Blog - www.richardjespers.com

LIKEWISE, BOYS OF WALES

6/12/2026

Medicine is probably one of the best backgrounds for a writer to find stories. I always think cops and docs have the best background because we see so much of human behavior, such a range of human emotions.
Tess Gerritsen, Author of Medical Thrillers & Crime Novels
Author of The Spy Coast
Born June 12, 1953

T. Gerritsen

MY BOOK WORLD

Jones, John Sam. Welsh Boys Too.
Cardiff: Parthian, 2000.

At ninety-one pages, the thinnest of story collections with eight specimens, yet each one is packed with what it is (or was) like to be gay in Wales. My favorite story may be “But Names Will Never Hurt Me,” one in which Jones explores the time-honored practice of putting dirty names on something you don’t understand:

They’d started calling you names even before it had dawned on you. You wondered sometimes, if it hadn’t been for the name calling, whether you would even have thought about it. You’d known that there were people like that, in the worlds of soap operas, television personalities and big cities, but your little piece of Welsh coast seemed so untouched. Of course there were the holidaymakers and their antics, but they came and went. The first time they’d called you bum-boy you hadn’t really understood what they’d meant; then it was shirt-lifter,and that one had really baffled you too. Effing queer was much more straightforward, even if you couldn’t understand why they were calling you that. But then. As the months passed, you came to recognize in yourself what others had already seen. It was unspeakable” (49-50).

That last sentence gives me a shudder, bringing back an innocent prank my so-called friends had pulled on me in high school, an ever so subtle way of attempting to get me to see what I was. When the character says “unspeakable,” I think of the restricted use of Welsh in this story. Another character in a different story proudly proclaims something to the effect that Welsh is eons older than English. A certain pride bounces off each page. Perhaps I recognize it because I am one-fourth Welsh, my ancestor having landed in New York in 1790. Maybe not. Maybe I just found this small collection fascinating on its own merits. In any case, I enjoyed it very much.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Erich Segal
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | John Wesley
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Gail Godwin
FRI: A Writer's Wit | Laura Z. Hobson
My Book World | Thom Gunn, The Passages of Joy

A WRITER'S WIT: KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

5/15/2026

All life worth living is difficult, nobody promised us happiness; it is not a commodity you have earned, or shall ever earn. It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the season we hoped for, or as the result of our planning for it.
Katherine Anne Porter, Journalist and Fiction Writer
Author of Ship of Fools
Born May 15, 1890

K. A. Porter

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Lorraine Hansberry
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | John Stuart Mills
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Janet Dailey
FRI: A Writer's Wit | Gérard Nerval

A WRITER'S WIT: CHARLOTTE Brontë

4/21/2026

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.
Charlotte Brontë
Author of Jane Eyre
Born April 21, 1816

C. Brontë

Up Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Andrew Hudgins
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Soe Tjen Marching
FRI: My Book World | Frank McCourt, 'Tis: A Memoir

BY THE SEA, BY THE SEA

10/24/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
In the contemporary world, we think of politeness as surface behavior, like frosting—it’s sweet and attractive and finishes off the cake. But 19th century nobility and the enlightened thinkers and stoics before them viewed manners in a very different way. To them, manners are an outward expression of an inward struggle.
Amor Towles
Author of Table for Two: Fictions
Born October 24, 1964

A. Towles

MY BOOK WORLD

Starnone, Domenico. The Old Man by the Sea: A Novel. Translated by Oonagh Stransky. New York: Europa, 2024.

I’m not quite as enthusiastic about the novel as the unsigned “Briefly Noted” writer of the September 15, 2025 issue of The New Yorker seems to be. At one point, one of the principal characters, Nicola, quips, “And enjoy playing out your Old Man and the Sea fantasy; Make Hemingway roll over in his grave” (119). This seems an odd and forced comment, perhaps more from the mouth of the author than Nicola. For Starnone’s novel of a successful old writer (eighty-two) spending some time by the sea (instead of fishing for the big one as Santiago does in Hemingway’s book) is more about making amends (in his mind) with the women in his life, including his late mother whom he at one point believes, in a vision, has returned from the dead.

Rather, and in this way the two novels may be similar, Starnone’s old man is rethinking his life as a writer with remarks such as these: “As a young man it was deceptively easy to manipulate real facts, use them to churn out fictional stories with elements of truth, but as an old man my feeble efforts lead only to despair” (95). Or, “Practicality without imaginations is flawed. Stories are good and useful precisely because they train the brain not to be satisfied with appearances, and to look beyond” (103). But I must say, the old man does impart a bit of wisdom to another woman, when she says to him, “Don’t be clever,” and he answers, “I’m not. All I’m saying is that it’s good to imagine terrible things that can never actually come to pass. That way, when bad things do happen, we’re less frightened, and it’s easier to find consolation” (126).

