Writers

Review: The Confessions of Saint Augustine

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I persuaded myself to buy this book after reading that, “The Confessions of Saint Augustine is one of the most influential autobiographies ever written. In this timeless work, Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, candidly reflects on his moral struggles, spiritual journey, and ultimate conversion to Christianity. With honesty and depth, his shares his transformation from a life of sin to one of faith and grace.”

The Conversion of Saint Augustine

Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras, Algeria) in the Roman privince of Numidia. His mother, Monnica, was a devout Christian; his father Patricius was a pagan who converted to Christianity on his deathbed. Scholars generally agree that Augustine and his family were Berbers, an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa, but were heavily Romanized, speaking only Latin at home as a matter of pride and dignity.

At the age of 11, Augustine was sent to school at Madaurus a small Numidian city about 31 kilometres south of Thagaste. There he became familiar with Latin literature, as well as pagan beliefs and practices. His first insight into the nature of sin occurred when he and a number of friends stole pears from a neighbourhood garden.

At the age of 17, through the generosity of his fellow citizen Romanianus, Augustine went to Carthage  to continue his education in rhetoric, though it was above the financial means of his family. Despite the good warnings of his mother, as a youth Augustine lived a hedonistic lifestyle for a time, associating with young men who boasted of their sexual exploits. Augustine began a relationship with a young woman in Carthage. Though his mother wanted him to marry a person of his class, the woman remained his lover. He was warned by his mother to avoid fornication (sex outside marriage), but Augustine persisted in the relationship for over fifteen years.  He ended his relationship with his lover in order to prepare to marry a teenage heiress. By the time he was able to marry her, however, he had already converted to Christianity and decided to become a Christian priest and the marriage did not happen.

After converting to Christianity, Augustine turned against his profession as a rhetoric professor in order to devote more time to preaching. In 391 Augustine was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius (now Annaba), in Algeria. He was especially interested in discovering how his previous rhetorical training in Italian schools would help the Christian Church achieve its objective of discovering and teaching the different scriptures in the Bible. He became a famous preacher, and was noted for combating the Manichaean religion, to which he had formerly adhered. He preached around 6,000 to 10,000 sermons when he was alive; however, there are only around 500 sermons that are accessible today. In 395, he was made Bishop of Hippo. He remained in that position until his death in 430. Bishops were the only individuals allowed to preach when he was alive and he scheduled time to preach after being ordained despite a busy schedule made up of preparing sermons and preaching at other churches besides his own.

 As a theologian and philosopher, his writings deeply influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine and Confessions. 

When I started reading Confessions, I was expecting a clear and complete confession of his sins, together with a detailed account of what persuaded him to convert to Christianity. The detail is missing. He confesses, however, to the theft of the pears and to relationships with concubines. He mentions the influence of his mother, but there is little about his conversion. Much of the book is devoted to his praise of God. From the very beginning if the book, he is clearly a man of very deep faith, though he regarded himself as sinner, and the transition from sinner to saint is granted. He also engages in philosophical discussions. The book was translated into ‘thou and thee English’. I found the book long (345 pages) and disappointing.

Review: The Bustamante Story

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The subtitle of this book is ‘& Behind the Scenes of Shadow Cell’. The author is ‘Harry Greene’.

After reading an article in the Atlantic about two CIA agents who fell in love on an assignment involving the creation of a shadow cell inside a global competitor of USA, I searched on Amazon for their book.

There appeared to be several, but I couldn’t find one with Shadow Cell in the main title. So I picked this one out as a likely candidate.

This book at 135 pages. The interesting information in it could have been divulged in ten pages. It is repetitious on several subjects: tight security at CIA; the two agents felt under great pressure at CIA for their relationship; the agents were clever, top performers. There were almost no examples backing up these assertions. The author is very careful to speak kindly of the CIA and the agents, and not to mention even a trivial fact which might be classified. He probably wants to be clear of any litigation, should his real name be known.

