I’m an old lawyer, a writer, and now I’ve stumbled into acting, but reading, just plain old sitting on the couch and reading, has always been my personal slice of heaven. I was a history major but not a history buff like those folks that can rattle off dates or win $287,000 on Jeopardy. These stories from history can be told realistically, romantically, impressionistically, philosophically, and lots of other ways. But satirically is how stories capture and move me the most. Nothing stirs me or grows goosebumps on me as effectively as a story of hard times and hard-hearted people who deserve a bit of exposure from some well-aimed wit.
When I say “more hysterical than historical,” what I’m talking about is satire. Satire is the way I mostly see the world, including the history of the world. Little Big Man is one of the great American novels, and it’s funny and brilliant. It’s a grab-you-by-the-shoulders-and-shake-you kind of Satire. Berger’s novel stitches a fictional tale onto the fabric of the Old West. It’s the story of Jack Crabb, a cranky 111-year-old adventurer, who narrates his long life in the colorful language of his time. Dustin Hoffman plays Jack in the movie, which you should see after you read the book!
'I am a white man and never forget it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.' So starts the story of Jack Crabb, the 111-year old narrator of Thomas Berger's masterpiece of American fiction. As a "human being", as the Cheyenne called their own, he won the name Little Big Man. He dressed in skins, feasted on dog, loved four wives and saw his people butchered by the horse soldiers of General Custer, the man he had sworn to kill.
As a white man, Crabb hunted buffalo, tangled with Wyatt Earp, cheated Wild…
Dickens’ classic novel of the French Revolution is, like all Dickens novels, a beautiful blending of satire and romance. I first read A Tale of Two Cities in college, and I was excited when my daughter brought it home as required reading in high school. I wanted to re-read it so she and I could discuss it, but we decided to actually read it together, aloud. It took a while, but it was such a wonderful father-daughter experience, something I won’t forget. Both my kids are amazing readers (and writers), and I’ve learned twice as much from them about books as they’ve learned from me!
Sydney Carton is a lawyer who has wasted his abilities and his life. Now he has to make a difficult choice about what is really important to him, which could be a matter of life or death. The French Revolution is running its violent course; lives are ruined as a new France is created. How did the gentle Doctor Manette and his daughter Lucie become caught up in France's struggles? What is the real identity of the handsome Charles Darnay, who wins Lucie's hand in marriage? And why does the shadow of La Bastille Prison hang over them all? The…
I read Imperium in an Afro-American Literature course in college. The instructor was excellent. I was the only non-Afro-American male in the class. I sat in the back. As soon as I finished reading Imperium I said to myself “This would make a great movie.” About ten years later I adapted the book into a screenplay. I typed it myself on my old typewriter. There was gunk on some of the keys and they needed cleaning. I realized that around Scene Five. If you ever read my old manuscript, I apologize for the first twenty pages. You can tell Sutton Griggs I’m sorry, also.
Imperium in Imperio (1899) is a novel by Sutton E. Griggs. Written while Sutton was at the beginning of his career as a Baptist minister, Imperium in Imperio was sold door to door and earned modest praise upon publication. Although Griggs' novels were largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, scholars have recently sought to emphasize his role as an activist and author involved with the movement for Black nationalism in the United States. Critics since have recognized Griggs as a pioneering political figure and author whose utopian themes and engagement with contemporary crises constitute some of the era's most radical…
A library is a treasure trove, in other words, a place where unknown gems of unestimated value can be discovered. The Los Angeles Central Library is one of the great treasure troves of the library world. If you start at “A” in the Fiction Department and keep going long enough, you might get to “W” and discover A Cool Million. Nathanael West died too young, he only wrote four slim novels. But fortunately, his absurdist satire about the ultimate schlemiel, who finds himself besieged and beset by every species of political shark, was one of them.
I miss that library. I haven’t been downtown in months. Years, even.
Nathanael West was only thirty-seven when he died in 1940, but his depictions of the sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying aspects of the American scene rival those of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. ‘A Cool Million’, written in 1934, is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression. Check out our other books at www.dogstailbooks.co.uk
What can I say about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? Seriously, what can I say? I was just a young kid when I read it. I still have the book. But I don’t remember details or have anything insightful that I can say about it. But I do remember being highly entertained and digging the time travel idea. That plot device really caught my imagination and I just have this very vague memory of being transported back to those mythical days as if the book itself were a time portal.
I also remember feeling really at home with Twain’s tongue-in-cheek style of writing. He activated those little satire-loving circuits in my little juvenile brain.
In this classic satiric novel, published in 1889, Hank Morgan, a supervisor in a Connecticut gun factory, falls unconscious after being whacked on the head. When he wakes up he finds himself in Britain in 528 — where he is immediately captured, hauled back to Camelot to be exhibited before the knights of King Arthur's Round Table, and sentenced to death. Things are not looking good. But Hank is a quick-witted and enterprising fellow, and in the process of saving his life he turns himself into a celebrity of the highest magnitude. His Yankee ingenuity and knowledge of the world…
Nebraska: not just a place on a map. It has a heart and it has a voice. It has a Then. It has a Now.
Lark, a young Sioux, rebels against traditions and crosses the plains to save her adopted sister from a bad marriage and return the girl to the Pawnee village where she was abducted in childhood. At the end of her journey, Lark finds herself the center of a mysterious Pawnee ritual that undermines her plan as well as her confidence. Janet is a small town editor crusading against a meatpacking plant that will destroy the fabric of the town along with its landmark stand of cottonwoods. Sounds like two stories but it’s not. Guess who winds them into one?
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing properties–Julia unearths a story rife with hidden agendas and a missionary community unwilling to share the truth. As she confronts the eerie legends and a fellow traveler with his own motives, Julia finds that the longer she stays, the thinner the line between reality and the fantastical becomes until she…
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman's past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers-ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