Bingo. The old man hits the nail on the head about aging (at least it may, for some of us), and I suppose it is appropriate that this gem arrives on page 127 of 145.

Up Next:
MON 10/27: WHAT I'M THINKING ... IF ANYTHING
TUES 10/28: A Writer's Wit | Ayad Akhtar
WEDS 10/29: A Writer's Wit | Caroline Paul
THURS 10/30: A Writer's Wit | Timothy Findley
FRI 10/31: A Writer's Wit | Julia Peterkin
My Book World | Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

MY BOOK WORLD ENCORE: A Small But Beautiful World

10/10/2025

Somehow, I've gotten behind in my reading and have nothing new to profile! Perhaps it is because I am currently reading A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker, over 1,000 pages. Perhaps it is because I've had company this past weekend, when I often finish up my blog posts for the week. In any case, I extend to you an invitation to revisit (or visit) a blog post from March 3, 2014, where I review A. J. Ackerley's We Think the World of You.

STROUT TELLS ALL

10/3/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.
Gore Vidal
Author of Myra Breckinridge
Born October 3, 1925

G. Vidal

MY BOOK WORLD

Strout, Elizabeth. Tell Me Everything: A Novel. New York: Random, 2024.

In this nonlinear novel, as is Strout’s style, it is as if she gathers together all the characters she’s ever written into her novels and catches us up on all their doings. And she does. Within the range of several Maine towns (people are always driving from one to another to shop or see someone they know), back and forth she travels until she brings everyone’s story up-to-date.

However, there is one character who garners more attention than others, a lawyer named Bob Burgess. When speaking with a friend, it is clear that said friend is about to be accused of murdering his mother years earlier, and Bob agrees to take on his case in court. Bob has his own problems. In childhood, he apparently takes the fall for accidentally killing his father, when it is actually his older brother who’s done it (an even more likely possibility will surface). And then there’s good old Olive Kitteridge, now ninety-one, living an apartment by herself. Author Lucy Barton stops by every so often and the two women swap “stories,” usually with a whiff of sordidness or at least . . . something curiosity-making. Makes me want to re-read all nine of the author’s books I’ve read as well as the two I haven’t! I’ve sung Strout’s praises before, and I’m going to do so again here. She knows how to tell stories that are interesting and appealing to a broad range of people. Get hooked on her, like I have!

Up Next:
MON 10/06: WHAT I'M THINKING ... IF ANYTHING
TUES 10/07: A Writer's Wit | Michelle Alexander
WEDS 10/08: A Writer's Wit | Francisque Sarcey
THURS 10/09: A Writer's Wit | Jane Cooper
FRI 10/03: A Writer's Wit | Nora Roberts
My Book World | TBD

A WRITER'S WIT: ANDRE DUBUS III

9/11/2025

I'm one of those writers who can’t talk about what they’re working on. The entire four years I was writing “House of Sand and Fog,” my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
Andre Dubus III
Author of House of Sand and Fog
Born September 11, 1959

A. Dubus III

Up Next:
FRI: My Book World | Federico Garcia Lorca, The Selected Poems of FGL
TUES 9/16: A Writer's Wit | Lord Bolingbroke
WEDS 9/17: A Writer's Wit | Cheryl Strayed
THURS 9/18: A Writer's Wit | Francis Parker Yockey

A WRITER'S WIT: KIMBERLY WILLIS HOLT

9/9/2025

If you haven't taken a writing class, take a writing class. I took every class that was available in my area. I went to conferences inside and outside my area to network with people. That's how I got my agent. I found my agent through another agent who was at a conference.
Kimberly Willis Holt
Author of The Hurricane Girls
Born September 9, 1960

K. Willis Holt

Up Next:
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Faith Hunter
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Andre Dubus III
FRI: A Writer's Wit | Han Suyin
My Book World | TBD

ISLAND WITH LITTLE HEART

8/29/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
What we must remember is that artifice is not necessarily the antithesis of sincerity.
Thom Gunn, Poet
Author of The Man with Night Sweats
Born August 29, 1929

T. Gunn

MY BOOK WORLD

Zebrun, Gary. Hart Island: A Novel. Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 2024.

