“Niki: The Story of a Dog”
Affection is not only a pleasure for the heart but also a burden which, in proportion to its importance, may oppress the soul quite as much as it rejoices it.
Long before books like Marley or The Art of Racing in the Rain appeared on bookshelves, a book entitled Niki: The Story of a Dog was written in Hungarian by Tibor Déry and published in 1956, shortly before the October Uprising, a nationwide revolt against the Soviet-controlled government in Hungary. In the years following World War II, Hungary underwent massive political changes and it is these changes the reader sees through the eyes of the narrator who tells the story of a middle-aged couple who adopt a street dog named Niki. The story begins in the Spring of 1948 and ends six years later in 1954. Read more 
6 Indie Bookstores to Patronize NOW
A quiet battle between Amazon (the behemoth bookseller) and Hachette (the giant book publisher) has been waging on for years but the lid was blown off this past week by a combination of factors that many observers are predicting will lead to the The War To End All Wars in Bookville.
At the 2014 Book Expo of America (the largest annual book trade fair) in New York City, a few brave authors spoke out against the giant retailer for its strong-arm tactics of notifying customers that pre-orders of books published by Hachette are no longer being accepted. In addition, Amazon notified customers of delays in book shipments and that certain books by authors whose works are published by Hachette are not available, bringing the industry issues to the public’s attention. But, I am getting ahead of myself so let’s take a step back.
“Life and Times of Michael K”
The Life and Times of Michael K was written more than 30 years ago (1983) by J.M. Coetzee and yet, the story is as relevant today as decades ago. Freedom from both persecution and charity are the overriding themes of this fictional story that takes place in South Africa when the minority Black South Africans were fighting against apartheid during a civil war. The years are irrelevant as the timeframe could be any decade and any place where there is one set of rules for the majority in power and another set for the oppressed minority class. Read more
“What You’ve Been Missing”
Never judge a book by its cover…..
The cover art of What You’ve Been Missing is a painting by Roger Brown called It’s a Wonderful Lie and is as telling as the short story collection written by Janet Desaulniers. A rectangular piece of art divided into eight sections, It’s a Wonderful Lie depicts life as we live and the impending disaster ahead: we come together and marry; we divorce and part; we enjoy a drive in a convertible and unexpectedly get hit by a truck; we run our businesses and we go to jail; and finally, we exercise and strengthen our bodies only to succumb to death. Read more
“Model Home”
What an odd thing a family was,…The permutations, like the patterns of a chess game, seemed endless.
The Ziller family – Warren and Camille and their three children: Dustin, Delilah (“Lyle”), and Justin, and Mr. Leonard, an old and arthritic dog – left their hometown of Nashotah, Wisconsin in 1982 to move to a suburban development outside of Los Angeles, California. In pursuit of success and wealth, Warren Ziller invests everything in a real estate development – Auburn Fields – that ends up being adjacent to a dump. Three years later (1985) Warren has lost everything but is afraid to tell his family who all seem to be completely unaware of what is going on around them. Read more
“Friendly Fire”
..honey, this is life. You learn to live with guilt. You do the best you can. Believe me, you don’t get away with anything in this life. You’re going to pay the price, so you make sure you get your money’s worth.
Friendly Fire, a collection of 11 short stories written by Kathryn Chetkovich was awarded the John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa. Although 16 years have passed since the book was published, this treasury of short stories is as relevant today as when they were first read in 1998. Forthright but with a subtle message and often open-ended, these stories don’t have twists or imply completion primarily because the stories deal with tough issues: envy, irony, dishonesty, loyalty, teenage angst, aging, friendship, marriage, love, lust, and responsibility – highly charged emotions that inspire loose ends and don’t take well to predictability. Read more
“Disgrace”
One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.
Such is the limited reasoning ability of David Lurie, a middle-aged (52) White South African man who spends his days as an adjunct professor at Cape Technical University in Cape Town where he teaches introductory communications courses which bore him and leave him with nothing but contempt for the students he regards as ignorant. That a dog has a desire to chew or that some instincts, if acted upon, should be punishable acts doesn’t seem to occur to Lurie, a twice divorced serial womanizer who chalks his desires up to instinct and therefore not something he should be sorry for. Read more
“The Interestings”
From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever lived, because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as The Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are. Read more
“Safe As Houses”
Safe As Houses is a collection of short stories written by Marie-Helene Bertino and winner of The Iowa Short Fiction Award (2012). The title of the book – Safe As Houses – signifies what most of us believe a home should be: a haven from the outside world where families celebrate holidays and display refrigerator art and framed photographs, but Bertino shows the reader that home can also be a house that is wiped away in an instant, a place we flee from, or a prison in which we lock the world out. Despite the general belief that people are safe in their homes, the truth can be entirely different because what makes a house a home is its inhabitants, not the brick and mortar – and people can be dangerous. Read more
“The Woman Upstairs”
I’ve finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it. No: let me correct that. In recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I’d managed to get out into Reality – and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: it felt so different – until I suddenly realized I’d been stuck in the Fun House all along. I’d been tricked. The door marked EXIT hadn’t been an exit at all. Read more
Paddock Post 