In his introduction to Forever Words, Paul Muldoon says, “So ingrained in our collective unconscious is the voice of Johnny Cash that we can all but hear the boom-chicka boom-chicka of his guitar accompaniment, at once reassuring and disquieting in its very familiarity.” That was absolutely true for me as I was reading through this collection.
This is the first in a six book series, totaling some 3,000 pages, about a quiet man from Norway reflecting on parts of his life. It is boring and breathtaking at the same time. The author ruminates on the death of his father and his own mortality as he shuffles through memories of his childhood and then the more recent past. Day-to-day events such as making breakfast, working at a computer, and making phone calls take center stage. We all do things like this every day and then forget about them. Somehow, Karl Ove Knausgaard makes them memorable.
Sue Lowell Gallion has recently celebrated the publication of her first book, Pug Meets Pig, a picture book illustrated by Joyce Wan. A sequel is already on the way. We asked Sue a few questions to learn more about who she is, her journey to publication, her thoughts on being an author, and her plans for the future.
"After their English aunt dies, listless American twins Julia and Valentina travel to London to live in their aunt's now empty flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery. There they become embroiled in the day-to-day sagas of their eccentric neighbors. But soon they discover that something is alive in Highgate--something unable to move on."
This consists of four stories--"quarters," Sedgwick calls them--from four different eras. Each is a compelling, haunting meditation on human nature. Each has horror undertones, confronts suffering and misery. Each is distinct in style, tone, setting, and action. Each involves philosophical musings about the meaning of spirals in the way of Jungian archetypes (universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct; Wikipedia).
Crosstalk is categorized as science fiction and yet, if it wasn’t for the telepathy, I could easily see the events in the book becoming reality in the near future.
An open-and-shut domestic murder case turns out to be much more than Antionette Conway or Stephan Moran bargained for when assigned Aislinn Murray’s case. Beautiful Aislinn is found dead in her perfectly decorated home, alone, with the doors locked. Her boyfriend Rory Fallon has a dinner date at Aislinn’s that night but she never answers the door or his many calls.
