If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject. The release of A Wrinkle In Time has brought this quotation to the surface. It sounds profound and is, I think, deeply wrong, but I don’t want to attack a lone, disconnected sentence. It would be better to return the sentence to its…
Category: Literature
In Praise of Short Stories
There was a time when the world abounded with short stories. Great authors wrote brief masterpieces, securing their places in literary history and in English courses throughout North America; great books were introduced to the world as serialized novels. The mediocre and the obscure – overlapping but not homogeneous groups – found their footing in…
Cover Reveal: Bound Beauty
On Tour with Prism Book Tours Welcome to the Cover Reveal for Bound Beauty By Jennifer Silverwood This YA Dark Fantasy is volume three in the Wylder Tale Series Coming winter 2018, cover designed by Najla Qamber Designs Beware the bond between blood and beasts… Vynasha has united the warring human and forgotten clans of…
Review: Merlin’s Mirror
The old legends of Europe hold that Arthur, greatest of Britain’s kings, was conceived by the trickery of the wizard Merlin. Merlin himself, the tales go, was demon-born, the son of no man. But what if both were the sons of no man – the sons, rather, of the Sky Lords, aliens seeking to return…
To PC or Not PC
Let’s talk about grammar. Wait! Come back! This will be interesting, I promise. It will involve politics and controversy and barely any pop quizzes. Politics and grammar meet – let’s say clash, because I did promise controversy – in the question of pronouns. There’s an old convention in English that, when the sex of a person…
Keeping Christmas
Of all the Christmas stories ever told since St. Luke penned the first and true one – of all the books and shows and movies themed to the season, all the Christmas specials – the greatest is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a tour de force for the ages. The story’s greatness is made up…
Through Uncanny Valley
“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the…
Once Upon A(nother) Time
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away … fairy tales happen. It’s the best place for it, too; anything can happen there. The classic fairy tale opening, like the classic fairy tale ending (happily ever after), is more than form. It is substance, part of what a fairy tale is meant to…
An Unheralded Significance
Show me a person who thinks that the Old Testament is only tales for children, and I will show you a person who hasn’t read the Old Testament. I am not referring principally to the fact that a lot of material in the Old Testament isn’t exactly family-friendly, though that is true. The larger point…
The Reepicheep Syndrome
It happens in fiction. A character strides through scene after scene, endlessly impressive to his fellow characters and obviously beloved of his author. He is invariably showered with attention and almost always with praise – except from the audience. The audience can only watch, baffled and annoyed. This character is the author’s pet: The author…