Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Fiction

Steampunk Fantasy Set in Chattanooga

Leave a comment

“Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1914. Tanna Cravens boards an airship bound for a colony in Fairyland… But a magical frontier ruled like the Old South isn’t the best home for a woman ahead of her time.”

Author Eric Slade noticed, like many others, that Britain seems to be the home for great, Earth-bound fantasy. If any wardrobe is going to open into a land of witches, winter, and satyrs, it will be in Hertfordshire or Kent, not in Hamilton County, Tennessee.

So Slade asked, “What if we had doorways, portals and fairies here? That was my initial inspiration for the world, something that was uniquely part of the American South.”

In case you’re thinking “Fairyland” is an oddly quaint name, Slade may have taken it directly from the Fairyland area on Lookout Mountain, which borders Chattanooga on the southwest.

Authors

Rotten Day (Part Two)

Leave a comment

And, picking up on the bad news from the previous post, I got news yesterday of the death of one of my literary heroes, the novelist D. Keith Mano.

In a review of the novel for The New York Times, John Leonard wrote: “It is as if James Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Sam Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby-Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Martin Heidegger had gone into vaudeville and … never mind. Just boggle.”

Mano was amazing, a Christian author who’d never be allowed within a hundred yards of the Christian Booksellers Association. He wrote about sex for Christians, and about Christianity for Playboy. Although he opposed women’s ordination in the Episcopal Church, his novel Take Five features a sympathetic woman pastor.

His first novel, Bishop’s Progress, is probably my favorite of his works (I haven’t read them all). It’s the story of a liberal bishop, author of a popular book “reinterpreting Christianity for the modern man.” Confined in a hospital room with an ordinary working guy, he gradually realizes that what he preaches is of no use whatever to this genuine human being (a species with which he has little experience). It’s a great moment when he tells the fellow, “Don’t buy my book!”

Unlike my friend Steve, Mr. Mano had a hard death. Rest in peace.

(Thanks to Dave Lull for the information.)

Authors

Tolkien on Sex

Leave a comment

Al Mohler writes about a 1941 letter Tolkien wrote to his son, Michael.

“The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favorite subject,” Tolkien insisted. “He is as good every bit at catching you through generous romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones.” Thus, Tolkien advised his young son, then 21, that the sexual fantasies of the 20th century were demonic lies, intended to ensnare human beings. Sex was a trap, Tolkien warned, because human beings are capable of almost infinite rationalization in terms of sexual motives. Romantic love is not sufficient as a justification for sex, Tolkien understood.

There is much more on Mohler’s site.

Authors, Religion

“Why I was wrong about Christianity”

Leave a comment

One of the best things I’ve read in some time, from Tom Holland in NewStatesman:

The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value. As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.

Read it all here.

Authors, Writing

Writing a Book? Don’t Ask.

Leave a comment

Writer Samuel D. James used to love being asked, “When are you going to write a book?” I mean, gosh, he might say, do you really think I should?

I probably mumbled something in false self-effacement, then spent the rest of the afternoon daydreaming about what kind of signature would be best for book signings. For me, that simple question was a validation–more than a query, it was an assertion that my talent and my work deserve the honor of being bound and sold in bulk.

The question felt great at first. But eventually something changed. What had sounded like the ultimate “You the man!” started sounding like the knowing inquiry of an accountability partner. As I was asked more and more about writing a book, I came to intensely dread that conversation.

He goes on to explain why he dislikes the question now.

Authors, Fiction

Crime Fiction Returning to Cozies

1 Comment

A hundred years ago, Agatha Christie wrote her first novel, which featured her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Today,  Sophie Hannah is writing Poirot’s cases and the crime genre as a whole is returning to the type of story Christie helped popularize. The Guardian asks:

Why does crime’s golden era continue to exert such a pull? Hannah says it’s largely down to our desire to be entertained.

“I think the resurgence in the popularity of golden age crime fiction is partly down to the fact that we do, at some level, like to have that satisfaction of having a story told to us in a very overtly story-like way,” she says. “Inherent in golden age crime writing is the message: ‘This is a great story and you will have fun reading it’.”

Authors, Fiction

S. Y. Agnon’s “Fable of the Goat”

Leave a comment

What Agnon did with these familiar characters was so seemingly simple that it couldn’t but mean absolutely everything. Riffing on so many biblical and rabbinic themes that one could barely track them all, the story begins with a sick man whose doctors prescribe goat’s milk. But the goat he buys periodically wanders off for days, returning with udders full of milk whose taste is “like a taste of the Garden of Eden.” The man’s son decides to tie a cord to the goat’s tail and follow her. The goat then leads the son into a cave, an underground tunnel to an almost-mythical Land of Israel. (Rabbinic tradition suggests that when the messiah arrives, the diaspora Jewish dead will travel from their graves to Israel through underground caverns.) In the mystical city of Safed, the excited son is about to go back and get his father when he realizes that the Sabbath is approaching and he cannot travel. He quickly writes a note to his father to follow this goat, sticks the note in the goat’s ear, and sends her back through the tunnel. But when the goat arrives, the father assumes his son his dead; he has the goat slaughtered, and only then discovers the note. The father laments how he has doomed himself to exile, while the son flourishes “in the land of the living.”

Dana Horn writes about this story, S.Y. Agnon’s “Fable of the Goat,” in light of a new English translation and the difficulties therein.

Authors, Bookselling

A Great Literary Mystery

Leave a comment

“Why waste those cute little tricks that the Army taught us just because it’s sort of peaceful now.”

On a day in 1993, David Mason had possession of books and letters by and between writers F.S. Fitzgerald, E. Hemingway, and Morley Callaghan about a boxing match in Paris 1929. Callaghan leveled Hemingway, and whether it was for that reason alone or for many others as well, their friendship broke up. The whole story of the match has yet to be told, but it’s apparently all in the papers Mason locked in his safe one night in 1993.

The next morning, those papers were gone, making the great Hemingway Heist one of the literary world’s great mysteries. Mason tells some of what he knows to The Guardian. (via Prufrock News)

“Hello, this is a recording. You’ve dialed the right number; now hang up, and don’t do it again.”

Authors, Publishing

Author Sued, Internet Mocks

2 Comments

“Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Unholy Night (among other titles), is being sued by Hachette Book Group for breach of contract,” reports Locus Online this week. Hachette says they agreed to publish two new books from Grahame-Smith after publishing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter in 2010, and they did receive one manuscript, but the second one, after some months delay, was, according to The Guardian, “too short and substandard, ‘in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public domain work’ (unnamed, but presumably 1897’s Dracula).”

As a result, Twitter users are running with their own ideas for .

More examples:

Authors

Who Was Bob Ross?

Leave a comment

NPR started asking around about the popular television painter Bob Ross, whose show has been streaming on Netflix for a couple months now. They found Annette Kowalski, who discovered him in a sense and helped produce his style of teaching into a hit show. She says Bob was a tough, but wonderful, man.

“Do you really think this company would be as successful as it is, if he didn’t insist that everything be done a certain way?”

She says she was attracted to his gentle, comforting style immediately when she saw him in person.

“I was so mesmerized by Bob,” Kowalski tells NPR. “Somehow, he lifted me up out of that depression. I just think that Bob knew how to woo people. I said, ‘Let’s put it in a bottle and sell it.’ “