Blogs about Fiction books

Paying tribute to the Vietnam refugee crisis after the Vietnam War (South-Central Vietnam, South China Sea, Hong Kong and British refugee camps; 1967 to 2023): “Knowledge allows remembering, and remembering is honoring,” says one of …

I know we're actually still a few days away from the official Ides of March, but as out of whack as the world feels these days, it's not impossible to imagine that it arrived this …

I shall be giving a talk in Sheffield on January 30th, on The War and the Novelists, looking at how writers of fiction responded to the Great War, both during theactual war years, and in …

Oh dear! Coming on for two weeks into March and I haven’t written a blog post since my February round up. I hadn’t even realised it had been that long. I had hoped to write …

As I mentioned in my review of his “The Written World and the Unwritten World” in January, 2023 is the centenary year of the birth of the great author Italo Calvino. I’ve written about my …

I bought a nice Reprint Society copy of Margaret Irwin’s Elizabeth, Captive Princess (1948) on my last trip to Hay on Wye, wanting to read it again after forty years or so. It’s very good, …

Regular readers of this blog will know of my fondness for the band Cannibal Corpse. And, to be honest, one of the things I like about them is a consistent product. When you buy the …

I wrote my last alphabet post (it’s here!) a little over two years ago, covering the letter Ч (Ch), which was productive but not rich with writers I considered real, true favorites. Today I present …

Dancing With Death by Joan Coggin Lady Lupin is a bit scatter brained, an amateur detective and a Vicar’s wife – which in this 1947 novel means that she is summoned by her good friend, …

Most are aware of Robert E. Howard‘s character Conan the Barbarian, as he has appeared in numerous stories by REH, further stories by others, as well as in comics and movies. But an interesting element …

Book Review by George S: Pal Joey began in the late 1930s as a series of short pieces in the New Yorker. Each of them was a letter from ‘your Pal Joey’ to a former …

In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen emigrated to the …

First published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1880-81, A Laodicean; or, The Castle of the De Stancys: A Story of To-Day is one of Thomas Hardy’s lesser known novels and one that I very …

At this very moment, anyway. My fave audio dramas are always subject to change, but I'm very consistent about my nonfiction and entertainment casts (likes movies and shows). I won't be updating this list, but …

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Bowen, linear narratives – welcome to episode 114! https://www.stuckinabook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/tea-or-books-114.mp3 In the first half of this episode, we use a suggestion from listener Sarah – do we prefer linear or non-linear narratives? …

Howdy, pardners. You may remember that in October of 2022, I got into a car accident. No, you know what, eff that, I’m not saying that I got into a car accident because I didn’t …

Assembling yesterday’s post I saw that I was only missing one dialogue from Plato’s early period, so I knocked off Greater Hippiaslast night. The early dialogues are generally short; the three in the “death of …

The word litso ‘face’ gives us the familiar dvulichnyi ‘two-faced, hypocritical,’ and dvulichnevyi sure looks like a different version of that same word, but that meaning didn’t fit here: Imagine, I paid them a visit! …