Recent Interviews

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I’ve been featured on a couple author blogs this past month. First up is Tim Gurung, author of Old Men Don’t Cry: A Hong Kong Tale of Sorrow:

But I doubt e-books will ever replace physical books. There’s something satisfying of not only holding a physical book in your hands but having a full bookshelf in your house.

Check out the rest here.

Also, Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong has featured me as her Author of the Month for April, 2016!

Someone once told me that no one would read my book unless they’d lived in China.

That’s absurd. It’s like saying that nobody would read A Confederacy of Dunces unless they’d lived in 1960s New Orleans.

Read the rest here.

Big thanks to these great writers for interviewing me. If you’re a writer and you’d like me to interview you, get in touch! You can check out all the interviews I’ve conducted so far here.

Book Passage of the Week (3/19/2016) – World Gone By, Dennis Lehane

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I recently finished World Gone By. It’s the third book in the Coughlin Trilogy that begins with The Given Day.

I loved The Given Day and Live by Night. This one? I didn’t enjoy it as much as the others. World Gone By is much shorter than the other two books. Things are smaller scale, more like wrapping up the loose ends than telling a full story from beginning to end.

It’s Dennis Lehane, so there’s going to be some good prose. Here’s a couple passages I really liked:

He only saw Montooth’s face in the muzzle flash, it appeared out of the darkness like something disconnected from the man’s body, like a death mask in a fun house, and then the windshield spiderwebbed.

And this, which might spoil Live by Night:

The light took flight from his wife’s eyes. He watched her cross whatever transom led to whatever world or void lay beyond this one. In the final thirty seconds of her life, her eyelids fluttered nine times. And then never again.

And you know what? Fuck it, here’s one more:

[Joe] waited for others to come. He hoped they would. He hoped there was more to this than a dark night, an empty beach, and waves that never quite reached the shore.

If you’re going to read World Gone By, you’re better off starting with either The Given Day or Live by Night. Live by Night is more essential since both it and World Gone By have the same main character.

Check out my short story, ‘A Long Fall’, now available for free!

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A Long Fall, published in the autumn 2015 issue of The Colored Lens, is now available to read for free: http://thecoloredlens.com/?p=39573

Set in the near future, when Patricia’s husband dies in a freak accident, she uses her life savings to have a clone grown. But when the clone begins to fall apart, she has to deal with losing him all over again.
Big thanks to the editorial team at The Colored Lens!

Book Passage of the Week (2/28/2016) – from The Alchemist

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The Alchemist is one of my favorite books. I read it my senior year of college, right after France decided they didn’t want me as a teacher and a few months before China did.

I’ve read it several times since then. I underlined a lot of passages, took a lot of notes. What you see below is just one of many:

“Well, why don’t you go to Mecca now?” asked the boy.

“Because it’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive. That’s what helps me face these days that are all the same, these mute crystals on the shelves, and lunch and dinner at that same horrible café. I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.

“You dream about your sheep and the Pyramids, but you’re different from me, because you want to realize your dreams. I just want to dream about Mecca. I’ve already imagined it a thousand times crossing the desert, arriving at the Plaza of the Sacred Stone, the seven times I walk around it before allowing myself to touch it. I’ve already imagined the people who would be at my side, and those in front of me, and the conversations and prayers we would share. But I’m afraid that it would all be a disappointment, so I prefer just to dream about it.”

The plot of The Alchemist borrows from the folk tale “The Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream“, which itself has many variations throughout the world, such as Pedlar of Swaffham.

And the passage above reminds me of the following exchange from Collateral, a very underrated movie:

Vincent: Look in the mirror. Paper towels, clean cab. Limo company some day. How much you got saved?

Max: That ain’t any of your business.

Vincent: Someday? Someday my dream will come? One night you will wake up and discover it never happened. It’s all turned around on you. It never will. Suddenly you are old. Didn’t happen, and it never will, because you were never going to do it anyway. You’ll push it into memory and then zone out in your barco lounger, being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life. Don’t you talk to me about murder. All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln town car. That girl, you can’t even call that girl. What the fuck are you still doing driving a cab?

Guy gets on the subway and dies. Think anybody’ll notice?