books
October 22, 2009
- I was doing some laundry this morning before work when it hit me. However, before I explain that statement let me just say that I am a big admirer of the renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, not least because he is the father of Uma Thurman. No wait, that’s Richard Gere. Still, I am a big admirer of Kornfield, author of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. I never read the book, but I intend to ...
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October 21, 2009
- A writer writes. He often writes into the dark. but once in a while there's a response, and it turns that solitary gesture into an intimate dialogue. The letter from a college student sent me after she read my book, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, is earnest and untempered and well, flattering as hell, not to mention deeply moving... I invite you to read ...
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October 21, 2009
- God is one rocking muse. Some writer or the other uses religion as allegory, metaphor, reinterpretation. Some religious group or the other is offended. Jose Saramago who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature has written a book Cain that has been described as an ironic retelling of the Biblical story of Cain, Adam and Eve's son who killed his younger brother Abel.I assume since he has titled the ...
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October 20, 2009
- 1Reading came first. It always does. Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale. I once read somewhere that kids who like to read fall into two groups. The first naturally picks up reading from their environment: they see their parents reading, they find books in the house, they go to libraries and bookstores and learn young and easily the books that they enjoy. These kinds of readers are ...
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October 20, 2009
- As a child I was very fond of The Red Balloon. I guess I had that glorious mix of Curious George and Lewis and Clarke. I loved adventure and mischief. I found the story intoxicating. The librarian from my local branch read the story for us, a clutch of eager Indian-seated kindergartners. I didn’t actually see Lamorisse’s film version until a bit later so I concocted my own image of the boy in ...
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October 19, 2009
- I recently received this e-mail from a company named BookWhirl:As you read the e-mail, pay particular attention to the grammar/spelling and see if you can see any mistakes (besides the most blatant one where "Brian" is used in the Header E-mail address and "Bryan" is used in the body). There are at least three other mistakes.----- Original Message -----From: Brian Villa To: ez ...
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October 17, 2009
- "Are your books doing as well as you hoped they would?" I have been asked this question so many times, and I haven't once been able to answer it. I have no answer. In order for my books to do as well as I hoped, I'd have had to hope in the first place. I was told by a very dear friend, when I was sixteen years old, that there's no money to be made in writing about art. He'd been doing ...
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October 17, 2009
- I've been thinking a lot about the subject of patience, and waiting for things. This month has had a weird feel, a bit like the first few weeks after Christmas and New Year's, when all the fuss is over, but it's too early to plan for Easter or summer or whatever.For example, I'm finished with the extensive rewrite on Houses that I've been working on for the past few months. I've researched ...
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October 16, 2009
- I bought a book of William Eggleston’s photographs recently at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. They are the photos collected in the book titled Paris.Eggleston’s photos, when I first saw them more than ten years ago, were disturbing and thrilling to me in the way that it was, many years ago when I first started writing, disturbing and thrilling to read the short stories of Raymond Carver ...
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October 15, 2009
- I grew up in the 1950s, the youngest of six kids in a Korean immigrant family. There were eight of us in a two-bedroom house in Takoma Park, just north of Washington, DC. Outside of school and church duties, we five girls mostly spent our spare time helping my mother make kimchee, which she sold by the gallon to a few Asian restaurants downtown, or cooking, cleaning and hanging endless baskets ...
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