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Recently, I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for panspermia—a concept I was already familiar with, relating to the theory that life on Earth might have originated from an external source. Specifically, a primitive microorganism might have landed here on a meteorite (or, in some versions of the theory, on an alien probe). While reading about…
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A few weeks ago, I’d never had any review (good, bad, or indifferent). Now, the fine people at @ALA_Booklist have given my debut novel, Twice the Trouble, a starred review! WHOOOO!!! I’m stoked.
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My great friend Margaret Luongo and I just released the premier episode of our new YouTube Channel, Read a Classic Novel…Together. In this series, we tackle classic novels that we’ve been meaning to read forever, and we invite the viewer to read each chunk along with us. (We try not to read ahead, but do anyway…
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Anyone who follows this blog knows that my two primary obsessions are movies and history. So, you can imagine my excitement whenever I encounter that rare intersection of these two interests: a well-written film history book. And, still further within this category, there is the vaunted production-of-a-classic-movie book, which is a special favorite. The supreme…
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Yeah, I know. Picking U2’s “New Year’s Day” as my Friday-Night Rock-Out three days before New Year’s Day is a very, very obvious choice. But the truth is that I still listen to this song all the time. It came out when I in high school, and it marked the first time I really became…
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Like millions of others, my family and I have spent part of this year’s Christmas holiday watching some version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Actually, we watched two, starting with Bill Murray’s mad-cap Scrooged and following-up with a much darker made-for-TV film from 1999, starring Patrick Stewart. The production was inspired, in part, by…
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Ever since I read her famous short story “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” in college, I have loved Joyce Carol Oates. I continued to read her short stories through the 1980s and 90s, and my admiration only grew. She seemed to combine the style and critical eye of other great practitioners of…
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Yeah, I know. Calling this song “rock” is a bit of a stretch. Like all of Bryan Ferry’s solo work, as well as all his hits with Roxy Music, “Don’t Stop the Dance” is a brilliant and elegant pop song. Emphasis on brilliant. What William Faulkner is to literature, Bryan Ferry is to pop music.…
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I am a perpetual student of the writing craft and, as such, I am an avid consumer of books about writing. Here is a list of my favorites, from great to greatest… 10. Aspects of the Novel Kindle Edition — E. M. Forster Forster is one of my all-time favorite novelists, a capital-G Great Writer…
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Ash Clifton, Writer 