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I'm often in awe of, or puzzled at, how you, Auntie, have such talent for creating characters so utterly unlike yourself: boors, churls, plebeians (including their jargon and their jaunts), all...

Blood is fine, Inbetween, but just repeating the word "blood", hoping its cinematic associations will do the work, is not a very effective way of creating horror or fright or whatever one is...

You seem to have a habit of dropping articles and pronouns, especially possessive pronouns (e.g. "...he smiled at the warmth of [her? the?] touch, like a flame igniting [his?] skin."; "...and never...

A clever story (all of yours are at least that) and some good details near the beginning. I usually dislike song lyrics in writing (they always seem empty without their musical accompaniment) but...

Thanks, Gilliatt, for your compliments. I unfortunately know little about coin collecting myself, but, despite this, I thought numismatics might make for an interesting motif in a story. I hope my...

"Don Quixote has been called the greatest novel ever written. This is, of course, nonsense...but its hero, whose personality is a stroke of genius on the part of Cervantes, looms so wonderfully above...

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by competes, but I am guessing you mean 20th century Modernists with perhaps a reputation for complex, precise prose. In that regard he does: "My greatest...

You're right, Stlukesguild, Nabokov has his critics too, as everyone does. And, as you've written, most of them find it convenient to label his work as all style and someone like Mann's all...

We can "tell why Nabokov is critical of Mann and Faulkner, and Pasternak": solely, because he thought little of their work. He said directly what he disliked in Mann's books above. As for jealousy...

Thomas Mann was one of Vladimir Nabokov's "big fakes" that he frequently, and in my opinion rightly, disparaged in his letters, interviews, and, occasionally, in a less direct manner, his fiction....

I think I'll also offer a bit of my own interpretation of the story. Nabokov was the major influence on it, meaning that I tried to create an only half-repulsive character, fairly unreliable in...

(October entry for the Story Competition)

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A Mess of Numismatic Pottage

I lay on a soiled, slack-springed mattress, surrounded by gold. Silver, too. From out of this treasure, I stared...

1932 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck 4
1940 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 6
1952 The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk 3
1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 5
1955 A Fable by...

As with Nick Adams, the story's most pressing flaw is the ill-defined "grasp" of the narrator. Solving that would make a big difference in the flow of the story; as it is, the story's progression...

The story's sole purpose, its raison d'etre, seems to be only for its surprise ending--a worn literary implement, that, even if used uniquely, can overshadow, if not entirely obscure, everything in...

(I feel insolent and mischievous offering any criticism on a story that is at a higher level than anything I write, but will, nevertheless, offer the following, trying to ignore its...

Lolita- Nabokov
Anna Karenina- Tolstoy
Invisible Man- Ellison
Fathers and Sons- Turgenev
Dead Souls- Gogol

I don't particularly like this story, and I probably should keep such indiscretions to myself; but I guess sharing such untalented creation is one step in coming to terms with my inexorable...

Definitely one of your funnier stories, Aunt Shecky, mercilessly so. It reminded me of a Dorothy Parker story--meaning, you managed to find deep humor in the most achingly common situations in life.

Most of Vladimir Nabokov's early novels and stories take place in Berlin or other parts of Germany, and contain interesting, memorable viewpoints and characters of Russian expatriates inside Germany.

You're completely right Aunt Shecky. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote this; it is a sloppy, mostly disjointed mess. But hopefully I can learn something from it, if only to spend a little...

I agree with you entirely APEist. The beginning is almost embarrassingly bad and superfluous, but the story seemed even more unsatisfactory with it off than with it on, I don't know why. You're also...

Let us start simply then proceed in complexity: She was a woman. She had two sons. She bore those two sons while a youth, and so, to her, they often felt more like nephews from an older sibling than...

The beginning does seem unnecessarily long, but the ending is nice and the characterization of the professor is, I think, done well.

I don't think much of this story, at all really, but, whatever, I'll go ahead and post it anyway.

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Night, Again

As expected, punctually at 9:00, a librarian informed him,...