the work, in which, for example, the narrator, Doctor Hooper, uses one of the first Kodak cameras to great effect. The author’s details on how the camera works not only read with authenticity but are crucial to his helping his partner, Derrick Miles, to solve the mystery. 
 
No point in recreating the plot, if one is acquainted with Doyle’s book. Readers will find its points familiar, yet with their own twists here and there. If you’re a mystery junky, or if you just like well-crafted fiction, I trust you will enjoy Will Brandon’s The Wolf Hunt. Get a copy!

NEXT BLOG: November 9, 2021

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A Writer's Wit: Ursula K. Le Guin

10/21/2021

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Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move; the writer’s job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm and let it move memory and imagination to find the words.
​Ursula K. Le Guin
Author of The Left Hand of Darkness
Born October 21, 1929
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U. Le Guin
TOMORROW: My Book World | Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt
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A Writer's Wit: Monica Ali

10/20/2021

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I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.
​Monica Ali
Author of In the Kitchen
Born October 20, 1967
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M. Ali
FRIDAY: My Book World | Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt
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A Writer's Wit: James Howard Kunstler

10/19/2021

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The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other worldwide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.
​James Howard Kunstler
Author of World Made by Hand
Born October 19, 1948
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J. K. Kunstler
FRIDAY: My Book World | Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt
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Baldwin: an Empathic Actor

10/15/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
Michel Foucault
Author of Discipline and Punish
Born October 15, 1926
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M. Foucault

My Book World

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Baldwin, Alec. Nevertheless: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.

In some ways this is an ordinary celebrity book. Baldwin writes about his acting career, his divorce from a famous actor, his new wife and family, and all his children. But Alec Baldwin also distinguishes himself by sharing how he comes to be an actor. In his preface he tells of his childhood, of wanting to be something one day and something else the next day. Acting allows him to become, in a sense, all of these things through the roles he plays. He also shares with readers about how his childhood of near destitution (his mother and five siblings living on their father’s teaching salary). Most interesting, however, is his quest to find himself, to be true to his desire to balance himself on that fine tightrope of acting for its own sake (the stage, the Broadway stage) and film (its commercial and sometimes lucrative nature). He glosses long lists of books he loves, plays and films he loves, actors (male and female) whom he loves and why. He peppers his writing with pieces of classical music he admires—a sign of a truly educated person.

Baldwin's is a rich life of pursuing happiness and sometimes coming up short but also getting up off the floor and trying again, whether to connect with a new woman or say yes to a new play or tackle the fields of philanthropy or politics. The man is that bright and that secure that he can make these choices and live with them. Because, in his youth, he is soooo good looking (the only reason I watched TV’s Knot’s Landing), he is sometimes approached or accosted by gay men who believe they might get lucky. To Baldwin’s credit, he is secure enough in his personhood, his masculinity, that he (by his own recognizance anyway) takes these incidents in stride (informing one man, an older mentor, however, that if he ever kisses him full on the mouth again, he will break every bone in his body—yet they do remain friends). He even goes as far as to say he “loves” a certain man he’s worked with and who knows? “he might be gay.” We know he isn’t, but it’s sweet of him to be so empathic that he might give it some consideration. That seems to be what his whole life is about: giving a role consideration before dispensing with it or forging ahead. We all should be so considerate in our own roles.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World |  Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt: A Tale of the Texas Badlands. A Derrick Miles Mystery

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A Writer's Wit: Kate Grenville

10/14/2021

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One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.
​Kate Grenville
Author of A Room Made of Leaves
Born October 14, 1950
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K. Grenville
TOMORROW: My Book World | Alec Baldwin's Nevertheless 
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A Writer's Wit: John Patrick Shanley

10/13/2021

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Conscience is the most dangerous thing you possess. If you wake it up, it may destroy you. To live a life of total moral rigor is not necessarily the way to go. It's the path for very few people. Most people need to come up with some kind of middle ground that satisfies their practical, moral, and philosophical esthetic needs.
​John Patrick Shanley
Author of Doubt: A Parable
Born October 13, 1950
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J. P. Shanley
FRIDAY: My Book World | Alec Baldwin's Nevertheless
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A Writer's Wit: Julie Kagawa