How wrong my choice was! This one is most likely a knock off of the real book (pictured below). A knock-off written by a Joe Bloggs under the pen name of a Harry Green. There is a Harry Green listed on Amazon who has written 16 fiction and non-fiction books on various subjects, none of which include the CIA. This book has an ISBN number (which no longer comes up on Amazon searches). In fact, this book no longer exists according to Amazon. This book doesn’t mention its publisher or its printer. It says only that the book was printed in New Haven, Connecticut on 10 September 2025. There is no author biography or statement of his/her relationship to the agents or the CIA. The narrator starts right in as if he had permission to tell the story.

The real book: a New York Times Bestseller!

Interestingly, I don’t believe the real book was listed on amazon.co.uk when I bought the knock-off. In fact, it still doesn’t seem to be listed. I just bought a real copy on amazon.com. It was published on 9 September 2025.

So what’s all the hubbub about? Well, here’s the publicity from the real thing:

“INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A thrilling firsthand account by husband-and-wife CIA operatives who, against all odds, triumphed in a deadly cat-and-mouse game against a mole within the agency—an unprecedented insider account of 21st-century spycraft in the tradition of Argo and Black Ops.
 
Andrew and Jihi Bustamante were a “tandem couple”: married spies who’d dedicated their lives to the CIA. They met as trainees at Langley, and got married while hunting terrorists across the globe. Then, suddenly, they were assigned to a mission so sensitive and explosive that the CIA still has never acknowledged it. The CIA’s source network in a country code-named “Falcon”—one of America’s most formidable rivals—had been compromised by a mole, and the agency needed a new way to collect intelligence there. Young newlyweds, the Bustamantes were considered safe choices for this daunting task precisely because they had no experience in Falcon. They were also loyal, forgettable, and completely disposable—operatives who could help to strengthen the CIA’s position in Falcon while simultaneously serving as bait for the mole.
 
But although their superiors at the CIA didn’t realize it, the Bustamantes also brought another advantage to the table: a granular understanding of how terrorist cells operate, and how the agency could exploit those same tactics to keep America safe. Assembling a rag-tag team of fellow operatives and recruiting new sources from Falcon, the Bustamantes pioneered a new way of spying by building a cell of their own—right at the heart of the CIA.

The propulsive, untold tale of one of history’s greatest intelligence crises and the unlikely band of agents who were sent in to clean up the mess, Shadow Cell allows us to peer behind the curtain to see how today’s spy wars are being fought—and won.”

AI Controversy

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There is an article in the Atlantic magazine on 19 September about how the publishing industry views AI. It is written by Boris Kachka, Senior Editor of the Atlantic. He titles the article ‘Publishing’s New Microgenre’

Boris Kachka

“Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts. Many in the culture industries see AI as not just a thief but an existential competitor, ready to replace human writers at every turn. Yet publishers are also fascinated by the technology (and not only because they use it for marketing and other tasks). The major imprints have been churning out a robust collection of books (more than 20 this year, by my count) that explain, extol, deride, fictionalize, and occasionally incorporate AI.

Among these recent releases, one overarching theme is a debate occurring between so-called accelerationists and doomers—those who think superintelligence will hugely benefit humanity and those who suspect it will kill us all. Adam Becker, a journalist and former astrophysicist, disagrees with both groups. Becker, the author of the recent anti-utopian critique More Everything Forever, wrote about his problems with a new dystopian manifesto, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.

Becker’s main objection to both sides is that they overhype the long-term, world-altering effects of superintelligence while downplaying the “much more immediate and well-founded concerns about the dangers of thoughtlessly deployed technology,” he writes. The kinds of ongoing changes that he would prefer to focus on are well accounted for in 2025’s AI book haul. Readers can find out more about how AI’s processes resemble the workings of our brains (or don’t); how the technology is changing medicine, warfare, education, business, and politics; how it has already profoundly altered society. But to me, the most interesting of the crop (or maybe just the most fun) are the works that explore our individual relationships with AI, through fiction or memoir.

Novels such as Amy Shearn’s Animal Instinct and Jayson Greene’s UnWorld imagine chatbots standing in for boyfriends or dead loved ones; politician-author Stacey Abrams invents a rogue medical-AI company in her latest legal thriller, Coded Justice. Hamid Ismailov’s wildly experimental novel We Computers, translated from Uzbek and longlisted for a 2025 National Book Award, creates an alternate history in which a 1980s computer intelligently generates a new kind of mind-expanding, transnational literature.

