Film Review: “The Big Short”
Hollywood’s cliff notes version of the 2008 credit crisis is entertaining, cautionary and for those not intricately aware of money management, difficult to digest. Thick subtext abounds. You don’t have to be a financial prodigy though to understand the main principals of the financial crisis. Economy collapse + Government bail out = Rich got $$$. […]
Poem By Louis Zoellar Bickett
MOTHER WHISPERED Mother, leaning over me, her palm placed securely to check my temperature whispered with a gentle breath that tickled my ear “You are my little prince, I will always love you.” January 22, 2016
Maxwell’s Poetry Corner
A Good Animal Day Ladybugs popped out of his ears as he emerged from the hollow log. She snapped one and they scooted to the dam, did yoga, then ignoring the downward facing sign, they raced to the water. He won, but, she thought to splash him – truly taking the […]
Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire
In 2013, the announcement that Garth Risk Hallberg, a debut novelist, was to receive an advance of nearly two million dollars, set the literary world atwitter. A New York Times article stated that the book drew a two-day bidding war, prompting ten publishers to offer more than a million dollars. Knopf, the eventual winner, pursued […]
Patti Smith’s M Train
The multi-talented Patti Smith continues her third career as an essayist/memoirist with her superb , slim new book M Train. Having taken the literary world by surprise and storm with her achingly lovely Just Kids, her memoir of her early days in New York with the equally young Robert Mapplethorpe, which won The National Book […]
Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton
Elizabeth Strout, whose magnificent novel Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer Prize for literature a couple of years ago–and who seemed to appear out of nowhere–returns with another flawless novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. Strout is known for her feisty characters, and, in Lucy Barton, she’s created another unique narrator, not so much feisty, as […]
Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare
The brilliantly gifted novelist Mary Gaitskill, whose novel Veronica was a finalist for The National Book Award some years ago, and which showcased the greed and narcissism of the 1980s through the character of a high fashion New York model, has returned with her equally impressive The Mare. The Mare’s a long novel, centered around […]