“Today, You’re A Black Revolutionary” by Jade Jones, 2018

“Today, You’re A Black Revolutionary” by Jade Jones, 2018

Initially published in The Rhumpus, June 27, 2018

Lead Story in the Pen America Best Debut Short Stories, 2019

Winner of the Pen/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Short Story Writers, 2019

I recently acquired a perfect book for those interested in the state of the short story in the USA, Pen America Best Debut Short Stories, 2019.  The stories were selected by a distinguished group of accomplished short story writers.  Today’s story “Today, You’re A Black Revolutionary” by Jade Jones, 2018 was considered the best story.

The story is told in the second person. Set in South Carolina, twice a day a woman, in her early twenties, walks past a flag pole supporting a Confederate flag.  

“YOU WALK BY the flag twice every day. Once on your way to work and once on your way back home. You’ve only recently noticed that it affects your mood. It can be perfectly sunny, just the right amount of breeze to cool your skin and not to sweat out your edges. But there it is. The worst part is, it looks majestic, crinkled in the wind.”..

the blue X on the red background. A color combination that says, “Fuck you and your eyes.” It rebels against the idea of pleasurable aesthetics. You’ve noticed that after seeing the flag, you’re irritable and easily annoyed by strangers on the bus. A blond child incessantly telling knock-knock jokes to her mother—something you would usually laugh about—is just another example of how frustrating the world can be. You keep your grumpy thoughts to yourself.”.

When she gets to work her manager calls her “articulate”, as if her ability to speak well was a surprise in an African American.  She has recently moved to South Carolina.  At a fair, boys are running around:

““When I get you,” the boy with the wet shirt huffs, “Imma beat you like Emmett Till!” He’s still smiling while he runs. You stop abruptly, and one of the boys has to brake with his heels to avoid colliding into you. It doesn’t seem fair to blame Lil Wayne and his lyrics. Do they know who Emmett Till was? Do they have an image of his battered face, his features beaten into smudges? Or is he just another mythical childhood threat, a boogieman, Bloody Mary?”

Everywhere she is confronted by affronts to her history, by people who probably don’t understand why a Confederate flag is not a harmless celebration of mythical days of past glory but a reminder of pure evil.

The narration reveals she still has a hang up ⎌on a man who has moved on, to make it worse to a lighter skin woman.  She also maybe an alcoholic. For sure she and her mother, who wants her to go to medical school, have issues.  Jade does a marvelous job of setting out her relationship with her mother and her ex-boyfriend.

One day she does something seemingly out of character that lands her on television being interviewed as if she were a “Black Revolutionary”.  I don’t want to tell more of the plot.

The story is insightful and actually a lot of fun to read.  The characters are completely real.  Telling the story in the second person added interest to the story for me.

I look forward to reading more stories by Jada Jones.

Jade Jones was born and raised in Southern New Jersey. A former Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, she is a graduate of Princeton University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She is a Lecturer in Writing Arts at Rowan University, where she teaches first year writing and creative writing and serves as the Managing Editor of Glassworks.

A winner of the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, her work has appeared or is forthcoming on The Rumpus and Catapult.

You can find her on Twitter at @jadereginajones and on Instagram at @jaderjones.

From jaderjones.com

Mel u

 

"Jagatishwaran" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. From her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants, 2018

C

"Jagatishwaran" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. From her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants, 2018

• 
  

You can read today's story here.

A Lockdown Read

In the nearly eleven years in which i have maintained The Reading Life i have never seen as much attention given to a debut Short story collection as that given to White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar.  So far I  have posted on five  of her marvelous very creative stories, all deal with the interaction of persons of Indian background with western countries.  

I have  recently  reread The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye.  He talks extensively and very learnedly about the various ways in which myths are used to structure literary works. In today's story and others of her work  I read prior to today we can see Bhuvaneswar very profoundly use ancient Indian myths not only as part of the rhetorical structure of her stories but she shows us how people retreat into deeply rooted ancient archetypal myths to help with the otherwise unfathomable aspects of their lives.  She overlays the ancient myths with modern reality. 

