An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
Along today’s roads through rural Minnesota and Wisconsin, one-room school houses remind us that once rural people walked or rode in horse-drawn wagons and buggies to school, town, or relatives’ houses. The school houses held perhaps 30 pupils–most of whom … Continued
Recently, the novels of World War II Czech writer H.G.Adler are being translated into English and published in the United States. I’m reading his Panorama, originally written in 1948, in Peter Filkins’ 2011 English rendition. Discovering a fresh voice, unknown … Continued
Margotlog: The King’s Speech At our book club recently, we discussed Nicholas Baker’s novel The Anthologist (2009). Though I had read perhaps only a third, I was one of two among ten with a decidedly negative reaction to the main … Continued
What makes a perfect motel get-away? On our family jaunts when I was a kid in South Carolina, the family car deposited us on the edge of turquoise pools and my sister and I raced into the motel to change … Continued
Waking in the dark of 5 a.m., I realize I’ve been dreaming of an auditorium where the show has stalled. Behind us rises row after row of viewers equally sitting in the dark. We’re waiting to hear “Moby Dick,” Herman … Continued
Yes, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it first came out. We were in the Hawaiian Islands, on Kauai, and I sat in the garage-lanai the first morning and afternoon, mid-December, bathed in easy warmth, a flowering … Continued
Hanging in the night sky and scratching at the window, the moon’s fingernail insists upon entering. What exactly it brings–fear, loathing, cold distance, even a brief respite from self-absorption with its reminder of a pearl, a shell–the moon links me … Continued
More on the Labyrinth: According to Edith Hamilton, expert on Mythology, King Minos of Crete had the great architect Daedalus build a labyrinth around a nasty secret: his wife had fallen in love with a beautiful bull, given him by … Continued