A finalist for the most recent Ferro-Grumley Award in Fiction, this grisly but redemptive novel is set on the also boot-shaped protrusion (like Italy) known as Hart Island in New York City. Each day, Sal Cusumano travels back and forth from home in Staten Island to Hart, where he, along with Riker’s Island inmates, buries unfortunates: the indigent, the unknown, particularly the unclaimed, the bodies (at one time babies in the arms of their mothers) no one knows is missing. In fact, it is the infants without identities who cause Sal to mourn most grievously, though silently, and usually quite alone.

Sal’s life is complicated. Once a fine specimen and captain for the Coast Guard, he was drummed out during the early days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell for being gay. He has been lovers with an adopted brother (now a priest, go figure) since they were children—a committed and still carnal relationship. Sal’s older brother is a Manhattan homicide detective who hobnobs with the mafia. Their mother suffers dementia and needs round-the-clock attention. What a cheerful life, and what can go wrong!

Father Justin’s simple theory, that “faith and eternal life are all about kindness” (39), exemplifies his quiet manner of pursuing a ministry. How he lives with an unbeliever (or disbeliever) like Sal is at times difficult to understand. Yet a part of Sal is like Justin, caring for others, though they now happen to be dead. A certain foreshadowing exists that Sal is going to die, even that he’s going to die at the hands of his brother the mobster-detective, Antony, but how it plays out is a bitter irony not to be missed.

Following Sal’s death, the Riker’s Island gang perform sort of a secular burial mass, where they lay the unfortunate Sal to rest in this potter’s field known as Hart Island—substituting their oft-consumed Jameson Irish Whiskey for a certain grape drink. They conclude by playing Eric Clapton’s song, “Tears from Heaven” and this apparently literary crowd citing from Derek Walcott’s poem (Sea Canes): Half my friends are dead. / I will make you new ones, said earth. / No, give me them back as they were, instead, / with faults and all, I cried (179). “The dead don’t know how or why Sal has ended up with them, but they welcome him into their earth, someone they know. They can almost taste the whiskey mourners pass around. They see how much the captain was cared for and wonder, if love like this is buried in this earth, can it spread through their graves, too” (180).

A more fitting end this novel could not have.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Kai Bird
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Rachel Johnson
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Richard Wright
FRI: A Writer's Wit | Yevgenia Albats
My Book World | TBD

ONCE A CATHOLIC?

8/15/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.
Thomas De Quincey
Author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Born August 15, 1785

T. De Quincey

MY BOOK WORLD

Plante, David. The Catholic. New York: Plume, 1987 (1985).

I first read this book in 1987 when American companies were just beginning to publish gay men’s fiction in what seemed like large numbers. I now believe I read it rather hurriedly, paying close attention to the sex scenes often written in great detail. I did this novel a great disservice. I now view it as a wonderful portrayal of a young man in the 1960s struggling not so much with being with men sexually but being with them in the world, his Catholic world in particular.

Dan, a young man teaching public school in Boston, narrates his short past: his father, his mother, his sister, their upbringing. With regard to his high school education, he tells of what seems like raping his good friend Charlie—an event they never mention again, even though they do remain friends into their twenties. Dan frequents the Boston bars where men meet men to have sex, and he goes home with a similarly aged man named Henry. In what may be one of the longest sex scenes I’ve ever encountered in a novel, Dan and Henry hungrily and repeatedly devour one another until early in the morning there is little left of either of them. At the same time, the chapter, as is the book, is full of Dan’s intellectualization or rationalization of the experience that he is tempted to think of as love:

"I wondered how many people he had made love with on this sheet. It was penetrated with the presences of how many lovers, their sweat and saliva and whatever sperm hadn’t been wiped away by the towel? I smoothed out the wrinkles between our bodies and was reminded of the sheets I used to see in the college dormitory pulled from the beds by women every Monday morning and thrown into piles in the corridors. As I passed them I used to imagine they retained the impressions of all the bodies that slept in them, had jerked off and maybe made love with others in them, and I wanted to fall into one of the piles” (31).

Dan thinks this deeply and philosophically about everything including the religion he claims to have abandoned. Near the end of the novel, the following idea occurs to him:

"If what I was struggling for was faith, I had not even reconciled in myself how that faith was to be achieved, through my own will or a vast will-lessness. I would never reconcile these. I was struggling both to overcome and to be overcome, and in doing this I was struggling for the realization of my greatest desire, for belief” (146).

Up until the end, Dan’s beliefs subliminally lace his thoughts:

"I wished I had drawn blood from Henry, just a little, then drawn blood from the same part of my body, from our arms or chests, and pressed his blood into mine” (150).

