Author Archives: John Walters

Book Review:  Being Michael Swanwick by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Although Zinos-Amaro is listed as the author of this book, it is in fact a collaborative effort. It consists of a series of interviews between prolific science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Swanwick and Zinos-Amaro. These interviews cover Swanwick’s stand-alone … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri; Part Two

Like the stories in Lahiri’s earlier collections Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, several of the tales in Roman Stories deal with cultural clashes: affluent foreigners who have chosen for various reasons to relocate to Rome, or laborers and domestic … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri; Part One: Background

I have long appreciated Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing. I first came across it by accident. I was living in Greece, where my then-wife and I were raising our family; I often browsed for books at the library of the elite high … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Borges and Me: An Encounter by Jay Parini

This book appears to be and reads like a memoir, and in most ways it is; however, Parini explains in an afterword that the events, though true, took place fifty years ago, and though he had “a handful of notes, … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

This work is presented as a novel, but it is not really a novel in the conventional sense. The plot is very thin. The narrator takes a walking tour of Suffolk, a county in eastern England. He describes what he … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes – Part Two

“The horror… The horror…” we hear Marlon Brando as Kurtz say at the end of the film Apocalypse Now. Such a somber chant would suit the mood of much of The Fatal Shore. It is almost unbelievable that humans could … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes – Part One

This is a massive, complex history about how the transportation of convicts from England to Australia gave birth to a new nation. It is also a devastatingly horrific story, so much so that I almost gave up reading it after … Continue reading

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Used Bookstores Then and Now

I take long walks in my neighborhood in northeast Seattle every day. Recently, however, I had the urge to attempt an excursion beyond the borders of the familiar, so I took a bus to a used bookstore in the University … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

I’ve been reading a number of weighty nonfiction tomes lately, and I thought I’d take a break and read one of the older science fiction books that have been accumulating on my shelves due to visits to used bookstores and … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan

This fascinating biography tells the story of Edward Curtis, a photographer who devoted his life to traveling around North America to capture images, stories, music, and languages of the indigenous population before traditional ways of life had completely disappeared. He … Continue reading

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