Category: Novel
-
Critical Mass
My latest novel has achieved critical mass. I’m no longer inventing the figments of a void, but rather connecting the last pieces of a puzzle with finite space to go astray. All creative energy is bent toward that one objective.
-
Mission Statement
Turns out I do have a podcast.
-
Good Reads
—
by
Who else inspired me this year? Do you want to hear about the teachers in my sons’ classrooms, their coaches and music gurus, the everyday heroes who drove them here and cheered for them there, the aunts and uncles and grandparents who served as role models?
-
Good Soul Stuff
It surprised me to learn that talking about writing might be a remedy for stagnating creativity
-
-
A Novel Coronavirus Novel
Will sustained isolation lead to a baby boom or a novel boom? Long before COVID-19, the most recent novel coronavirus to come along, I’d toyed with the idea of writing a novel called A Novel. As is usually the case in the life of a novelist, however, I ran into a few problems right off…
-
About Mohamed
Every year this time my thoughts turn to Mohamed (his story is here). I had reason to conjure his story this fall and found the image below. Pictured is the American Library, Kabul, circa 1958. Is this the building where Mohamed learned to love the United States? Where he read American authors and watched American movies?…
-
Cube Farm
BOGIE, or Why I Wrote Patchworks My second novel addresses gun violence in America. It didn’t start out that way. Patchworks‘ protagonist, a millennial grad student interning for peanuts within a government bureaucracy, didn’t appear until several months into writing. And, angry as I felt to see America shredded over and over again by episodes of massive…
-
War Novels and the War on Terror
More than 16 years ago, standing beneath a massive banner, George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq: “Mission Accomplished.” What followed this publicity stunt—he arrived on an aircraft carrier off California’s coast riding in a Navy jet—were years of insurgency and bloodshed in pursuit of a Dick Cheney figment: Saddam…
-
Again
While we sit idly by No longer dumbfounded Just dumb Numb Gunman kills 7 in a rampage that started with a West Texas traffic stop
Ben East Books 