The phrases that ring of Genesis—"bone of my bone” and “flesh of my flesh”—seem to imbue Dan’s desire to make Henry’s blood his as well. It seems that once a Catholic always a Catholic, but that aphorism may be too simple. Perhaps, once human, always human is more like it, and that concept seems to be what Dan cannot learn or accept.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Frank McCourt
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Edwards
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Alexander Chee
FRI: A Writer's Wit | Dorothy Parker

ALLISON'S STORIES: NOT TRASH

8/8/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
I certainly don’t fit into any genre that I know of. Writing, for me, feels like reinventing the wheel every time. But I wouldn’t want it any other way. After all, if you are just writing an altered version of what someone else has already done, why bother?
Evan Fallenberg
Author of Light Fell
Born August 8, 1961

E. Fallenberg

MY BOOK WORLD

Allison, Dorothy. Trash: Stories by Dorothy Allison. Ithica: Firebrand, 1988.

The late author Allison begins this book with a preface, “Deciding to Live,” in which she outlines the horrific childhood she suffered through to become an adult: an abusive father, her struggle to put herself through college, and more. It sets up the stories, particularly the first seven or eight of fourteen, in which each first-person narrative relives some fragment or shard of Allison’s fractured life, only transformed, of course, from the realities of life to the realities of fiction: “I write stories. I write fiction, I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life—the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determine to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine” (12).

Allison died late in 2024 at age 75. Her stories in Trash are laced with that titular word: “She called the children devils and worms and trash, and swore that, like worms, their natural substance was dirt and weeds” (23).

“Listen to you. You . . . you trash. You nothing but trash. Your mama’s trash, and your grandmama, and your whole dirty family . . . “ (63).

“Bobby believed lust was a trashy lower-class impulse, and she so wanted to be nothing like that” (120).

Allison swings for the rafters with this one: “Poor white trash I am sure. I eat shit food and am not worthy. My family starts with good teeth but loses them early. Five of my cousins bled to death before thirty-five, their stomachs finally surrendering to sugar and whiskey and fat and salt. I’ve given it up. If I cannot eat what I want, then I’ll eat what I must, but my dreams will always be flooded with salt and grease, crisp fried stuff that sweetens my mouth and feeds my soul. I would rather starve death than myself” (152).

These stories, though written more than thirty-five years ago, are still crisp with fresh wit and insight, and, not a little bit of history concerning a young girl growing up in South Carolina in the 1960s and 1970s. They are to be treasured and certainly read again and again.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Mary Roberts Rinehart
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Bryan Burrough
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Mary E. Pearson
FRI: My Book World | TBD

MOBY-DICK: A SECOND READING

8/1/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
Herman Melville
Author of Moby-Dick
Born August 1, 1819

H. Melville

MY BOOK WORLD

Author's Copy of Moby-Dick

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text | Reviews and Letters by Melville | Analogues and Sources | Criticism. Hayford, Harrison, and Hershel Parker, eds. New York: Norton, 1967.

I first read—if you want to call it reading--Moby-Dick when I was a sophomore in college. The instructor was not very inspiring, and, as a nineteen-year-old music major I wasn’t very receptive either. The novel seemed, at the time, like a ponderous and boring text. Having grown up in the Air Capital of the World, Wichita, Kansas, and its surrounding prairies, I didn’t have much curiosity about whales, whaling, being at sea (unless it were to have been aboard a cruise ship), blubber or that particular sort of sperm. Least of all, did I care for Ishmael, the narrator. How could a character about my age know as much about whales and whaling (and its many component parts and activities)? I noted that in the margin. Was young Ishmael speaking or was it Melville? I still believe it is a bit problematic; perhaps it is idiomatic of that period of writing that the author’s voice and character/narrator become blended as one.

After recently enjoying Melville’s Typee, I wondered what it would be like to peruse his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, once again. I located the very copy I’d read over fifty years ago—since that time having earned an MA in English and having taught AP English for ten years—and read it with different eyeballs, so to speak. I noticed right away my original underlining—I’d used a fountain pen with black ink, an indelible record of what I thought was important at the time. During this reading I annotated with pencil, as is my habit now—so much easier to expunge if I’ve made an error or said something stupid in the margins. Even pencil marks made fifty years ago can be erased today.

I still believe the text is ponderous, but with the caveat that it is also profound (although a few scholars cited at the back of this Norton text seem to disagree on its profundity). Shakespearean in scope? Odyssey-like in its structure? An inspired purpose? To demonstrate to readers the lengths to which a monomaniac (Melville repeats this nineteenth-century word many times) like Captain Ahab goes to avenge having lost his leg to the monstrous Moby-Dick. At one level it seems unreal to believe that having been injured in the Atlantic, Ahab can then locate the selfsame whale in what seems to be the South Pacific—thousands of miles away—and years down the line when Ahab is an old man.

