As a creative writer, I think it is important for me to put myself into the bodies and minds of people, unlike myself, and imagine how they move about in the world. In my book, I write about Blind Tom, a person from the nineteenth century who has little in common with me. However, there are some affinities and connections between Tom and myself. Although I am not blind, I suffer from a disability. Also, I like writing about music and musicians. I chose to write about Tom in part because he was a great musician who has never received the proper credit he deserves from musicologists and historians.
I love this book because it is the only other novel, besides my own, that I know of that features pianist Blind Tom. or at least a character based on Blind. In Cather’s novel, he is called the Blind d’Arnault. Cather is a fine writer who knows how to tell a story. It is a novel that I go back to for inspiration and ideas. I often write about music in my fiction and appreciate other authors who take up this challenge.
Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our history through the words of the exceptional few.
My Antonia, a novel by Willa Cather, tells the story of friendship between Antonia Shimerda a young woman who moves to…
I like this novel because it is one of the few that I know of that features a blind musician like the protagonist of my novel. Also, I feel that the author offers fine descriptions of jazz piano and jazz music. This book was published in 1965, a turbulent time in America. The author depicts being black as a disability like blindness. I think William Melvin Kelley was an excellent novelist who deserves greater recognition.
At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world.
The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlow's pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene - where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom.
A Drop of Patience is the story of a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart -…
Dive deep into the high octane world of sport. Travel the world with a comical twist as Zara seeks her perfect partner. But are there underlying secrets at play. Returning from Zara’s hedonistic past, we career into lust & temptation head on in the form of Tyler Montgomery causing sexual…
I like this disturbing novel written by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was also adapted into a fine feature film with a stellar cast of actors. The book is a study of darkness as the driving force of human nature. Be prepared: this is not an easy read. I can tell you that you will find many unsettling scenes in the book. I think anyone who enjoys dystopian novels will like this book.
No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.
A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society…
I think Helen Keller is one of the most fascinating and brilliant individuals in human history. In this book, she shows and tells us what it is like to be a person who cannot see, hear, or speak. I find the book quite moving. Some readers will be familiar with the biopics that have been made about Heller. Take my word these movies don’t offer the pleasure of reading Keller’s story.
These poetic, inspiring essays offer insights into the world of a gifted woman who was deaf and blind. Helen Keller relates her impressions of life's beauty and promise, perceived through the sensations of touch, smell, and vibration, together with the workings of a powerful imagination. The World I Live In comprises fifteen essays and a poem, "A Chant of Darkness," all of which originally appeared in The Century Magazine. These brief articles include "The Seeing Hand," "The Hands of Others," "The Power of Touch," "The Finer Vibrations," "Smell, the Fallen Angel" "Inward Visions," and other essays. "Optimism," written while Keller…
Mosaic is a story of exploration and self-identification, of grief, relationships, tackling mental health, and how to walk through difficult times when there is nowhere else to go. The story follows Laura, who along with her husband Jason, embarked on having a baby, only to go on a journey that…
I love this book because it is so beautifully written—lyrical, poetic, vivid, moving, and engaging. I find this book to be a thing of beauty, from sentence to sentence, from page to page. This is the way I write. I would encourage others who love prose stylists to read this book.
Blind people are not casual listeners. Blind since birth, Stephen Kuusisto recounts with a poet's sense of detail the surprise that comes when we are actively listening to our surroundings. There is an art to eavesdropping. Like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood or Dorothy Allison's One or Two Things I Know for Sure, Kuusisto's memoir highlights periods of childhood when a writer first becomes aware of his curiosity and imagination. As a boy he listened to Caruso records in his grandmother's attic and spent hours in the New Hampshire woods learning the calls of birds. As a grown man the…
My novel is loosely based on a real person, Thomas Greene Wiggins, a musical prodigy who performed under the stage name Blind Tom. Wiggins was most likely an autistic savant. Born a slave in Georgia in 1849, he began giving recitals on the piano around age six and achieved widespread popularity. In fact, he was, for a time, arguably the most popular pianist of the nineteenth century.
Although he was at one point among the most famous people in the world, Wiggins has largely been written out of history. That said, my novel is not a biography. It is speculative, experimental, and magical, a book for readers who love challenging literary fiction.
Malcolm Before X is about finding a way to continue moving forward after everything has been taken from you. While in prison, Malcolm Little discovered the power of reading and found a way to transform his character and become a better man. This half-biography focuses on that transformation, especially his…
Nick and Lesley Albert yearn to leave the noise, stress and pollution of modern Britain and move to the countryside, where the living is good, the air sweet, with space for their dogs to run free.
Suddenly out of work and soon to be homeless, they set off in search…