Occupying a category all its own is Searches, a fragmented memoir in which Vauhini Vara works through her complex feelings about technology. Vara interweaves the story of the rise of the internet with the narrative of her life and work as a tech reporter. She also includes strange interludes: prose-poetic lists of her Google searches; a collection of her Amazon-purchase reviews; and, most strikingly, a series of long interactions with ChatGPT-3 as she works to revise an essay about a sister who died years ago. As Matteo Wong noted in his Atlantic article about the book, the large language model produced what Vara considered to be the essay’s best lines while also inserting plenty of lies. She wound up employing the bot not to think for her, but to prod her into a different kind of thinking; it forced her, she writes, “to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods.” I enjoyed the book in part because it was less about what technology is doing to us than what we are doing in response.”

Dan Brown’s New Novel

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On the AP website there is an interview of Dan Brown written by Hillel Italie, which explores his writing techniques in the context of his new novel, Secret of Secrets.

Dan Brown

Brown says, “Anybody who writes a thriller needs to have a plan. There’s a great saying that the thriller writer who starts a book without knowing where’s he’s going is just lying,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

“And certainly these books are very complicated. One way I sort of battle, trying to keep it all straight, is to write every single day, just to keep it fresh. If I go through two sleep cycles (without writing), it starts to evaporate. And, of course, I also have what looks like a detective’s chalkboard in a police station. We’ve got the pictures and the yarn and the notes and the sticky notes, all that on my wall trying to keep it straight as well.”

Brown’s “The Secret of Secrets” has been published this week, a 650-page thriller and mind-bender from the author known worldwide for “The Da Vinci Code”, “Angels & Demons” and other million sellers. Brown again combines suspense, philosophical digressions and travelogues, along with codes and puzzles and secret societies as he dispatches favorite protagonist Robert Langdon to Prague and ensnares him in a deadly, international race for the key to ultimate wisdom — what happens when we die.

Besides Langdon, the Harvard symbologist who has found adventure and trouble everywhere from Paris to Washington, D.C., Brown has brought back love interest/noetic scientist-in-distress Katherine Solomon and a New York-based book editor with a very real-life counterpart. “Jonas Faukman” is an anagram for Brown’s editor at Doubleday Books, Jason Kaufman, who has worked with the author for more than 20 years. Author and editor are good friends, they say, although that didn’t keep Brown from subjecting Faukman to abduction and other un-literary experiences in his latest book.

“I always enjoy getting manuscripts from Dan and seeing where he’s going,” Kaufman told the AP recently. “I have to ask him not to tell me in advance what he has in mind. He always finds new ways to surprise me.”

Brown also spoke with the AP about how he decides on his subjects, his evolving thoughts on mortality and why Prague is the perfect setting for a few conspiracies. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: How do you go about deciding what to write about?

BROWN: It’s no secret that I like to write about big topics and there really is no topic that is bigger than consciousness. It is the lens through which we see ourselves. And so the real challenge was how to make a concrete urgent modern thriller about something that’s so ethereal.

About eight years ago, my mom passed away about the time that I was thinking of writing about consciousness, and I started asking myself, “What happens when we die?” and if you’d asked me eight years, ago, I’d say nothing It’s full stop total blackness. Over the course of the eight years that took me to write this book and all the conversations that I had with philosophers and physicists and noetic scientists, I’ve come out the other side with a totally different mindset. And in fact, it sounds crazy. I no longer fear death.

AP: Before you worked on this book, did you consider yourself an atheist? An agnostic? How would you have described yourself?

BROWN: I grew up Christian, Episcopalian, but I moved away from the organized nature of religion. I’ve always been spiritual and sensed there’s something else, but I’ve also been skeptical and said, “Well, that sense of there’s just something else could just be wishful thinking.” It could be because it’s so hard to imagine that there’s nothing else that we just sort of say, “Well, I sense there’s some thing else.”

And now I do sense there’s something else. And that is from an intellectual standpoint. I have not had a religious experience, a spiritual experience, an outer body experience, or near death experience. This change of mind comes from looking at the science that is happening right now in the world of physics and noetics.

AP: Some people talk about the creative process, so to speak, as almost a religious experience, that moment the idea comes to you, whether it’s the right phrase or a piece of music.

