The Writing Was the Fun Part This is the first Perfidy Press newsletter to issue from Perfidy Press itself, and I am keeping my fingers…
Leave a CommentPublishing dark matter since 2018
Publishing dark matter since 2018
The Writing Was the Fun Part This is the first Perfidy Press newsletter to issue from Perfidy Press itself, and I am keeping my fingers…
Leave a CommentDear Readers, This month, no august pronouncements, just some random thoughts. Well, just one diatribe: Tech companies want to make themselves indispensable for anyone who…
Leave a Comment“I’m not writing for a particular audience. The reader in mind is me. If someone else would write these books I could go play golf.”…
Leave a CommentDear Readers, This month’s newsletter is brought to you by the letter G. To start you off, here’s a typographic riddle. I saw this text…
Leave a CommentThis is a story about why technological innovation should worry us as our lives inexorably shift online, if only because innovation begets obsolescence. Fourteen years…
Leave a CommentI’m afraid another month blew by without saying hi to you. And rather than ranting about politics or plugging my book, I’m offering a guest…
Leave a CommentThis month’s assorted provocations include several commentaries, a story, a funding appeal, and news of recent publications. Two of the items are fiction.
5/5. Got an email saying, “Greetings everybody, I’m Oscar, your friendly spambot. I’ll be feeding you all sorts of incredibly delicious offers from exotic portals for your shopping enjoyment. You’ll want to read each and every one and clip the valuable coupons.”
How nice. I kept reading.
You would be foolish to decline my bountiful offer, but can opt out at any time by visiting my Patreon page and donating $5 to cover my monthly upkeep or just $50 for a whole year, and thank you in advance.
Welcome to my internet family!
Oscar.
At least it doesn’t want Bitcoin. Still considering what to do. Any ideas?
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Though I’ve never met Jeff Schnader, we are both fellow alumni of Columbia University and fellow authors whose work has been excerpted at The Write Launch, where I learned he had set a novel on campus during the riotous years of Vietnam War protests. I remember those days well, though not as well as him. Of course, I had to seek him out. That wasn’t hard, as he has a website that runs down his career as a physician, journal editor, published science writer, and now fiction writer, and found him welcoming. Aside from being a thoracic surgeon, I have a lot in common with Jeff (besides first names), and now we have both published subversive novels. So, let’s hear it for:
1 CommentAt least three other biographers had attempted to chronicle Roth’s life since the 1990s; all were fired or became antagonized.
Leave a CommentIt saddened me greatly when my principal muse David Cornwell—aka John le Carré—passed away last December twelfth at 89. By my lights, the Brits should make that date a national day of mourning. Were it not for the spell of the holidaze, I would have said something about it at the time, so please allow me to pay my respects now.
He was a gifted storyteller. It wasn’t just how scrupulously he constructed his characters and how mercilessly he deconstructed them that I admired; he also kept me guessing about outcomes, so many of them equivocal. As in real life, few of his protagonists triumph, and some don’t make it. Along the way, he tends to adjust the attitude of some and lets others slide into more august or shrunken versions of themselves—until, like George Smiley and Peter Guillam in his 2011 A Legacy of Spies, they leap out of retirement. (Le Carré scholars reckon that Smiley would be a centenarian at the time, having cut his espionage teeth in 1930s Berlin.) Being billeted throughout Central Europe by the Foreign Services through the 1960s and having traveled widely since, Cornwell’s settings bubble with both old- and new-world authenticity.
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