It was all bullshit down there fat, happy liars, turning their fat, happy faces away from the real trouble.” She didn’t know what friends meant, because down there in that phony Topeka nobody was really friends. “She didn’t know what it was to trust somebody like Blood so much that he was a part of you. The relationship between these two is at the heart of the story, particularly when a young woman comes between the two: Vic and Blood were one such partnership with Blood having the brains and Vic being little more than a dumb teenager barely smart enough to survive without the smarts and instincts of his canine partner. There were also solos who traveled without gang protection, dependent on their dog partners. The dogs were necessary to sniff out radiation monsters and to find females who were quite scarce. A Boy and His Dog postulated a savage survival universe where the earth’s surface was populated by teenage rover gangs and their telepathic dogs. Long before all the modern fantasies about a post-apocalyptic world, such a theme was extraordinarily popular in fifties and sixties science fiction with the idea being that there would be an atomic war and few survivors fending for themselves. A Boy And His Dog was one of the great classic shorts of late sixties science fiction and it’s shock value put Harlan Ellison on the map.
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5/11/2023 0 Comments Always You by Nell IrisHe owns a food cart, and every day he has two different kinds of soups for sale. Sometimes another person’s emotions wash over him, and sometimes they don’t.īassel has come to terms with never being able to perform miracles. He’s more in tune with his empathic side, though he has no control over that either. He gets premonitions on occasion, though he can never predict the timeframe or if it’ll happen at all. The result is that Bassel has no control over his powers. In this world, psychics mate with shifters, not with other psychics. His mum was a precog and his dad was an empath. Because sometimes there’s a need.īassel is a psychic. The purpose of the day is to give a loved one a bowl of therapeutic soup. Soup it Forward Day isn’t about soup kitchens, though. It’s a day that was founded by the Soup Sisters who give soup to the homeless and other people in need. I wrote Batshit Bassel to celebrate Soup it Forward Day. I’m aware of having harmed our friendship by bringing up Nutella in a less favourable way (but seriously, Nutella!?!) the last time I was here, so we’re gonna stick to a safer topic this month. Hello, everyone! Thank you, lovely Nell, for allowing me back on the blog. Holly Day is back on the blog! Yay! I scheduled this post before breakfast, which was a mistake because the excerpt she’s included made me hungry! Peanut soup, yum! It also made me want to read this book, so when I’m done here, I’m going to go one-click it, and I hope you’ll do the same. 5/11/2023 0 Comments Jitterbug perfume bookPan encourages Alobar to continue East in search of the masters of immortality. Eventually he stumbles upon the stamping grounds of the pungent goat-god Pan, who is slowly losing his godly powers as the world turns toward Christianity. After fleeing, no longer a king but only a man, he travels through Eurasia, on a newfound quest for the secret to longevity. The book was first published in 1984 by Bantam Books and later published by Random House.Ī powerful and chiseled 8th-century king named Alobar narrowly escapes regicide at the hands of his own subjects, from a custom of killing the leader at the first sign of aging. Orchestrated by a mysterious Irish philosopher, the past and the present collide when the characters come together and discover the unexpected path to life-everlasting. The story connects dueling perfumers in Seattle, Paris and New Orleans to a bottle of incomparable perfume created by two unlikely but defiant lovers of the past who seek immortality. The book follows two interweaving storylines, one in Ancient Eurasia and one in the present day. Jitterbug Perfume:. Everyday low prices on a huge range of new releases and classic fiction. Jitterbug Perfume is Tom Robbins' fourth novel and was listed on the New York Times Best Seller list in 1985. Buy Jitterbug Perfume by Robbins, Tom from Amazon's Fiction Books Store. 5/10/2023 0 Comments Gestation by John GoldPalencar has also worked on entertainment projects for Lucas Arts, Paramount Pictures and Vivendi Universal. Time, Smithsonian, and National Geographic Magazine, and the Philadelphia Opera have employed his illustrative talents for their publications and productions. (Paolini named Eragon’s birthplace “Palancar Valley” after John.) Recently, his cover paintings for Eragon and Eldest, by Christopher Paolini, have appeared on the New York Times Children’s Best Seller List. James, Charles deLint, David Brin and Stephen King. Lovecraft, Ursula LeGuin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, P.D. His work has appeared on hundreds of book covers in over thirty countries for authors such as H. Most recently John was presented the award for “Artistic Achievement” by ASFA at the World Fantasy Convention held in Yokohama, Japan. There are touches of Bosch and Da Vinci in his visual allegories of netherworld landscapes and doomed characters.įor more than twenty-five years, he has created book covers and received honors for his contributions to the field of illustration including Gold and Silver Medals from the Society of Illustrators, two Gold Book Awards from Spectrum, and four Chesley Awards from the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA). John Jude Palencar is a rarity among modern artists, mixing meticulous technique reminiscent of the old masters with a soaring, darkly surreal imagination. 