"Jagatishwaran" is narrated by the only unsuccessful child in a large Bombay family, the youngest, a boy. His siblings all have highly professional jobs.  He is fancies himself a painter, working on a mural based on classical Hindu mythology.  He lives at home and is a great disappointment to his father.  His father is very verbally abusive to him.  He suffers from various delusional mental disorders.

His sister, a physician, is at home on her annual visit from America, along with her adolescent daughter and younger son, bringing lots of gifts. Of course her presence only makes him stand out more as a burden on the family. We learn a good bit about how the family, affluent with servants functions.  Foodies will savour the descriptions of the meals.

Jagatishwaran is a regular patron of prostitutes.  It seems he feels more comfortable at the home of the women he regularly 

sees than his own family.  

The family dynamics are masterfully depicted.  Jagatishwaran establishes a bond with his neice and she confides in him.

I give my total endorsement to all lovers of the short story to White Elephants Dancing.

https://chayabhuvaneswar.com/

Chaya Bhuvaneswar studied Indian poetic traditions with the support of an NEH Younger Scholars grant and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, concentrating in Sanskrit. She has received a Time-Life Writing Award as well as a Yale Elmore Willetts Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2,and featured on the Other Storiespodcast. An Affiliated Fellow in Writing at the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia, she lives in Newton, Massachusetts.She is a practicing physician.

"Biophile" - A Short Story by Ruby Cowling from her collection This Paradise, 2019

https://www.thewhitereview.org/fiction/biophile/

"Biophile" - A Short Story by Ruby Cowling from her collection This Paradise, 2019

Initially published in The White Review, April 2014

Website of Ruby Cowling

You may read the story here

A Lock Down Series Work.

This is my first venture into the marvelous creative challenging work of Ruby Cowl. I am very glad to have started what I hope will be an enduring connection with The Reading Life.

"Biophile" is an intriguing and complex story that will reward all lovers of the short story.

The  story narrated by a female game designer.  Many of us under lock down are spending a lot of time on our favorite computer games.  The narrator's company, Funsoft, designs very intricate role playing games based on literary classics.  She is currently working on a game based loosely on Wuthering Heights.  This is a very competitive business, game players are fickle. The job of the designer is to addict the player.

"Funsoft’s internal slogan was simple: Keep Players Playing. Which meant: get people addicted. Seduce them, blanket them with snuggly narcotic sensations. Get them to bury themselves in your two bright dimensions of zipping video candy. The lits brought some estate-reputation issues, and Plan B on Wuthering Heights meant a total remodel, fraught with the pangs of artistic compromise – Blustering Crags, we’d call it, with new character names, visuals nudged just far enough away from the originals to keep the estate lawyers at bay."

The narrator has a complicated personal life, sometimes she entangles the elements in the game into her internal monologues about her family life.  A dominant theme of her fantasies and from the game in development is the interface of players in the game with the dense Forrest areas of the area.

She seems to be  increasingly drawn into the game:

"—The soil is an illusion. Not matter, but a dream. In this way mountains can be moved. See, Harmony? You can move a mountain. Shitshitshit I am under a mountain No. Calm. Breathe. Don’t be sick. Breathe just a bit. It’s all I need. I chose this. I am all-powerful. I am the universe. I could do a game based on the gods. A game based on consciousness itself. No, forget the games. Fuck them. I wriggle a finger and feel the earth settle tighter around my hand. I veer from stabs of hope to the soft murmurs of submission, the hope worse than the fear. Then no, no, yes, this is it, here it comes, the eruption— Dinner over, everyone else elsewhere."

Cowling does a marvelous job showing us the narrators romantic involvements, her family complications and much more.

Ruby Cowling was born in Bradford and now lives in London. This Paradise is her first book. Her stories have won The White Review Prize (2014) and the London Short Story Prize (2014) among others and been widely published in journals and anthologies, including Lighthouse, The Letters Page, Unthology, and The Lonely Crowd. . 