10/12/2021

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Just keep writing, and try to finish that novel. Remember, all authors started exactly where you are right now; the only difference between a published author and a non-published one is that the published author never stopped writing.
​Julie Kagawa
Author of The Iron King
Born October 12, 1982
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J. Kagawa
FRIDAY: My Book World | Alec Baldwin's Nevertheless
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Fire Is a 'Hazzard'

10/8/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
The healthy and strong individual is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he's got an abscess on his knee or in his soul.
​Rona Barrett
​Author of Miss Rona: An Autobiography
Born October 8, 1936
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R. Barrett

My Book World

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Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire. New York: Farrar, 2003.

This novel takes place all over the globe, it seems, in the period following World War II. When one first encounters the word “fire,” one believes that the book may be about a single fire. The next false signal is near the end of Part One in which, in a flashback to 1942, one witnesses a plane crash: “There was an explosion after the crash, then a great fire that, despite the rains, smouldered on overnight. The villagers struggled up in the wet, but explosions kept them off” (52). Mere foreshadowing. The main character, Aldred Leith, recalls, as a youth, visiting a monument to WWI in London, one of over 300 steps: “The monument to the Great Fire” (91). Leith, in his thirties, falls in love with a girl of seventeen and eventually marries her, but even that relationship of love cannot save him from the author’s great fire, the war through which he has just lived:
 
“Even to her,  he would not say outright that he was thinking of death: of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration” (278). 
 
Any war is comprised of fire, from fireball to friendly fire, but Hazzard transforms war from an abstraction into one single, eternal event, as she says, a conflagration.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

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A Writer's Wit: Dan Savage

10/7/2021

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Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.
​Dan Savage
Author of It Gets Better
Born October 7, 1964
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D. Savage
TOMORROW: My Book World | Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire
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A Writer's Wit: Caroline Gordon

10/6/2021

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A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
​Caroline Gordon
Author of The Women on the Porch
Born October 6, 1894
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C. Gordon
FRIDAY: My Book World | Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire
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A Writer's Wit: Nick Robinson

10/5/2021

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Fifteen is such a weird age to be. Nobody treats you like an adult, but you desperately want to be one. You still have these childlike aspects, but you're just kind of coming into the world.
​Nick Robinson
BBC Journalist
Born October 5, 1963
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N. Robinson
FRIDAY: My Book World | Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire
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Kerouac: Underground Author

10/1/2021

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A WRITER'S WIT
Sometimes we need pure relief. Sometimes we need pure escapism. Sometimes we need major reflection on some aspects of our collective unconscious.
​Marielle Heller, Director
Can You Ever Forgive Me? 
​Born October 1, 1979
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M. Heller

My Book World

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Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.

I got what I deserved for reading this book: perpetual arousal. My God, maybe one of the most sex-laden books of literary biography I’ve ever read: all about one man and his friends and lovers. According to Amburn, Kerouac keeps a sex list of not only his partners but how many times they engage. It amounts to a sexual track meet of stupendous proportions (if self-reporting is accurate): sex with men, sex with women. Maybe the man had a third testicle? Enough of that.
 
Because Amburn turns out to be Kerouac’s final editor, a young man attempting to make his mark in publishing, he stands to have one of the most tolerant and understanding viewpoints of the controversial author of On the Road and at least a dozen other novels. Like a number of important American authors before him, Kerouac is ahead of his time, ahead of what critics are capable of understanding. Like many writers, he must scramble for money nearly his entire life, never experiencing the adulation that is to come after his premature death, when he dies at forty-seven of alcoholism. But if anything, he remains a hero of young writers of all ages, writers who are willing to put everything on the line, to write novels the way they want to, not kowtowing to editors, publishers, or even the public. For that, yes, he is a true hero.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire

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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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