5/10/2023 0 Comments The Iron Knight by Julie KagawaWith the unwelcome company of his archrival, Summer Court prankster Puck, and the infuriating cait sith Grimalkin, Ash begins a journey he is bound to see through to its end - a quest to find a way to honor his vow to stand by Meghan's side. Meghan is now the Iron Queen, ruler of a realm where no Winter or Summer fey can survive. And when all of Faery nearly fell to the Iron fey, she severed their bond to save his life. Then Meghan Chase - a half human, half fey slip of a girl - smashed through his barricades, binding him to her irrevocably with his oath to be her knight. His own love had died a horrible death, killing any gentler feelings the Winter prince might have had. To cold faery prince Ash, love was a weakness for mortals and fools. My fall began, as many stories do, with a girl… I am the last remaining son of Mab, Queen of the Unseelie Court. My name - my True Name - is Ashallayn’ darkmyr Tallyn. 5/10/2023 0 Comments The dispossessed bookGrappling with Pandemic: An Interview with Poet Robert Carr.A Poem Born from a Single Image: In Conversation with John Sibley Williams, Author of The Drowning House.It’s Never Too Late: A Conversation with Wendy Drexler, Author of Notes from the Column of Memory.Next Post Next Review of Mark of Voodoo, by Sharon Caulder View the full speech via this link, or embedded below: Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profits and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.” Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. “We need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. Anyone who’s read The Dispossessed will recognize the philosophy of the Odonians in the following excerpt from that speech: On Anarres, it is an insult of the highest order to call someone a profiteer. In her 2014 acceptance speech for the National Book Award, LeGuin used the word “profiteers” to refer to the increasingly money-focused publishing industry. As Shevek travels between the two worlds, his journey sheds light on the wonders and flaws of each. Shevek leaves Urras because his work as a physicist isn’t considered “central” by Odionian society, but he struggles to maintain his ideals and his identity on a planet that grants him luxury and wealth while forcing others to live in hardship and poverty. 5/10/2023 0 Comments Bull by david elliottThe end words of lines one and two set the rhyme scheme.The first and second lines form an unrhymed couplet.And when we do, we get closer to all the human beings with whom we share the planet. Of course, we can’t duplicate the experience of grief, or love, or jealousy, or rage, or astonishment, or confusion or any of it through metaphors, and syntax, and line breaks. I think that’s an excellent definition of a poem. Carl Jung once defined a symbol as the best representation of that which cannot be represented. I can’t think of any better way to give our young women and men these skills than to sustain them with poetry. But if we’re going to get anywhere in this weary world we need engineers who can feel, doctors who can empathize with their patients, astronomers who can communicate the wonders of the universe to the rest of us, and mathematicians and coders who are firmly grounded in notions of what it means to be human. Yes, of course, we need great engineers, great doctors, great astronomers and mathematicians and coders. There are so, so many reasons to get poetry into the ears and mouths and hearts of our younger citizens. If we’re not very careful, teaching it is like refusing to give a starving kid dinner until she can recite every ingredient that went into its preparation. Bringing poetry to young people is an act of love. Well, this is like asking why it’s important to bring math into the classroom, right? And I love that the question refers to bringing poetry into the classroom, rather than teaching it. 5/10/2023 0 Comments Five little indians book coverThe Spanish and Russian titles of Christie's novel today are still Diez negritos and «Десять негритят», respectively, and the German children's song, with a different melody, is called "Zehn kleine Negerlein". The novel was later retitled And Then There Were None (1939), and remains one of her most famous works. It was sung by Christy's Minstrels and became widely known in Europe, where it was used by Agatha Christie in her novel of the same name, about ten killings on a remote island. Either way, "Ten Little Niggers" became a standard of the blackface minstrel shows. Green in 1869, as "Ten Little Niggers", though it is possible that the influence was the other way around, with "Ten Little Niggers" being a close reflection of the text that became "Ten Little Indians". It is generally thought that this song was adapted, possibly by Frank J. He began composing songs at age 14 - a creative discipline that would inform his life and work - and went on to study classical philology (the study of language and literature) at Germany’s University of Bonn. Nietzsche believed in the importance of individualism and self-expression he often challenged traditional morality and societal norms, and espoused the pursuit of personal excellence.īorn in 1844, Nietzsche grew up with his mother and younger sister, after his father and younger brother died within six months of each other when Nietzsche was just 5 years old. One of the most influential thinkers of the modern era, Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose work, an early example of existentialism, explored the meaning of the human experience. 5/9/2023 0 Comments The black jacobins readerThe Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood that elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth.” The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Toussaint could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class complications of their society, too often had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify. That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton. The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution, and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman. “Leader of a backward and ignorant mass, he was yet in the forefront of the great historical movement of his time. |