Seems to be quite a stretch. I mean, even today, if you equip a whale with a GPS tracker, you might not necessarily locate the creature. (I must now account for the science, not clear back then, that whales swim not randomly around the globe but, like birds, have set “highways” and migration periods.) Yet the beauty of the novel and its pacing is that if you follow Ahab, through Ishmael’s eyes, that if you, too, have boarded the infamous Pequod and journeyed with those intrepid sailors to locate and kill this gigantic whale—you, as well, can experience this mighty expedition. At once I now feel that I have indeed read the novel, but at the same time, I might read it every year until my death and still not fathom either the journey it takes or its profundity.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Fiona Hill
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Martin Duberman
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Fadiman
FRI: My Book World | TBD

PINNING DOWN SATAN

7/25/2025

Time is not a linear flow, as we think it is, into past, present, and future. Time is an indivisible whole, a great pool in which all events are eternally embodied and still have their meaningful flash of supernormal or extrasensory perception, and glimpse of something that happened long ago in our linear time.
Frank Waters
Author of Book of the Hopi
Born July 25, 1902

F. Waters

MY BOOK WORLD

Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses: A Novel. New York: Random, 1997 (1988).

In some respects this novel is a simple one. Two men—both Indian actors—fall from the sky when the jumbo jet they’re riding in is split apart by a bomb, apparently. And unlike all the other passengers, only these two men survive. The rest of the novel is spent telling about the spectacular lives of these two men, whose stories sometimes mesh together. I have to admit that this may be one of the most complex contemporary novels I’ve ever read. Though I probably won’t read it again, I believe I would have to in order to understand it more fully.

At the time it was published (late 1980s) Salman Rushdie was nearly crucified for writing it. That seems to be one of the complexities I don’t understand. Why? I guess I would have to be Muslim to get why this novel was so offensive to such a wide swath of such readers (if they indeed did read it). Rushdie does create and recreate worlds that are beyond belief, but he does so in such a manner that one does believe every word. He takes every liberty that an author can take to create or recreate original language and poetry, verses as it were. I read the book aloud to my partner, and I believe that did help me to soak up more of the novel—even if I didn’t understand everything that happened.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Mary Lee Settle
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Thorstein Veblen
THURS: A Writer's Wit | J. K. Rowling
FRI: My Book World |Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

A WRITER'S WIT: LAUREN GROFF

7/23/2025

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few [sic] and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.
Lauren Groff
Author of Florida
Born July 23, 1978

L. Groff

Up Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Zelda Fitzgerald
FRI: My Book World | Salman Rushdie , The Satanic Verses

A WRITER'S WIT: SALMAN RUSHDIE

6/19/2025

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
Salman Rushdie
Author of The Satanic Verses
Born June 19, 1947

S. Rushdie

Up Next:
FRI: My Book World | Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Jandy Nelson
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anthony Bourdain
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Pearl S. Buck

NITTY GRITTY OF FLORIDA

6/13/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
Mark Van Doren
Author of Liberal Education
Born June 13, 1894

M. Van Doren

MY BOOK WORLD

Groff, Lauren. Florida. New York: Random, 2018.

As I begin reading this collection of stories, I am doubtful that the author can convince me to like Florida any more than I already do (which isn’t much). Most of my life it has been a way station—to the Bahamas, to Europe, but not a destination of its own—except for two different trips to Key West which actually were delightful. Ms. Groff, however, takes readers into a Florida of gators, snakes, insects, and heat, relentless heat and humidity. But also a place of wild human animals.

There is Jude, “born in a Cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of reptiles” (15). There is an older sister who thinks “an island is never really quiet. Even without the storm, there were waves and wind and air conditioners and generators and animals moving out there in the dark” (44). On a stormy night, a woman’s young sons “told me about the World Pool, in which one current goes one way, another goes another way, and where they meet they make a tornado of air, which stretches, said my little one, from the midnight zone, where the fish are blind, all the way up up up to the birds” (77). One narrative titled “Snake Stories” reads like this: “Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: snakes in mulch, snakes in scrub, snakes waiting from the lawn for you to leave the pool so they can drown themselves in it, snakes gazing at your mousy ankle and wondering what it would feel like to sink their fangs in deep” (204).

