help, readers, i just rec'd an e-mail from aol scolding me for breaking their/my? terms of service with my blog. does anyone out there know what i could have done? has anyone had a similar incident?
on the positive side of recent e-mail are the many, many congratulatory messages i received from readers of the akron beacon journal's review. thank you all.
i'm sorry that i didn't keep the messages to copy in this blog. some were orders for books, always welcome. some asked where the book 'turning leaves' could be purchased. it can be purchased directly from me. it is available on amazon.com and b&n.com. in canton and north canton oh., it can be found at elemental arts, canton flowers, the canton museum of art, tony's hair design, the spa at atrium, and the yoga place. i have been lax in asking other shops to carry the anthology. if any of you have suggestions or would like to carry it at your own businesses, please let me know.
i did keep part of one message from joel,
I was just re-reading your kind note long ago regarding the first half or so of Author In Search Of Six Characters. . .and had to express myself because of your warm comments..belated thanks as I relive your generous reaction Joel
i do try to help other writers as, indeed, other writers continue to help me. none of us do it for the thanks, but it IS nice to be appreciated.
i have had a productive week. 'i' might be the wrong pronoun. li hertzi has finished her design for the cover of my new book to be published by anaphora literary press. i really like it. poe's raven is perched on the title looking down at it. that's one big accomplishment.
the other is that today i sent a short creative non-fiction piece into two journals in response to their prompts. i hope something comes of it.
through some twisted mental processes (not unusual in my case), i re-read two murder mysteries in the past couple of days. over a year ago, geoffrey o'brien, editor in chief of the library of america, listed in the wall st. journal his five favorite international crime fiction novels. two of the five are the oxford murders by guillermo martinez, 2005, and the water's edge by karin fossum, 2007. they are good books, worth reading. of course, i see some things in the second reading that i would not have seen first time around.
martinez, who is from argentina, writes 'an intellectual mystery in which mathematical symbols become clues in a sequence of murders' or seemingly murders. it is full of sentences, such as, 'it's the more or less obvious extension of godel's incompleteness theorem: any philosophical system which starts from first principles will necessarily have a limited scope.' and 'we were discussing nicholas of cusa's geometrical metaphor,' etc. on second reading, i didn't try to figure out all of these mind-traps, laid for reader and narrator. in fact, i realized that there really are only two main characters in this novel, the narrator and the man who tells him the story he repeats to us, the readers. it is really quite a simple plot cleverly obfusticated by 'wittgenstein's and frankie's conclusion' and 'mandelbrot's paradox,' etc. we have either a wildly unreliable narrator or someone is leading him and us astray. cleverly done and fun to read.
the oxford murders was translated by sonia soto and published by macadam/cage. it is 197 pages.
karin fossum's the water's edge takes place in a small town in fossum's native norway. it is an inspector sejer mystery and beautifully written. it is completely free of the slight-of-hand that dominates the oxford murders. one would think that the atmosphere of the going-nowhere town and its inhabitants would depress the reader, but this is not true. fossum is too good. and one woman does escape. she is the woman, who with her husband, discovers the first body while out on a sunday walk, the same walk they take every sunday at the same time. there you have it!
the water's edge is translated from the norwegian by charlotte barslund. it is published by houghton mifflin and is 227 pages. in addition to both novels being rather short and being translated from other languages, what they have in common is the inclusion of a number of murders that did not have to happen, that were almost accidental, or, in a few cases, weren't even murders. this probably says more about geoffrey o'brien, who put them on the list than anything else.
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