BOOKLOVES

Early in America and Americans by John Steinbeck a man named Jimmy, chief of a Piute band summering near Lake Tahoe, turns up at a trout hatchery in the snow and asks for a fish. He is given one. He puts it in a snowbank, strips, washes himself in the freezing stream, dresses, picks the […]

The closing dispatch of Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck sends a lieutenant up a hill on an Italian island in December 1943 carrying a white flag, and his white flag is a bath towel. There are forty-three American paratroopers behind him and eighty-seven heavily armed Germans dug in ahead. He has memorised […]

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 […]