Print Media Praise

 

‘Admirably ambitious in scope, Ruby Cowling explores big themes – climate change and natural disaster, technology and survival – using strange and sometimes fantastical imagery to trace the obscure edges of human experience.’ Alice Ash, Times Literary Supplement

 

‘The most original short stories I’ve read in a long time … current, entertaining, and relevant. Highly recommended.’ Jimena Gorraez, Litro

 

‘The range of Cowling’s style and subject matter is impressive … This Paradise is a beautiful and highly original collection.’ The Spectator

 

‘Ruby Cowling offers a call-to-arms, an urgent encouragement to breathe complexity back into a human experience made simple. We will be recorded, we will be flattened and reduced. But we can record too.’ Jon Doyle, Review 31

 

‘Most stories have their ‘home’ audience. But when fiction crosses that inner ring, and survives to tell its tale, well – that’s art. And This Paradise achieves that handsomely.’

Tamim Sadikali, Open Pen

I read this story twice, I thing I will return to it once the lock down period ends.

I look forward to reading the other nine stories in This Paradise

Mel

"Seder in the Taiga" - a short story by Yenta Mash, translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy in 2017 in Pakn Treger

"Seder in the Taiga" - a short story by Yenta Mash, translated from Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy in 2017 in Pakn Treger

A Seder in the Taiga” appeared originally as “A seyder in der tayge” in Mash’s collection “Mit der letster hakofe,” (The Last Time Around), Tel Aviv: H. Leivick Farlag, 2007.

A Lock Down Read

You can read today's story here 

"The Hebrew word seder means “order” and most often refers to the religious service and festive meal observed in Jewish households on Pesach. Seder derives from the same root as the Hebrew word siddur (prayer book).

Just as the siddur contains the order of prayers for daily, Shabbat, and festival services, so is the Passover seder - and, in many Sephardic and Mizrahi communities, the Rosh HaShanah seder - a prescribed order of prayers, readings, symbolic explanations, and songs related to the holiday. The Pesach seder is the only ritual meal in the Jewish calendar year for which such an order is prescribed, hence its name.

A seder can and should be interactive – encourage questioning, fun, and learning to ensure everyone from the youngest to the oldest at your table comes away with something new!" From reformJudaism.org

Yenta Mash

1922 born Zguiritse, Moldova

1977 immigrated to Israel

2013 dies Haifa, Israel

One quality I am seeking in short stories for Lock Down Reads are works that let us see how others have coped with the consequences of terrible hardships imposed on them through no fault of theirs.  Maybe from the strength show in "A Seder in  in Taiga" by a group of eastern European women of Jewish heritage exhiled to Siberia we can be drawn to reflect on how to make the best of whatever circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

Today's story is narrated by a woman in a Siberian prison camp, all the men have been sent to the mines in the Ural Mountains, for most a certain death sentence.  The only bakery in the area has just burned down, bread is a very big component of their sparse diets.  The Jewish women fear the forthcoming very important traditionally Seder dinner will be ruined by God intervened.

"As if that weren’t enough, God sent us yet another affliction—not one from the Haggadah but a Siberian one. The heavy layers of snow that had built up during the long winter caused the chimney of the bakery in Krasnoye to collapse. This, alas, was the only large-scale bakery in the area. It provided bread to villages and settlements for miles around. What were we to do? Three times a day, we gobbled down whatever meager nourishment we could put our hands on. We gathered mushrooms in the forest and ate them with the wild garlic the Siberians called kolba, and before we’d swallowed the last spoonful we were hungry again.

Two weeks passed like this, and then came word from Krasnoye, where the village council and our commandant were located, saying that if we sent them two strong young men with sleds, they would give us the sacks of flour we were owed for the two weeks. After that . . . God willing, the bakery would soon be back in operation...

In this way the Lord provided us with matzo for Passover. The non-Jews made potato dumplings they called kletski, as well as zateriukhes, which they devoured with a thin potato soup, and since it was the day before Passover, the Jewish women used our portion to bake matzo."

In the old days scholars of the Talmud, restricted to men, would speak at the dinner, now the narrator's mother speaks.  She begins to question God, what good can be behind the situation the women find themselves in just before Pass over (a Haggadah is a text giving the order of the Seder):

"All the Jewish families from our section and the one next to ours came to the seder, and there was matzo for everyone. My mother led the ceremony. Since we had no Haggadahs, she proposed that we celebrate the seder in a new way. Year after year, she said, we’d conducted the seder according to the rules laid down by the scholars of old, but this year, by necessity, we’d add our own twist. We would not ask the Four Questions, first of all because there was no one to ask them of, and second because once we began asking we wouldn’t be done till morning. Our questions weren’t actually questions anyway—they were complaints, directed at God.

