Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion

New release: ‘The Last Closet,’ by Moira Greyland

Leave a comment

The Last Closet

Moira Greyland is the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, the late best-selling feminist sci-fi and fantasy author. A while back I passed along some published revelations about the abusive sexual practices Bradley and her husband indulged in, particularly in regard to their daughter. Just today, Castalia House has released Moira’s book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon, in a Kindle edition. [Reviewed here]

Here’s the blurb:

Marion Zimmer Bradley was a bestselling science fiction author, a feminist icon, and was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. She was best known for the Arthurian fiction novel THE MISTS OF AVALON and for her very popular Darkover series.

She was also a monster.

THE LAST CLOSET: The Dark Side of Avalon is a brutal tale of a harrowing childhood. It is the true story of predatory adults preying on the innocence of children without shame, guilt, or remorse. It is an eyewitness account of how high-minded utopian intellectuals, unchecked by law, tradition, religion, or morality, can create a literal Hell on Earth.

THE LAST CLOSET is also an inspiring story of survival. It is a powerful testimony to courage, to hope, and to faith. It is the story of Moira Greyland, the only daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and convicted child molester Walter Breen, told in her own words.

Moira Greyland is a born-again Christian today. I bought her book within minutes of its announcement. This, in my opinion, could be just the book we need at this time in history. If not, it’s a good thing to set the record straight on any day.

Authors

The Author May Be Dead But He Continues to Publish

1 Comment

Here’s a list of new books from dead authors, including an Umberto Eco essay collection taken from L’Espresso magazine, Chronicles of a Liquid Society. Eco “sees with fresh eyes the upheaval in ideological values, the crises in politics, and the unbridled individualism that have become the backdrop of our lives—a ‘liquid’ society in which it’s not easy to find a polestar, though stars and starlets abound.”

Also, Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James. These are not unpublished stories, but stories written as far back as 1973 that have never been collected.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

Peter De Vries

Leave a comment

Peter De Vries

The other day I recalled – for no reason I can state – a movie I saw in my college days. It was Pete ‘n Tillie, starring Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett. Some friends and I saw it cheap at a second run theater somewhere in Minneapolis. I didn’t like it much.

And yet, having thought of it, I looked it up on Wikipedia. I discovered, to my surprise, that it was based on a novel called Witch’s Milk, by Peter De Vries.

And that reminded me of Peter De Vries. He was a prominent novelist back in those days. A Dutch Calvinist from Chicago, he had served in the OSS in World War II (very hush-hush), and eventually went to the work for the New Yorker, at the invitation of James Thurber.

His Wikipedia article quotes James Bratt, who called him “a secular Jeremiah, a renegade CRC missionary to the smart set.” However, this interesting article from Image Journal describes him as essentially an atheist.

De Vries dwelled in familiar settings because he wanted to dismantle the belief systems that struck him as too smug or self-sufficient. Religion was his enduring target, but he also mocked modern medicine, psychoanalysis, feminism, academia, and the advertising industry.

I’m not really qualified to pass judgment on him. I only read one of his novels, The Glory of the Hummingbird, which left a lasting impression on me, but did not inspire me to read more of his books. He was one of those authors I didn’t feel qualified to grapple with.

The Wikipedia article says all his books were out of print at the time of his death in 1993. I am happy to report that some are now available in Kindle form (like the works of that other brilliant but neglected author, Lars Walker). The Blood of the Lamb is the most famous.

Authors

Richard Adams’s Library Up for Auction

1 Comment

Richard Adams died at the end of 2016. Now his personal library is being prepared for auction.

The auctioneer called his collection “a proper library – not just one to be looked at … There wasn’t a special place for the more valuable books – they weren’t under lock and key, they were there to be enjoyed. I was amazed when I first walked in.”

 

Authors, Non-fiction

Dennett’s Dizzying Intellect

Leave a comment

While he may not repeat a word the meaning of which he is uncertain, Daniel Dennett does exhibit a dizzying intellect. David Bentley Hart reviews his latest book.

