Tag: Books

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Lonely and adrift in Manhattan

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Gish Jen is the award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. Gish’s mother Agnes Jen – Loo Shu-hsin – born in 1925 to wealthy Shanghai family where the chauffeurs wore leather gloves, expensive Persian opium was served to society women via a sous chef, and girls are expected to behave and be quiet.  No domestic chores were required of her as a child, but the sudden disappearance possibly sacking of her beloved nurse-maid Nai-ma caused an open wound, potentially poisoning her future maternal facility, combine this with the Cultural Revolution, a famine, other … Continue reading Lonely and adrift in Manhattan

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Realities of entrepreneurship: Greed, Wealth and Ambition of US business in the ’80s

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The Bonfire of the Vanities in a ’87 satirical novel by Tom Wolfe, where there is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics and greed in 1980s New York City, and centres on three main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow. This novel was phenomenal success, and is often been called the quintessential novel of the ’80s. Sherman McCoy, the central character of Tom Wolfe’s first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the … Continue reading Realities of entrepreneurship: Greed, Wealth and Ambition of US business in the ’80s

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Sally Evans

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“DRIVING IN THE BOOK LANE” – A MEMOIR BY DR SALLY  EVANS –  PHD IN LITERATURE – POET, House wife, Mother WIFE,  MOTHER  AND LONGTERM BOOKSHOP OWNER! Price £7 or £10 posted (UK) Fiction Direct Memoir at The Callender Press. 21 Chapters in total. @sallyevans2025 Poet, novelist, publisher, editor, bookseller and sometime librarian Dr Sally Evans uses the memoir form to consider what turned her into a “bookwoman”. From London to Newcastle, from Kirkby Lonsdale, Teesside and Edinburgh to a bookshop in the Trossachs, Sally drives around in a landscape of books and book people in search of the meaning of life. Questions, … Continue reading Sally Evans

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Guilt, Grief, physical and mental perils of human fragility

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Samanta Schweblin, Argentine author of Fever Dream translated into 20 languages, and three-time Booker finalist, longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and winner of prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, explores a world in which violence and horror exists with daily domesticity- as one woman taking extreme measures to escape family life, to another running away to a writer’s retreat in China. Schweblin’s Good and Evil is sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, with six stories that lure us into the shadows to confront the moinsters of everyday life- ourselves. In one tale, a mother surfaces from the depths of … Continue reading Guilt, Grief, physical and mental perils of human fragility

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Lilly becomes first drug maker to achieve $1trillion valuation

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Indianapolis-based company, Eli Lilly’s weight-loss drugs have enabled it the first pharma company to join an elite group of businesses valued at more than $1trillion, including eight tech giants, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway.  Clinically approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Eli Lilly’s weight loss medication which promises to lose up to 20 per cent of your body weight by reducing cravings and regulating appetite, costing from £70 Continue reading Lilly becomes first drug maker to achieve $1trillion valuation

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Mushroom murderer

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Three renowned writers of true crime Helen Garner (greatest contemporary writer), Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein (legal expert) tracked Erin Patterson’s preminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell, a town east of Melbourne, and close to Leongatha, where the deadly dish was served, and spent unlimited hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: Love, Hate, Jealousy, Revenge, Marriage, Money, Mycology and Murder. The writers explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true … Continue reading Mushroom murderer

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Meaning of Life: ride to infinity

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Ferries have a spooky association with death, Charon, an ugly demon employed by Hades as the underworld’s ferryman, picking up the souls of recently perished human beings in his skiff and depositing them in the afterlife, in Greek mythology. In The Ferryman and His Wife by 64-year-old bestselling Norwegian author and winner of the prestigious Brage Prize, Frode Grytten takes readers on an epic journey: Ferry Driver Nils Vik’s last route along the fjord instead of the River Styx, which he must cross to get there “it rumbles and rustles, it whispers and rushes, even on days with no wind”, … Continue reading Meaning of Life: ride to infinity

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How water instilled a dream city

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Back in Nineteen Thirteen, William Mulholland completed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile engineering masterwork transporting water from the Owens Valley, a dry lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada across the desert to a barren south-western corner of California that would become the home of filmmaking, and transformed the land’s fertility. In Aqua, award winning, Italian filmmaker and writer Chiara Barzini gives insight into the founding of Hollywood, the building of great water systems. Her hometown Rome, abound with empty aqueducts and pipes, representing someone’s dream of turning dry soil into a fertile lucrative and fertile agricultural … Continue reading How water instilled a dream city

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Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

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This is the amazing memoir of one of the greatest storytellers of our time, over six decades of writing, from 1961 onwards, with her towering influence, who wrote New York Times bestseller’s and modern classics like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or The Testaments or Alias Grace (1996) are a reproach to the Swedish Academy. In 1939, with a world war under way, born in Ottawa and raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents- Carl, an entomologist father, and Margaret Dorothy, a former nutritionist mother. She and her siblings were taken by their mother to throw tin cans at a large … Continue reading Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

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Restoration or Erasure: Old ways are erased by the new

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The Palace of the Republic, that once housed the East German Parliament, is demolished. A grandmother’s laughter passes from life into memory and the furniture that once made a home is taken to the tip. A friendship drops into silence. Old ways are erased by the new  In this fascinating collection of essays, most of them written for her column in the Frankfurter  Allgemeine Zeitung, Winner of the International Booker Prize Jenny Erpenbeck meditates, with a sense of both deep melancholy and wry humour, on the disappearance and impermanence of things. Recalling the shop that used to darn tights in the … Continue reading Restoration or Erasure: Old ways are erased by the new