For example, why on this day do we not eat leavened bread? Very simple. Because the bakery in Krasnoye isn’t operating. And maror? We have more bitter herbs  than we need; we’ve all eaten kolba till we’re green in the face. As for dipping, we’re drowning in a sea of tears, and when it comes to reclining, we’re up to our necks in the middle of nowhere.

We were slaves in Egypt, my mother said, and today we’re slaves of Stalin, exiled to hard labor in the Siberian taiga, without rights and without the slightest hope of rescue.

Why, my mother continued, should we listen to what Eliezer said thousands of years ago about the exodus from Egypt, or quote from the words of Reb Berl or Reb Shmerl, when right here at the table, Aunt Gitl and Madam Glazer, Madam Gurevitz and Sonya Shmukler, Sheyndl Gelman and Madam Schwartsman can tell us about how their homes were destroyed in the dark of night and their families torn asunder without a why or wherefore? Let each of us tell how we used to live in our little towns, upholding our Jewish traditions and our humanity, caring for the poor, distributing challah for Shabbat and matzos for Passover, providing dowries to needy brides and help to the destitute. Yet even so, the Lord sent his messenger to condemn us to wander and suffer in the Siberian taiga."

All the women in the group contribute to the conversation.  In the old days women from families of different economic and social types would have seperate Sedar dinners, now such matters are forgotten.

This is a very wise and deeply moving story.  The narrator's mother died within a year but she herself survived to almost ninety, having moved to Israel.

As a Lock Down Story, if you are comfortable, no serious food anxieties and wondering what to watch next on Netflix, then be grateful.  

We are all in this together.  We need to try to forget our divisions for a while.

Yenta Mash (1922–2013) grew up in the region once known as Bessarabia (present-day Moldova), renowned as a lively polyglot area and a flourishing center of Jewish culture. In 1941, she was exiled to the Siberian gulag by Soviet forces. She endured seven years of hard labor before leaving the prison camp and making her way to Chisinau, then the capital of the Moldavian SSR. In 1977, in her fifties, Mash immigrated to Israel and settled in Haifa, where, she began to write and to publish. Her short stories were published in Yiddish journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and her work was collected in four volumes published in Israel. She was honored with Israel’s Itsik Manger Prize in 1999 and with the Dovid Hofshteyn Prize in 2002...from Words Without Borders

"The Thaw" - is the lead short story in Alison MacLeod's collection, All the Beloved Ghosts, 2017

"The Thaw" - is the lead short story in Alison MacLeod's collection, All the Beloved Ghosts, 2017

A Lock Down Read

Gateway to Alison MacLeod on The Reading Life

Very Informative Website of Alison MacLeod

Yesterday I began a new project on The Reading Life, Reading While Locked Down.  In "The Thaw" we travel back to 1926, our destination is Cape Breton Island, in the eastern Canadian Province of Novia Scotia.  Today it is a highly valued travel destination for vacationers, in 1926 it was a hard place to survive.  (The story seems based on MacLeod's family history.)

In just a few sentences MacLeod masterfully shows us a tragic soaked in death family history.  I want to share a bit of the story:

"As for their mother, Cecelia Maud, it is true what people say. She has never recovered from the deaths of her three grown children: Ethel, Kathleen and, finally, senselessly, Murray, two months after Kathleen. Before Christmas, Marjorie found her mother sitting in the ice house with her coat unbuttoned and sawdust stuck to the bare soles of her feet.  After seven daughters, Providence gave Cecelia Maud and James MacLeod a single son, a boy who would become the youngest lawyer ever admitted to the Bar in the province of Nova Scotia."

We see beyond the terrible pain into a family with the strength to produce  "the youngest lawyer ever admitted to the Bar in the province of Nova Scotia".  We learn nothing about him but we can see way ahead to great things.

The narrative structure centers on twenty nine year old, unmarried, Marjorie Genevieve.  She is thrilled with her just purchased after two years of saving, beaver fur coat.  To make it all the better, the coat has arrived just in time for the Saturday night dance, a very big event.

