Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
Where Books and Readers Come Together
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
The Naked and the Dead is concerned with the invasion and taking of the Japanese-controlled island of Anopopei. Most of the 721-page book follows a platoon as they prepare to land on the island until the successful American victory, with some inserts from ”The Time Machine” to give back story to the platoon of foot soldiers the nameless, omniscient narrator follows through the campaign in third person POV.
Inherent talent is a small part of success and that the habits of making mistakes and learning to improve on such mistakes are the true keys to success.
“I also remember as distinctly that I had a persuasion that I was dead, and that I thought what a jest it was that they should come too late by such a little to catch me in my body.”
“A people without written language, without art, without homes, without love… Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common.”
The University of North Carolina – Greensboro’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing publishes a poetry and fiction review called The Greensboro Review. I happened to read the Fall 2013, Number 94 issue, having received a copy only because I paid a small fee to have my own fiction submitted to the review.
“The artist lives thus in two worlds — as do we all; but he, in so far as he knows what he is doing, in a special state of consciousness of this micromacrocosmic crucifixion that is life on earth and is perhaps, also, the fire of the sun, stars, and galaxies beyond.”
”The name Beowulf itself, ‘bee-wolf,’ apparently meaning bear, suggests affinities with a widely known folktale figure of prodigious strength, the Bear’s Son, the distribution of whose appearances, in North America as well as Eurasia, points to a background in that primordial cult of reverence for the bear discussed in Primitive Mythology, and which is still observed among the Ainus of Japan.”
The book should be called ‘How to Build Your Author Platform’ and then the last 1/3 is actually more details on how to write a proposal for a nonfiction book with much of that being four lengthy proposal samples, which are helpful but reflect more the success of the platform rather than any actual design in the proposal itself–but we can get into that in a minute.
For a National Book Award winner and a finalist for the 2008’s Pulitzer Prize, I expected much much more from Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke.
Jack Kerouac was a famous writer known for his fictional, but mostly autobiographical, novel On the Road, depicting the Beat Generation and Sal Paradise bumming across the United States.
Edward Abbey, “the patron saint of the radical environmental movement,” is one nature writer that includes many classifications found in nature writing into one seamless book.
Captain Beatty, in Fahrenheit 451, imagines how fire is much like censorship, both eradicated knowledge: “‘It’s perpetual motion…. What is fire? It’s a mystery… Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.’”
Like all writers from the moment they put pen to paper, Anderson desired to be a great writer; however, much of his life was spent as a middle-class businessman in Ohio and Virginia, later becoming the owner of Marion Publishing Company and the owner and editor of two newspapers.














