I’m thrilled to announce that “Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera” is back! Season 4 of this podcast kicks off with an interview with singer and actress Casey Keeler, who played the Fairy Queen in a concert production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Iolanthe” … Read the rest
There’s a smell of scorched earth in the air lately, here in America.
It’s smoke from Pacific coast wildfires, and it’s something more: the warning scent of an authoritarian future we must avoid, even as our society chokes on climate change, racism, social injustice, predatory capitalism and military escalation. Scorched … Read the rest
I’ve been thinking about voice — about my own voice, and about the word ‘voice’. I looked up quotes with the word ‘voice’ and immediately found a bunch that got me thinking. So many worthwhile quotes, in fact, that I stopped reading after I got to these four:
… Read the restThe one
Writers create whole worlds; we see this most often in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Eamon Loingsigh is a Brooklyn writer whose world is fully grounded in urban reality — the rough waterfront docks of Auld Irishtown in Brooklyn, 100 years ago. His first novel Light of the … Read the rest
“What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story.” – Pedro Calderon de la Barca
I think it would be fun if Literary Kicks won the 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize in 2015. My blog post “First There Is A Mountain” is … Read the rest
“Do we really want writers to be okay? Just okay?” That intriguing response is one of many I elicited from J. C. Hallman, author of B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal
(We’ve been talking to novelist Roxana Robinson about her unique family history, which includes two celebrated 19th century Americans, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this conclusion to the two-part interview, we talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe, about religion in fiction, and about Roxana’s own mission as a … Read the rest
It wasn’t long after I became enraptured by the uncommon fiction of Roxana Robinson that I learned she was a direct descendant of the famous, controversial 19th century preacher Henry Ward Beecher and a relative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. I was intrigued but somehow not surprised; … Read the rest
The shaded cobblestone streets of Garden Rest are lined with shops, cottages, a pub, a boarding house near the town square, and of course, something nefarious lurking in dark hinterlands. John Shirley’s Doyle After Death
First, it … Read the rest