The simple truth of the matter is that Dennett is a fanatic: He believes so fiercely in the unique authority and absolutely comprehensive competency of the third-person scientific perspective that he is willing to deny not only the analytic authority, but also the actual existence, of the first-person vantage. At the very least, though, he is an intellectually consistent fanatic, inasmuch as he correctly grasps (as many other physical reductionists do not) that consciousness really is irreconcilable with a coherent metaphysical naturalism. Since, however, the position he champions is inherently ridiculous, the only way that he can argue on its behalf is by relentlessly, and in as many ways as possible, changing the subject whenever the obvious objections are raised.

For what it is worth, Dennett often exhibits considerable ingenuity in his evasions — so much ingenuity, in fact, that he sometimes seems to have succeeded in baffling even himself.

Authors, Poetry

Miłosz: “All I Wanted Was to Get Out”

Leave a comment
Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs’ pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died. (from “Campo dei Fiori“)

David Pryce-Jones reviews a laudatory biography of the great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz and the difficult decisions he had to make as his homeland of overrun by Soviets. He chose to write and compromise where he needed to in order to write.

His biographer notes his depression, even at least one moment of despair.

Half a deadpan paragraph treats as more or less normal the moment when Miłosz swallowed a quantity of vodka, loaded a revolver with a single bullet, and played Russian roulette. Graham Greene, a not-so-dissimilar character, also gave way to this particular form of nihilism—or is it vanity? . . .

The Sovietization of Poland was bound to be fraught with moral choices that would lead either to reward or to punishment, possibly a concentration camp and death. . . . Once he was in the West, Miłosz himself was to observe, “All I wanted was to get out, and see what would happen next,” accepting that this amounted to making “a pact with the devil.”

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Cowles on Sally Wright

Leave a comment

Ashlee Cowles has an appreciation of the mystery novels of Sally Wright at The University Bookman:

Thematically, the Ben Reese mysteries touch on many topics that will resonate with “bohemian Tory” conservatives of the Kirkian variety, where local culture, a living connection to the past, and a love of the land are more important than the “hot button” political squabbles of the day. In Out of the Ruins, for example, Ben Reese must solve a murder linked to a historic family’s ownership of Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, “now threatened by developers and government takeover.” This notion of big business and big government as equal threats to authentic culture and human flourishing was one of Russell Kirk’s favorite themes, evident in several of the ghostly tales collected in Ancestral Shadows.

On the strength of this article, I’m reading my first Ben Reese book now.

Tip: Dave Lull.

Authors, Publishing

Call to Fund Finishing of Unpublished Burgess Novel

Leave a comment

Prance, Noah!

There are many kinds of flood, not all of them water. Here: France, green and grey beneath a swift blue sky, and wholly submerged. The flood here is war.

Adam Roberts, professor of nineteenth-century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, has been inspired to take up a screenplay left unproduced by Anthony Burgess, a historical movie on The Black Prince. Roberts is working on developing it into a novel. Above is an excerpt from the work in progress.

Roberts said he talked over his idea “with Andrew Biswell (director of the Burgess Foundation in Manchester the world’s leading expert on Burgess’s writing) and we agreed it would be worth seeing if the work could be completed. I have always felt that a science fiction writer is working in the same sort of territory as the writer of historical fiction (and several of my SF novels have been historical, or included historical elements): the creation of a world, the estrangement of the familiar.”

He has been crowd sourcing his fund this year and is 72 percent to his goal this morning.

Authors, Religion

Looking for Missing Pieces

Leave a comment

In the vein of the news we shared several days ago (“Worse Than You’ve Heard” ), Abby Perry writes about a few people who have provoked her over the years, teachers and singers who were “edgy” in different ways, and our responses to those people.

I knew my salvation was secure, but I wondered if perhaps the hollowness I’d sometimes felt in the conservative evangelicalism of my childhood could be filled by the fresh air this singing provocateur was breathing. Maybe this was the missing piece.

But, she says, maybe this desire for finding a missing piece is a significant problem that draws us away from our own families and churches.

“The church isn’t a static commodity—it’s a living thing, and living things often cause and experience pain.”

Authors

What Can We Gain Looking Back?

4 Comments

What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy.

From The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, who just won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.