Groff is unafraid to tell readers about human snakes, as well: ne’er do well fathers, skanky women, mean children, perhaps all made malicious by the climate: hot and humid twenty-four/seven. Yet, as Florida’s large population must attest to, there has to be something wonderful about the place: tempting seafood, cool breezes off the water, mild winters, and empathic people here and there who stop to help someone in trouble.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Carol Anderson
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Sylvia Field Porter
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Salman Rushdie
FRI: My Book World | Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance

SEX AND THE STEINS

6/6/2025

A WRITER'S WIT:
I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us—so I do.
Louise Erdrich
Author of The Night Watchman
Born June 6, 1954

L. Erdrich

MY BOOK WORLD

Stadler, Matthew. Allan Stein: A Novel. New York: Grove, 1999.

Since I read this novel the first time, I’ve also read Stadler’s The Sex Offender, and in some ways they deal with the same subject matter. Both books concern youngish male school teachers who are disgraced by having affairs with (underage) male pupils of theirs. Both books have the filthy protagonist flee to Europe or a European-like country (Sex Offender). In both books the older male finds a new young protégé over which to make a fool of himself. Stadler approaches this subject in both cases without judgment (except the judgment the protagonist bears against himself) and with great sensitivity.

In Allan Stein, in order to take flight from his recent fling and disgrace, a young gay American travels to Paris assuming the name of a friend who wishes for him to do some business research on his behalf (he can “vacation” while “Herbert” is gone and also deduct the travel expense for his business). The “new” Herbert is to stay with long-distance friends who’ve never actually met the real Herbert. And . . . they happen to have a fifteen-year-old son who seems very seducible, and Herbert spends a great deal of time attempting to do just that.

The real beauty of the novel (otherwise it might just be a salacious story) is the parallel pursuit he makes: 1) To locate some drawings of Allan Stein (Gertrude Stein’s nephew) on behalf of the real Herbert, an art dealer. 2) To try to gain the confidence of his host’s son, Stéphane. Does “Herbert” indeed seduce the winsome Stéphane? I’m not at liberty to say, but the ending in any case is a satisfying one.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Gina Gershon
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Yasunari Kawabata
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Frank
FRI: My Book World | Lauren Groff, Florida [Stories]

A NOVEL OF FERAL PEOPLE

5/30/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
Tears are summer showers to the soul.
Alfred Austin
Author of
Born May 30, 1835

A. Austin

MY BOOK WORLD

Lethem, Jonathan. The Feral Detective. New York: HarperCollins, 2018.

Manhattanite Phoebe Siegler agrees to help find the missing daughter of friend. Arabella, being a freshman at Reed College on the west coast, has been missing for three months but now may be in southern California. Phoebe hires Charles Heist whom she right away calls the feral detective, mainly because he himself seems wild, part of the high desert milieu of Joshua Tree environs. His “profession,” if one wants to call it that, is to find missing children and youth, and Phoebe not only interests him in the case but in having rather bumbling sex with her as well.

This book reads quickly mainly because many chapters are only a paragraph or a page long. Seems a waste of the publisher’s paper supply to leave entire pages blank. But anyway . . . Phoebe and Charles embark on a trip into the mountains in which they are indeed successful in locating Arabella and secreting her out of the community of Rabbits (women hippies) and Bears (not-gay hairy men) who seem to run roughshod over this desert-mountainous area. Phoebe escorts Arabella back to New York and her mother via commercial flight, but Phoebe now seems to become the feral detective because Charles is “lost,” and she must find him. His rescue is a wild and wooly affair, but Phoebe is successful, and the denouement of this novel is a soft landing compared to where it has been. Still, an enjoyable read.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Allen Ginsberg
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Westheimer
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Bill Moyers
FRI: My Book World | Matthew Stadler, Allan Stein: A Novel

ALVAREZ EXPANDS MEANING OF AFTERLIFE

5/9/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.
Richard Adams
Author of Watership Down
Born May 9, 1920

R. Adams

MY BOOK WORLD

Alvarez, Julia. Afterlife: A Novel. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2020.

A woman in her sixties loses her husband, and she turns to her three sisters, on whom she has depended since her childhood. Afterlife is more than a novel title here; it is a motif formed over and over again. The woman must now figure out how to live her afterlife: life without her husband, life with weird, bothersome neighbors, life with insistent and sometimes needy sisters. Yet because of these numerous eruptions of life going on around her, she must adjust. She must help others in the midst of her own grief. In the end, after aiding one sister as well as a stranger in need (an undocumented pregnant teenager), she is able to settle down to her singular life, and she has earned it. But one gets the feeling that if the story were to continue, the woman would still be interrupted by others in need and she would indeed help them. That’s who she is. That is her life, her afterlife.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Madeleine Albright
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Eoin Colfer
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lauren Myracle
FRI: My Book World | Carol Burnett, Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story

KILLING YOUR MOTHER: A NOVEL

4/11/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.
Glenway Wescott
Author of Apartment in Athens
Born April 11, 1901

G. Wescott

MY BOOK WORLD

Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.

