BOOKLOVES

Near the end of A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck, the travellers are handed a sealed cardboard box and told not to open it until their plane has left Soviet airspace. Inside are four thousand negatives, less whatever the censors kept. They kept very little: some shots that showed landscape too clearly, some pictures of […]

A woman gets on a bus in The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck and is asked her name. She glances at a cigarette advertisement on the wall and then out of the window at a tree, and says she is Camille Oaks. She also tells everyone she is a dental nurse, which she is not. […]

A haunting, richly-textured supernatural thriller about violence as inheritance and the line between control and love The safest weapon in Joseph Stone’s The Haunted Women trilogy is literacy. For more than two centuries, the ghost of Daedrian Crow has haunted the women in Fran Tarantino’s bloodline, claiming them as his own. He watches them, sleeps […]

Before he sails, the boy in Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck is sent up a crag to speak with an old man who may or may not be Merlin. The verdict comes back in two parts, and both are insults dressed as prophecy. Greatness is coming to him, the old man says, precisely because […]

In a cell so dark that Maevyth cannot tell whether her eyes are open, her fingers find grooves in the stone floor. They are letters, cut deep by someone who came before her, and she traces them one word at a time: “I will not obey. I will not beg for mercy.” Up in the […]