When he died, the Russians felt that they lost not only a writer of genius, but a spiritual leader. He was Russia’s prophet. In all his stories, Dostoyevsky comes back to his relationship with God. He writes about Jesus Christ,…
What should you eat, when you can eat everything? This is the omnivore’s dilemma. And this book makes it more fascinating and controversial than ever. As it has been raining in this part of the world for what seems like…
The first biography of Emily Dickinson that I read, was the one by Cynthia Griffin Wolff, which I didn’t review here, but mentioned on the blog, and which is a very large and very erudite work. Going through the Amazon…
Reading Liane de Pougy’s journals, I was intrigued by one of the characters that appeared throughout her life story as possibly the biggest love of her life: Natalie Clifford Barney. Liane mentions her in the notebooks as eternally beautiful and…
I have been thinking of doing one of these posts for a very long time. I do find them fascinating, and I know I am not the only one. Now that Angie posted her thoughts about her bag and its…
Things come up to upset me lately and I have moments when I need to speak against them. I am usually a little coward and prefer to sit in the back, in the dark, in the shadows. Unless I am…
Liane de Pougy was one of Paris’s most famous courtesans. She was famous and rich. Men were putting at her feet millions of francs worth of jewelry, on a whim. She married Romanian Prince George Ghica when she was fourty-one,…
I remember the frightening weekend nights from a distant adolescence back in Romania, unable to move from in front of the TV where I watched paralyzed with horror a series of enthralling adaptations from Ray Bradbury’s stories. But apart from that, I cannot say that I am a big fan of the “weird tales” genre. Yet, how could I resist a book called Zen in the Art of Writing?I read this book with very conflicting feelings. I started with “I think I read this book before”, went through “Wow, it’s beautiful to have this all confirmed” and through “What the hell, the afterlife is too depressing”, finally settling…
I read this book, all the way amazed by the vitality of the writing, all the way trying to label it, to encase it in some sort of genre. I have decided to call this idealist realism. No, they are…