"The Herald will assure us that, as she arrives at the Imperial Hotel on Sydney’s Esplanade, Marjorie is a young lady whose thoughts are centred on an evening’s innocent recreation. In the lobby, she passes her fur to the cloakroom attendant, wondering if the girl will be tempted to try it on when no one’s looking. Go on, she wants to say. I don’t mind! But she doesn’t want to presume. ‘Don’t forget your dance cards!’ the girl calls after them, and Marjorie dashes back. For this is a dance, not a society ball, and Marjorie thrills to the faint promise of the unexpected, the spontaneous."

We learn that African Americans have moved to Cape Breton to work in an iron work.  They are a new segment to the community.  At first Marjorie does not know what to do when a very well mannered Iron worker asks her to dance.  We see the subdued racism of the community in the reaction of other dance goers to this.

The ending left me staggered.

"The Thaw" left me feeling I had been to a dance in Cape Breton Island in 1926. In tropical Manila I could feel the cold, fear the ice.

As a Lock Down Story, we see how great art comes from 

pain.  As a practical matter, I realize me not being able to get my 

preferred brand of breakfast cereal is not a horrible burden.

There are 12 short stories in All the Beloved Ghosts I am very much looking forward to reading and posting upon.

Alison MacLeod is a novelist and short story writer. Her most recent book, the story collection 'All the Beloved Ghosts', was shortlisted for The 2018 Edge Hill Prize for best story collection in the UK and Ireland. It was a 'Best Book of 2017' for the Guardian, and a finalist for Canada’s 2017 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. 

Her website has a detailed bio.

My Lock Down Reading Plans and Hopes

Here in Quezon City we have been in lock down since March 15, I expect it will continue another month at least.  My family, wife, three adult daughters and five cats are materially fine.  You can go out to shop and there are delivery options.  

I admit to being distracted at first.  I decided to create a special "Lock Down Collection" to motivate me.  There are lots of short stories and I will try to post on one at least every other day.  I also included science fiction and fantasy works.  

Have you made any lock down reading plans?

The Reading Life Review - March - 2020

The Reading Life Review - March 2020

March Authors

Column One

1. Marc de Faoite - Ireland - Malaysia, author of Tropical Madness, a collection I highly recommended

2. John Keene - USA - distinguished historian

3. Alison MacLeod - Canada to UK, highly regarded multi genre writer, I hope to follow her work for many years 

Column Two

1. Elaine Chiew - Malaysia - Singapore, author The Heartsick Diaspora, featured 13 times on The Reading Life, with more to come

2. L. Annette Binder - Germany - USA - authur of Rise, an award winning debut collection

3. Billy O'Callaghan - Ireland, two novels, four short story collections.  I have followed his work since 2012, great things are coming for him.

Column 3

1. Madeline D' Arcy - Ireland, featured numerous times, a multi-awarded writer of great talent

2. Linda Lappin - USA - Italy.  Author Katherine's Wish, and several other marvelous works.  I first began posting on her work ten years ago and hope for many more opportunities to read her work.

3. David Butler - Ireland - David Butler is a novelist, playwright, poet and writer of short fiction. With a BA in Mechanical Engineering, the literary path could initially seem a peculiar ambition for an ostensibly numerical mind. The Renaissance man later became a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) and speaks no less than five languages other than his mother tongue; French, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and Russian

Column Four

1. Catherine McNamara - Australia to Italy - Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney and studied visual communication and African and Asian Modern History before moving to Paris.

She worked in an embassy in pre-war Mogadishu and later lived in Accra, Ghana, where she co-managed a bar and art gallery. She moved to Italy ten years ago, where her jobs have included translating welding manuals and modelling shoes.

Catherine is the author of the erotic comedy The Divorced Lady’s Companion to Living in Italy (Indigo Dreams Publishing) and wrote the children’s book Nii Kwei’s Day.  

2. Aiden O'REILLY - Ireland. Greetings, Hero was published by Honest Publishing UK in 2014, and launched in London and in Dublin.Aiden lived for nine years in Eastern Europe. He studied mathematics, and has worked as translator, building-site worker, IT teacher, and property magazine editor. His fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly (x4), The Dublin Review (x3), The Irish Times, Prairie Schooner, 3am magazine, and in Unthology 4 and several other anthologies. His plays have been given staged readings at The Triskel in Cork and in Dublin. He won the biannual McLaverty Short Story Award in 2008. In 2012 he received a bursary from the Arts Council.