BROWN: It’s called flow, a muse. Certainly, we writers have that experience of, “Ah, I’ve got it. It’s just flowing through me.” I have certainly felt that. Not every day, unfortunately. There’s a lot of trial and error, but that is the feeling that creative people are always looking for. My mom was a professional musician. I was brought up to be a musician. I thought I would be a musician. I still play piano every day. I studied music composition in university, and I’ve had that experience also with music.

That sort of muse moment when something flows in, it’s different between writing and music. Writing sort of feels like finding the right Lego piece to put in. You say, “Ah.” It’s almost like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You’re like, “Got it. It fits.” And music is a little bit more fluid. It’s like making a big brush stroke. And the melody just sort of flows in and finds its way to your hands, and then it exists.

AP: The cities you set your books in are so important to what you do. Do you have a kind of wish list? Like, “I need to set a book in this city.”

BROWN: I mean, there are a few of them that I won’t mention because I don’t want people running out, and they’re sort of off the beaten path, kind of like Prague is.

I like to use location as a character. I want to make sure that, whatever book it is, it could only be set there. “The Lost Symbol” could only be set in D.C. because it’s about the symbology of D.C. “The Da Vinci Code” could only be set in Paris because it is about the Roseland. “The Secret of Secrets,” about human consciousness, could only be set in Prague. It’s been the mystical capital of Europe since Emperor Rudolf II (in the late 16th-early 17th centuries) brought all the mystics and scribes and alchemists to Prague. And as a character, Prague is perfect for Langdon. It’s full of secret passageways and cathedrals and monasteries and all, that’s his world.

AP: Puzzles and mystery and passageways, that’s just endlessly fascinating to you? It’s as interesting to you now as when you were 10 or 20?

BROWN: I don’t know what that says about me, but yeah, I still love secret passageways. You talk about that “aha” moment. It’s kind of the same thing to say, “Wait, there’s something here that you don’t see and now you see it.” It’s the same kind of sensation of “aha.”

Review: The Road to Freedom

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This book was recommended to me by an Italian niece, a brilliant mathematician, who works at a university, guiding doctoral candidates in writing their economic theses. She said, “Joseph Stiglitz is my hero.”

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (born February 9, 1943) is an American New Keynesian economist, a public policy analyst, political activist, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Noble Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He is also a former member and chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support for the Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists (whom he calls “free-market fundamentalists”), and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Joseph Stiglitz

The sub-title of this book is “Economics and the Good Society”, but the key word is “freedom”, and the key theme is that in society if one individual, group, company, institution, or market is given more freedom, some individual or group will have less freedom. And Stiglitz’ point is that in the US today (and in much of the developed world), the economic system (neoliberal capitalism) and its attendant political philosophy has failed because it waves the freedom flag but it neglects the many people who are harmed by the freedoms given to corporations, institutions and powerful individuals. The US does not understand that markets are not self-correcting, and require regulation. The author says that free and unfettered markets have conveyed great wealth and power to a few individuals but have exploited consumers, workers and the environment. Moreover, free markets have delivered financial, opioid and inequality crises. The book is rich with specific examples of how free markets have failed. He contends, in addition, that control of the environment, health and property – particularly intellectual property – should be improved. His arguments for what he calls progressive capitalism, and what it would do differently are compelling.There is an eight page chart summarizing the failures of neoliberal economics and what progressive capitalism’s corrective policies would be.

One cannot help feeling that the prescription for putting progressive capitalism in place is missing. I, for one, am sold on progressive capitalism. How can we implement it? But the barriers to change are enormous. The entire Republican party is wholly committed to neoliberal capitalism. Millions of wealthy, powerful people depend on it. It is ingrained in the American culture. A huge educational effort would be required to gain the understanding of the American people. The change is so fundamental that it cries out for a constitutional change. But that would never happen. What is more possible is the Democratic Party taking up the ideology and implementing it gradually over the course of a generation. In the meantime we have the first step in Stiglitz’ book: we know what’s wrong with neoliberal economics, and that makes it essential reading for every American.

