Citizenship | Literature
Select novels, short stories, and nonfiction on contemporary life.
What began as a bold experiment in grassroots service produced future ambassadors to help guide U.S. diplomacy through seven decades of global upheaval.
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Dear Grandpa, Today a couple dozen World War II aircraft buzzed the National Mall. They flew in honor of the 70th anniversary of VE Day. You can picture the scene: you worked in DC for three decades after leaving the Pacific behind. They flew from the west over the Lincoln Memorial, past your old worksite at…
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Hate-speech promoter Pam Geller reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld’s dentist, Tim Whately and his quest for total joke-telling immunity. When Jerry tells Father Curtis he thinks Whately converted to Judaism for the jokes, the priest asks, “And this offends you as a Jewish person?” “No,” says Jerry. “It offends me as a comedian.” Geller’s irrational defense of…
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The Marquis de Sade comedy hour? Adolf Hitler touching base with his inner child? A casual discussion of pillage and plunder with Genghis Kahn and Attila the Hun? John Altson’s Does Harry Dream of Electric Sheep? An Adult Social Satire really can lighten any subject. At its core, Altson’s book is a fun riff on Jonathan…
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I revisited The Second Most Dangerous Job in America (Atticus Shorts, 2012) when I learned Steve Himmer was releasing his next book, Fram (ig Publishing), which came out in January this year. Any discussion of this short treat must focus on observable detail and rudimentary character. There’s little to be found by way of plot, but…
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You might inscribe the title of your novel a couple dozen times before it sticks. You might make it longer, shorter, TBD, Working Title, WIP, B.S., Nada, Whatever… whatever. And revert after all that to the original working title. Or not. But “The End”… this is a thing you only write once on a manuscript. Today was that…
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One week to go before the deadline to submit your novel-length manuscript to the 2015 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. Get it done! The goal’s had me burning the midnight oil the past couple months, forcing me to put off a lot of other substantive posts. Among the big items I’d hoped to reflect on recently…
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Good morning, Jon. Thank you for being here this morning. Thank you for having me. I didn’t know you also did morning programs. Actually, I think I just stayed up too late. What time is it? Let’s get right to it, shall we? After 17 years of attacking the schmucks in the media and in government, there…
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Jonathan Ashley crams a lot into The Cost of Doing Business, from ghetto shootouts with Tec-9s to sociological laments about middle class norms. It’s got elements of the tough-talking hood narrative, and the book is entertaining in places, but ultimately much of the action is muddled by drawn out sentences and the narrator’s distracted observations. What…
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Just stumbled upon Stuart Beaton‘s podcast featuring my old buddy Preston Lang. The conversation between the two is thoughtful and funny, a mirror of Lang’s writing. If you like noir, pick up The Blind Rooster; if you like crime fiction, it’s The Carrier, both released last year. As for this podcast: Do we really need a 90,000-word book…
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From DC’s skyline to its underground rail system, one has to wonder how the capital of our great Republic has come to symbolize so much decay and brokenness. Escalator outages pervade Metro, clogging the human flow. Congress teases us with shuttering the Department of Homeland Security, even in the face of recent threats. These perversions…
Ben East Books 