3. Elizabeth MacDonald - Ireland to Italy - a highly valued contributor to The Reading Life, author of The House of Cards and A Matter of Interpretation.  I love both these works

4. San Lin Tun - Myanmar - my second post on one of his short stories.  Many more to come.  San Lin Tun is a freelance Myanmar-English writer of essay, poetry, short story and novel and he has published ten books including “Reading a George Orwell Novel in a Myanmar Teashop and Other Essays” and his latest novel “An English Writer”.  

Column Five

1. Jaki McCarrick- Ireland - Jaki McCarrick is an award-winning writer of plays, poetry and fiction. Her debut short story collection The Scattering was published by Seren Books and was shortlisted for the 2014 Edge Hill Prize. The collection includes her story The Visit, which won the 2010 Wasafiri Short Fiction Prize and was included in Best British Short Stories (published by Salt), 2012. On the basis of her debut collection, Jaki was longlisted in 2014 for the inaugural Irish Fiction Laureate. Her play LEOPOLDVILLE won the 2010 Papatango Prize for New Writing, and her play THE NATURALISTS premiered in 2018 in New York to rave reviews: "Impeccable, a gift to its actors" New York Times; "Beautifully performed" The New Yorker. Her play BELFAST GIRLS, developed at the National Theatre Studio, London, was shortlisted for the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the 2014 BBC Tony Doyle Award. It premiered in the US in Chicago in 2015 to much critical acclaim and has since been staged widely internationally with recent premieres in Australia and Sweden. In 2016, Jaki was selected for Screen Ireland's Talent Development Initiative and has recently completed the screen adaptation of BELFAST GIRLS. She is currently working on her second collection of short fiction and her first novel, The Family Wolves. Jaki also writes critical pieces for the Times Literary Supplement, Irish Examiner, Poetry Ireland Review and other publications.

2. Steve Wade - Ireland - he has been featured five times on The Reading Life -He is an Irish Writer and English language teacher. A prize nominee for the PEN/O’Henry Award, 2011, and a prize nominee for the Pushcart Prize, 2013, his fiction has been published widely in print and online. His work has won awards and been placed in prestigious writing competitions, including being shortlisted among five in the Wasafiri Short Story Prize 2011, a nomination for the Hennessy New Irish Writer Prize, and Second Place in the International Biscuit Publishing contest, 2009. His novel ‘On Hikers’ Hill’ was awarded First Prize in the UK abook2read Literary Competition, December 2010 – among the final judging panel was the British lyricist sir Tim Rice. His fiction has been published in over twenty-five print publications, including Zenfri Publications, New Fables, Gem Street, Grey Sparrow, Fjords Arts and Literary Review, and Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. www.stephenwade.ie

3. Brian Kirk - Ireland - featured seven times on The Reading Life. Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist from Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs and various anthologies. I hope to follow him for a long time

4. Qurratulaim Hyder - India, author River of Fire, quintessential Urdu novel

Birth Countries

1. Ireland - 9

2. USA - 2

3. Canada - 1

4. Malaysia - 1

5. Germany - 1

6. Australia - 1

7. Myanmar - 1

8. India - 1

In March we featured 9 women and 8 men, all but  Qurratulaim Hyder are living.  All have been previously featured on The Reading Life.

Blog Stats

Since inception there has been 5,986,693 page views.

Home countries of visitors: USA, India, Russia, The Philippines, Germany, Hong Kong, France and Canada.

There are 3715 active posts 

Future Plans.  

We will be mostly posting on short stories by writers such as Alison MacLeod, Elaine Chiew, Mavis Gallant, reading along with Buried in 

Print, Alice Adams, and Sholem Aleichem.  I will continue reading the four part science fiction classic, The Hyperion Cantos.

Blog readership was down this month, school is out over much of the world.

We wish the best to all in these difficult times.

Mel has asked us to thank Max u for his gift of Amazon Cards.

Ambrosia Bousweau

Oleander Bousweau