Review: All Things Are Full of Gods

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This book caught my attention as a philosophical, perhaps religious book with its subtitle: The mysteries of Mind and Life. It was written by David Bentley Hart, who is a philosopher, scholar of religion, writer, and cultural commentator. His books include The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss and Roland in Moonlight. His current position is collaborative researcher at the University of Notre Dame.

David Bentley Hart

This book is not an easy read. The text brims with philosophical terms so that I found myself reading with my phone within easy reach to look up the unfamiliar terms. It is 483 pages long with 11 pages of footnotes and a 14 page index. Clearly, it is a scholarly masterpiece. And yet, one wants to keep reading to discover the revelation one can sense is coming, to achieve new insights, and to rediscover important truths. Rather than frame the book as an extended first-person lecture, the author has assigned the debate on the nature of existence to four Greek gods who have near infinite knowledge, the authority of being gods and engaging characters. They are: Psyche, the goddess of soul and life, Eros, Psyche’s husband and god of love, Hermes, the messenger of the gods and the divine intermediary between heaven and earth, and Hephaistos, the god of craftsmen and manufacturing; he is the deity of all technical virtuosity, ingenuity and skill. The dialogue takes place at the estate of Eros and Psyche, in one of its many gardens. Everything is in blossom. In that place everything always is. Psyche begins the debate by picking a rose and commenting on its beauty. She then leads the discussion of existence over the next several days. Hephaistos role, throughout the debate, is the represent the position of reductionist materialism philosophy, which takes the position that everything can be explained scientifically.Topics include mind, life, matter, brain, machine, soul and nature. Much of the discussion centers on the inability of some philosophers (current and ancient) to demonstrate that science (including nuclear physics, modern chemistry and quantum mechanics) does, in fact, answer all of the interesting questions.There are revelations about genetic science which prompt questions about how a living single cell ‘knows’ how to modify its own capability to respond better to its environment. The conclusion is that life, mind and language must be put it place by a ‘higher power’. In spite of many scientific attempts, life has never been produced in a laboratory. Likewise, there is no explanation for the existence of mind, in all its glory, including consciousness. Language owes its existence to mind.

Why isn’t there a condensed version of this book which uses everyday language to make the point that atheism is a dead end belief?

A must read!

Kurt Vonnegut Rules for Authors

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In his Friday email, Harry Bingham gives his views on Kurt Vonnegut’s rules.

Harry is founder and CEO of Jericho Writers.

Harry Bingham

“1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

That rule, I think, is bomb-proof. And, in fact, I’d make it a little stricter. I think that even high-end literary fiction has to entertain. It can’t be enough that I have a sense of having done my duty by the Gods of Literature. I need to have had fun – or have been moved – or basically just liked my experience with the book. I think entertainment is core. I’ve never knowingly broken that rule, not even writing non-fiction.

  1. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I’ve never broken that rule either, but I think it’s probably possible to break it effectively. American Psycho is a yukky book, but it’s a work of proper genius … and its genius isn’t because its protagonist likes home-baking, cat rescue and volunteering at church-run soup kitchens. That said, it’s not even 1% of books that can break that rule effectively. So as a general guide, I’m with you, Kurt.

  1. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Every character? I don’t know. If your protagonist has a momentary interaction with a receptionist, say, then does the receptionist need obvious motivation? On the one hand, no: truly minor characters can simply fall off the table of things you have to think about. On the other hand, here’s a snippet where Fiona does in fact interact extremely briefly with a receptionist – at a modern, ultra-secure, psychiatric institution for very violent, very dangerous offenders. (Fiona is the key character in Harry’s thrillers.)

The driver takes us in. Hands us over to a neat, blue-suited receptionist – Alys, to go by her fabric badge. She is almost blushingly young, a late teenager at a guess. She wears a tri-coloured scarf, like a seriously out-of-place air stewardess.

‘Inspector Rogers? Miss Griffiths? Etta is expecting you.’

The ‘Etta’ in question is, I assume Dr. Etta Gulleford, the hospital director, and the woman we’re here to see.

No badges, I think because the metal clips could make a weapon. Instead, plastic cards, like the key-cards they use in hotels.

‘Upstairs. Right on to the end. Julie-Ann will find you there.’

She does a crinkle-eyed smile at us, the sort you’d get at an upmarket spa.