This may be one of those novels that you don’t want to continue after reading the first sentence: When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily”(3). But then then comes the next sentence: “Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it”(3). Interesting! you may think. Onward you go . . . and then you are hooked, as I was—queasy feelings subsiding. The middle-aged narrator, Helen, continues her story of caring for her mother for nearly three hundred pages, and honestly, you’re not sure what is going to happen.

Will Helen leave the country, or at least the area of Pennsylvania where she lives? Will she off herself like her father did some years earlier? Will she tell her two young adult daughters she’s murdered their grandmother? Will her ex-husband (whom she tells first of the murder) help her cover it up or escape the police? Will she continue the affair she’s begun with the thirty-year-old son of her best friend? Whoa!

You just can’t believe the behavior of this woman until the author skillfully wends readers through her family’s backstory. Then her life only becomes more complicated, and you may develop sympathy for her. It could happen to you! What will she do? you continue to think, until the very last pages. A true murder mystery—not one of those cozy contrived things. Only the “mystery” here may be why she really done it, and the author presents readers with a plausible and satisfying answer.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Eva Figes
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Peter Ustinov
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Isak Dinesen
FRI: My Book World | John McPhee, The Founding Fish

IS GRADUATE SCHOOL REAL LIFE?

4/4/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.
Maya Angelou, Poet
Author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Born April 4, 1928

M. Angelou

MY BOOK WORLD

Taylor, Brandon. Real Life: A Novel. New York: Riverhead, 2020.

In this fairly recent title (a so-called campus novel), young Wallace leaves his home state of Alabama to pursue graduate school in biochemistry at a major university in the Midwest. In most respects the years-long experience does not go well.

As a young black man, Wallace encounters subtle but resistant racism among his colleagues, even though, on the surface, things are cool. Compounding this problem is the fact that he’s out-and-proud gay. In one salty situation, he believes a woman has purposely ruined his experiment, putting him back months in his research. He just can’t prove it, and because of a lifetime of being put down, he doesn’t have the energy to pursue the justice of the matter.

The major relationship he develops is with Miller, an ostensibly straight white man, a handsome man to whom Wallace is quite attracted. Author Taylor subtly but competently creates all the complications that such a relationship can have. Wallace, a bit insecure about his looks and build, feels weird about Miller’s attentions—causing him to send Miller mixed signals. In turn, Miller, rife with his own insecurities, doesn’t believe Wallace is sincere. Repeatedly, they send and receive communications that don’t make clear who they are or what their intentions are. These conflicts lead to a couple of dramatic scenes. One, after sharing the sordid stories of their past, Wallace leaves Miller’s bed in the middle of the night, angering Miller. Second, the two men engage in a fist fight that Wallace loses against the more muscular Miller. They seem to semi-settle their differences, but they certainly do not live together happily ever after. In fact, the denouement of the novel seems to occur when the author returns the cast of characters to the first day they arrive on campus—when everyone’s, including Wallace’s, expectations are high. It seems to be a subtle way the author establishes what real life is all about. The term is tossed about throughout the novel, but in this particular conclusion, readers understand that university life is real life, not just that period that is to follow commencement exercises.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Ayer Barnes
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Charles Baudelaire
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Lamott
FRI: My Book World | Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon: A Novel

QUEENS OF SOLVING CRIME

3/21/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and “live” with the characters.
Margaret Mahy
Author of A Lion in the Meadow
Born March 21, 1936

M. Mahy

MY BOOK WORLD

Benedict, Marie. The Queens of Crime: A Novel. New York: St. Martin’s, 2025.

I sometimes think that wish fulfillment may be a driving force in writing fiction. The writer is able to bring to life a scenario by way of fiction that was impossible for its time in real life. Perhaps that is the case for Ms. Benedict, who takes five of the most celebrated female mystery writers of the 1930s and places them as characters in the same novel setting of London: Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Emma Orczy.

The women essentially crash the local Detection Club, which is male dominated in every way. The women plan to solve a local murder not only to show the men in the club that they can but also the local police who otherwise treat them with disdain. The case they tackle involves a young English nurse who makes what is to be a short excursion to France (the ferry provides a day trip). She never returns alive, as her body is discovered in a wooded area. The five queens of crime set about working together to solve the murder. Though they have their squabbles, they see that cooperation is quite useful.

I don’t usually read mysteries, but my curiosity, for some reason, was piqued by this one. I’m not sorry I read it. It’s a page-turner, all right, but an intelligent one! Perhaps I shall read more of the genre.

