By: Eliza Mimski When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher returned an essay I wrote (don’t remember what it was about much less her name–crap!) with the word Majestic! written on top. At the time, I…
By Eugen Oniscu It was night. I was walking home, a little tired and sad, reflecting on the troubles in my family—my mother had remarried and was going through a very difficult time—on the film I had just seen, on…
By: Eliza Mimski When I was writing my novel Sex, Love and Makeovers in the City of the Ancient Cougars, a novel about a make-believe South American town that hosted a beauty pageant for elderly women, I wanted to depict…
By: Ramlal Agarwal Few novels are as intriguing as Camus’s The Stranger (1942). It intrigues the reader from the first line to the last. It is about a man who does not seem to belong to this world. Except for…
By: Alex Dzhoganov At the beginning of The Name of the Rose, William of Baskerville does something that looks almost like a magic trick. The monastery servants are looking for a runaway horse, and William, who has never seen it,…
By James Aitchison In 1944, Australian surrealist poet and publisher Max Harris opened a packet of poems on his desk in Adelaide. The poems had been submitted for publication in Harris’s avant-garde arts journal Angry Penguins. Harris, in his own…
By: Eugen Oniscu When I was twenty years old, I had formed a rather unusual habit: I would borrow a book from the library and go to my father’s grave, where a large cherry tree grew and a bench stood…
By: Frank J. Albert Abner Snopes in William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” is stolidly self-justified in his refusal to belong to any community. He is the hero of his own story – the story that plays out in his own…
By: Eliza Mimski I am one of those people who keeps a daily journal of sorts. That’s me–I’m 79 now– and I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. From the moment I wake up in the…
By James Aitchison The country around South Australia’s Flinders Ranges is unforgiving. It is also deceptive. Some years there’s enough grass to support thousands of sheep; in others, the pastures become an arid wasteland. Boom and bust, boom and bust…