There’s no obvious sense of desire there, of wanting something … but on the other hand, I think there probably IS something. She’s blushingly young. She wears a scarf like an out-of-place stewardess. And she offers Fiona a spa-quality, crinkle-eyed smile.

What does all that amount to? I think it amounts to the Alys very much wanting Fiona not to make a fuss. Not to do something that breaks the spell. And the spell is, effectively, that this place can be considered like a nice, posh, modern spa rather than a quasi-prison full of extremely dangerous men. It’s like Alys is saying – pleading – don’t call this out for what it really is.

So, OK, I’m going to go with Vonnegut on this one. Even extremely minor characters should have some kind of want, even if it’s undeclared, even if it’s trivial.

  1. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

That’s probably mostly true, but it can’t be quite literally true. I think that, in the passage I just quoted, every sentence does do one of those two things. But what about this:

We watch for a while. The gulls. The waves. The rolling print of the wind on the water. Stippling squalls that turn the sea’s smooth watercolour into something jumpy and agitated, like the surface has been rubbed with gorse.

That’s not really advancing any action and it doesn’t really tell us much about Fiona, except I suppose glancingly, in the sense that the way she expresses what she sees would be different from yours or mine. But really, the point about those lines is that they describe something – they reveal the character of a place, not a person. That’s fine with me. I expect Kurt wouldn’t have a fight with me over lines like that. I like description. It’s fine.

  1. Start as close to the end as possible.

Vonnegut thought a lot about short stories and I think this rule applies both to short stories and to scenes. Enter late. It’s really easy to write 200 words of intro before you get to the meat of a scene. It’s often better to start with the meat, then use just 20-30 words a few paragraphs in to explain to the reader how they got to where they now are.

But does this rule make sense for novels? Don’t think so – or at least, I don’t think that it’s especially useful. Most of my Fiona novels start with a corpse discovery. Yes, that’s as close to the end “as possible”, but really: it’s right at the start. So: useful rule for scenes. Silly rule for books.

  1. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Oh yes. Definitely. No quibbles here.

Here at Jericho Writers, we occasionally get books that tell a story such as: middle aged woman divorces cheating husband, feels a lack of purpose, gets diagnosed with cancer, takes up pottery, makes great ceramics, meets dashing ceramicist, gets the cancer all clear.

And, yeah, OK. I mean: in an actual person’s life, that’s all bad (to start with) then heart-warming (to end with.) But we all know people with stories like that. And – readers don’t care. They want really bad stuff to happen to characters. They’re sadists. So you have to be too. That’s just how it is.

  1. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Yes. I agree with that. (It’s also, by the way, an exceptionally good rule for marketing books too. Sell hard to your ideal reader. Bore the rest. Ignore the rest.)

But I think it’s not clear enough. Who is that person? In the end, there’s only one person who matters and that’s you. Every line you write, every word choice you make, you’re just asking the question: do I like this? Or that? Which pleases me more?

So your task as a writer is to develop your tastes as far and as finely as possible. You can’t do that in isolation from the broad sweep of contemporary writing. You have to develop your own taste with reference to what others read. But still – write to please just one person. And make it you.

  1. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Uh, Kurt? This is just BS, and he surely knew it.

I mean the cockroaches/pages thing: OK, yes, at that point, I think there is often a kind of solid inevitability in play … but not always. In one of my Fiona books, Fiona ends up clapping handcuffs on the dastardly people who tried to imprison her (in a very weird way.) That part plays out as the reader should by then expect.

But then, a Ukrainian millionaire tries to bribe her … and she (in a Fiona-y way) semi-accepts the offer.

And a girl who went missing needs to be reunited with her father, and Fiona does just that.

Both of those things make sense from what went before, but I don’t think any reader could plausibly have mapped out either scene. So, sorry, Kurt, no way. I think you were having a laugh.”

Writing a Novella

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Tara Deal has an article on the Writer’s Digest website, dated December 9, 2024 in which she talks about the’Allure’ of the novella for both readers and writers.

Tara Deal is the author of the award-winning novellas That Night Alive (Miami University Press) and Palms Are Not Trees After All (Texas Review Press). Her most recent novel, Life/Insurance, is the winner of the Fugere Prize from Regal House Publishing. She lives in New York City.

