“Just follow.” He took off, pushing the larger ferns from his face. There were two paths to choose from, both signposted but neither marked with a destination he recognized. Why not just write “Summit”? Or “Top”? Or the equivalent in Spanish, with altitude noted? The top was where everyone wanted to go. To read the…(Read More)
“Just follow.” He took off, pushing the larger ferns from his face. There were two paths to choose from, both signposted but neither marked with a destination he recognized. Why not just write “Summit”? Or “Top”? Or the equivalent in Spanish, with altitude noted? The top was where everyone wanted to go. To read the…(Read More)
Two Irish-American Harvard scholars travel to Albania to study the oral epic in the 1930s. (H stands for Homer.) The local authorities, however, become convinced they are spies while the local mayor’s bored wife is equally convinced they represent deliverance. This was the first Kadare novel I ever read and, as with others…(Read More)
In remote highlands of Albania, a young man fulfills his responsibilities in a long-running blood feud then hunkers down to face his own retaliatory murder after a customary thirty-day truce. As he awaits his fate, he catches the eye of a honeymooning couple from a more sophisticated locale, to devastating effect. Similar to…(Read More)
In an unnamed empire, all of the citizen’s dreams are collected, sorted, and interpreted in a sprawling central fortress, with the goal of identifying “master dreams” portentous of the Empire and monarch’s future. Young Mark-Alem initially feels lucky to have scored a job there. This Kadare novel was banned in Albania upon…(Read More)
“It means being able to see the forest for the trees, while still knowing the sound of the wind through their branches in deep winter, the color of their leaves in autumn, their smell in early spring. It means being able to recognize the universal that will make a story meaningful to others, while retaining…(Read More)
“In journalism, immediacy is a valuable commodity. The journalist doesn’t want facts to become clouded by reflection. But literary fiction, the genre I write in, is about reflection.” In “Tools: The Power in Writing Where You Aren’t” for the e-zine Women Writers, Women’s Books, I wrote about the place of place…(Read More)
“From the day Jane walked out our front door — taking everything of value she could stuff in her car, except our seven-year-old daughter, Shoshana — the ferrets began appearing in our backyard.” Sometimes neighborly relationships are not so neighborly. To read the rest of this new short story, “The Beauty Secrets of Cave Dwellers…(Read More)
“From the day Jane walked out our front door — taking everything of value she could stuff in her car, except our seven-year-old daughter, Shoshana — the ferrets began appearing in our backyard. Every evening, they would creep through the straggling peonies and rustle the black-spotted old-fashioned roses. Before long, once night fell…(Read More)
“From the day Jane walked out our front door — taking everything of value she could stuff in her car, except our seven-year-old daughter, Shoshana — the ferrets began appearing in our backyard.” First lines of a new short story, “The Beauty Secrets of Cave Dwellers,” now available in The Saturday Evening Post. To read…(Read More)