Up Next:
TUES APR 1: A Writer's Wit | Jesmyn Ward
WEDS APR 2: A Writer's Wit | Hans Christian Andersen
THURS APR 3: A Writer's Wit | Jane Goodall
FRI APR 4: My Book World | Brandon Taylor, Real Life: A Novel

'PREP': SMARTASSES ON STEROIDS

3/14/2025

A WRITER'S WIT
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein
Author of The Evolution of Physics
Born March 14, 1879

A. Einstein

MY BOOK WORLD

Sittenfeld, Curtis. Prep: A Novel. New York: Random, 2005.

I’m not sure why, but I’m drawn to so-called campus novels—perhaps it is something against which I can hold up my own experiences of adolescence. This one takes place at a prep school, Ault, in Massachusetts. Prep, at least this school, is a cross between an all AP-class high school and a small college occupied by smartasses.

Sittenfeld, given that she is about thirty as she publishes this novel, is perhaps the proper age to recreate such a world, about a half a life ago. The memory is still sharp concerning details she uses: aromas of freshly pubescent boys and girls, smells of institutional food, smells arising amidst the chalk dust and musty books and papers of a long-established institution. She recreates the emotions of that age, yet instead of going home to your parents each night, you’re returning to a dorm to eke out a life with someone you either hate or someone you adore (maybe the sophomore year onward).

Lee Fiora, a fourteen-year-old frosh, is bright enough to be on scholarship, and yet she feels insecure much of the time. At her middle school in South Bend, Indiana, she was a genius, but at Ault she is just one among many—many who seem to be far more ambitious than she is, as well. They seem not to have holes in their education as she does in the field of math. Not only that, but most of the students hail from rich families from the Northeast, and even though some of them befriend her, she never feels quite at home with such people.

One might be jealous of Sittenfeld for writing such an engaging, successful novel the first time around if it weren’t such an enjoyable piece of literature to read. It isn’t just about a bunch of teenagers but it is about those teenagers’ education: academic, personal, literary, social, and cultural. In this novel, they seem to learn it all—in four short and quick years.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Wilfred Owen
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Garth Greenwell
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lois Lowry
FRI: My Book World | Marie Benedict, The Queens of Crime: A Novel

BURROUGHS'S 'QUEER' EXPLORES PREDATION

2/28/2025

It’s painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last.
Tessa Hadley
Author of Accidents in the Home
Born February 28, 1956

T. Hadley

MY BOOK WORLD

Burroughs, William S. Queer. New York: Viking, 1985.

I first read this book before I started keeping records of my reading history, and that 1985 reading reflects not a single annotation—assuming I perused it entirely for pleasure. Not long ago, my partner and I watched the recent film of Queer starring Daniel Craig, and my interest in Burroughs’s novel was rekindled.

Bars and hotels play a great role in this short novel. The primary bar related to Mexico City where forty-something American, William Lee, is now living is the Ship Ahoy (the real name of the bar upon which it is based)—which seems particularly significant. Lee uses the bar as one might use a vessel, to search out sexual partners. In that sense he is a predator, particularly when he first sights Gene Allerton, a young American: “His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips” (25).

Burroughs painstakingly portrays the exhaustion caused by Lee’s desires for Allerton: “In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals . . . Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocating of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes” (36). All Lee and his bar friends seem to do, with the singlemindedness of the amoeba, is drink, eat, and fuck.

Burroughs’s economic use of words is admirable: “He must have slept. Mary and Allerton were gone. Tom Weston brought him some hot coffee. He drank the coffee, got up and staggered out of the apartment. Exhausted, he slept till the following morning” (62). The ellipsis between leaving his friend’s apartment and landing in his own bed is understood. Burroughs does this all throughout, and it is a good lesson for writers of fiction. You need to show (rather than tell) the important things, yes, but not necessarily that which is easily understood or taken for granted.

Lee convinces Allerton to take a trip deeper into South America in search of Yage (Ayahuasca), a psychoactive drug used by certain tribes in the region. The recent film departs severely from the book in that it makes this search a more exciting climax than in the book, where it seems to be just one more of Lee’s (and Allerton’s) endless scavenging for that great drug high.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | James Ellroy
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Rosa Luxemburg
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Barrett Browning
FRI: My Book World | Eric Haseltine, The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy's Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat

A WRITER'S WIT: JUDY BLUME

2/12/2025

You know what I worry about? I worry that kids today don't have enough time to just sit and daydream.
Judy Blume
Author of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
Born February 12, 1938

J. Blume

Up Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Ricardo Güiraldes
FRI: My Book World | Graham Norton, Ask Graham