Tara Deal

Tara says, “Everyone talks about novellas getting a lot of attention these days because everyone’s attention span is shrinking (a novella is somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 words), but short books have always been around, enduring, durable, made of quality materials. Stealth Wealth. Novellas are versatile, subtle, changing to suit the times. Metamorphosis. Because think of what a novella represents. The good life! (“Instagram’s Hottest Trend? Flexing Your Favorite Paperback,” according to Nylon magazine.) 

Imagine spotting someone reading a novella from afar, the flash of a bright blue dust jacket across the subway platform, the park, the plaza, or the palazzo. And even though it does take a bit of effort to read a novella, it’s not too much. 

But what if you’re a writer rather than a reader? What if you’re at home, with a computer, rather than out buying paperbacks with abandon, traveling around the world, and enjoying life at night? Is it really worth the effort to invest your time and money and short attention span into crafting a beautifully made, eternally desirable novella? Yes!

Imagine the exhilaration and accomplishment! Mild Vertigo. But how are you going to do it? With something so slim, almost fragile, approaching evanescence, you don’t want any shoddy workmanship to slip in.

How are you going to get a handle on it? I don’t know, but I’ve been working for years on novellas, trying to get it right. Working for years, sometimes giving up and escaping, packing too much into too many suitcases, heavy books for long flights, but always coming home to strip down, pare back, refresh, and rewrite. Back to trying to write a novella that will stand out from the crowd. How?

You want to make a good first impression, ideally on the first page. Your hook doesn’t have to be flashy, but it should be substantial, weighty. Quality at a Glance. So pick out a few essentials that work together, that you can repeat (if necessary), that you can recombine as your write. 

If you focus on one or two characters (rather than a crowd) and one strong story line (rather than trailing subplots), then you need to insert only a scattering of telling details (objects, phrases, names? Who can say.). But it’s always smart to invest in those evocative (provocative?) items that can go from day to evening. 

And this is no time to be frugal. Go all out on a few well-chosen items, as if you’re in Paris. Pretend there’s Never Any End to Paris. But it doesn’t matter where you are, in a city or on an island, in an apartment, An Apartment in Athens or New York, either way, wherever. Make room for what matters.

Strip away things from your text, as if you are a devoted minimalist committed to black and white. You can cut more than you think: description, dialogue, digressions. Think of Chanel, who said to always remove something from your outfit. Think of Hemingway and his iceberg. You need see only a little to imagine the depths. The Torrents of Spring. In a novella, everything is washed away to reveal a vein of gold. Or a vein of blood, depending.

As if you’re running for a plane about to leave for somewhere glamorous (Fez, Lisbon, Osaka? I don’t know. You have your own itinerary.). Keep checking your watch to make sure things are on schedule. Keep checking your novella, rereading as fast as possible, looking for any snags in the fabric. Time is running out. You are losing hours as you travel. Flatland. 

Are there any rough edges in your reading like burrs in the desert that make you look up and think of going somewhere else? Or are you lost in a dream? Does your novella feel like an enduring design that can’t be improved upon? The Time Machine.

Like the clasp on a necklace, with a satisfying click, the end of the story feels solid, satisfying. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. You’ve strung along some scenes, some thoughts, and although they might have seem unbalanced to the casual reader, a window shopper who wasn’t committed, now everything hangs together, tight or loose, depending on your style. A gift. The Pearl.

Afterward, a moment of luxuriating. Self-Care. Whether you’re a reader or a writer. The Lover. Has the novella transported you? What do you remember? What will you tell people at dinner? Nothing. Quiet Luxury. You’re happy to have avoided the packaged tour through a bloated book that feels like a typical tourist’s itinerary with too much time wasted while waiting for those bits that are tender and delightful. 

With a novella, you always go straight to the heart of the matter, the marrow, the best parts, presented on a platter. As if on a terrace in Venice or looking out over Bangkok. The Stranger. The suburbs are far behind you, beyond you. The night turns purple. Do Not Disturb. Dream Story.“

Review: Understanding Marxism

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After reading the biography of Xi Jinping, I decided I needed to refresh my knowledge of Marxism. If Xi thinks Marxism is so good, what have I forgotten? So I bought this rather thin book by Richard D. Wolff.

Wikipedia says, “Richard David Wolff (born April 1, 1942) is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs at The New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City College of New York, University of Utah, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and The Brecht Forum in New York City.

Richard D Wolff

I was disappointed in this book. At only 75 pages, it can be read in less than two hours. It was written by an American professor with impressive teaching experience. I was hoping for a learned set of arguments about the benefits of Marxist economics, but what I got was a largely a high school level set of criticisms of capitalism. I know that capitalism treats many people unfairly. What I wanted to know was how and why Marxism would treat every one fairly with universal freedom.

Professor Wolff described how Marx defined various classes of people involved in the productive process, and how conflicts between the classes leads to inequities in the distribution of ‘surplus’. Marx’s theory was that the class of ‘surplus providers’ (workers) should be given an equal say to the ‘surplus appropriators’ (executives and investors), and Professor Wolff mentions cooperative organisations. These organisations can be successful in low technology organisations such as farming, where all class members have about the same level of knowledge. But in a pharmaceutical business, for example, a laboratory technician would not understand market dynamics, pharmaceutical pricing, approval processes, etc, and a cooperative model will not work there. While Marx himself did not advocate it, some communist governments have used government ownership as a sort of cooperative, usually without a formal voting process or much success, because government bureaucrats do not have either the knowledge or the experience to make vital resource-allocation decisions.

Marx appears to have been a social/economic class expert. He wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about modern economics.

If you are looking fora strong defense of Marxism, I would suggest you look elsewhere.

Review: On Xi Jinping

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This biography attracted my attention because in covers an extremely powerful autocrat about whom relatively little is known, it had good reviews and was written by a very senior politician, Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, who had personal dealings with Xi.

Kevin Rudd was also a former foreign minister of Australia and the founding president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, and established its Centre for China Analysis. He has a PhD from the China Centre at Oxford University. He is the author of The Avoidable War, among other books.

Kevin Rudd

I found the subtitle of the book particularly interesting: ‘How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World’.

This biography is certainly a scholarly work, covering just over four hundred pages of text, sixty-five pages of footnotes, over one hundred pages of bibliography, much of it in Chinese and a twenty page index. But I found it difficult to put the book down for very long. I was continually thinking tell me more and where is this leading.

The book is very well organised for non-experts like me. It begins with purpose and its core arguments, continuing through definitions of Chinese core ideological concepts, and presents a historical survey of Chinese ideology. Then it moves subject-by-subject through Xi’s evolving ideology, and its effects on China’s domestic and foreign policy. There are three final chapters dealing with China’s future and China’s future after Xi. The book makes it clear that Xi’s ideology has evolved considerably from Mao, Deng, Jiang and Hu.

It is also clear that Xi is deeply intellectually committed to Marxism and to Leninism ‘with Chinese characteristics’, and he speaks about these theories as being ‘scientific’ and ‘proven effective in the Chinese context’.

Mr Rudd backs up every bit of Xi’s ideology with multiple historical references, usually in the form of published quotations. For example, he documents China’s shift in its foreign policy with quotations from high-ranking diplomats.

On the subject of whether or not China will invade Taiwan, he says that Xi has demanded that the People’s Liberation be ready to do so by 2027, and that he would like to do it by 2032, but that if there is a significant chance of failure, he would delay.

Xi clearly thinks that his political ideology is clearly superior to democracy/capitalism. He has apparently conceded that capitalism is superior for economic growth, because he has reigned in the Chinese private sector, knowing that this would slow economic growth. He is aware that Leninism, which Xi has applied to the running of the Communist Party, and Marxist surveillance of the Chinese people represent a risk of revolution. But surveillance is growing, not shrinking.

Xi argues that Marxism is completely congruent to classical Chinese culture, and he enumerates examples of Chinese culture without seeming to recognise the apparent conflicts between the two. Religious freedom, individual freedom and true justice are clear examples. Unfortunately, Mr Rudd and Mr Xi are not able to debate these points, but perhaps Western diplomats and politicians can do so.

This book is a timely, very welcome, thought-provoking study of an influential, but largely unknown national leader.