Book Review, Hot Country and The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler:
While traveling these last two weeks via Istanbul, Venice and Trieste to Rovinj, Croatia I have been rereading Robert Olen Butler’s Christopher Marlowe Cobb novel, Hot Country and its follow-on, The Star of Istanbul. I think Hot Country is as good as any novel...
Codes, Ciphers and Cryptanalysis
Justin A. Day (pseudonym) with Jan Weeks published The Centerville Code forty-two years too late for me. It is a 10-13 year-old boy adventure book where the heroes require facility in cryptanalysis––the reading of codes. It is the type of story I read as a...Robert Olen Butler and A Small Hotel
Robert Olen Butler (A Small Hotel) I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients. Al Alvarez Robert Olen Butler’s novel A Small Hotel is a gem. It is a diamond. It is an intense moment-by-moment psychological study of a...On the Eve of 2012, Peer Literary Criticism
It is New Year’s Eve 2012 in Madison, Wisconsin. Yesterday there was an alternating snow-sleet-rain storm in our Lake Wingra microclimate. Today this small world is grey and ice-covered. Tomorrow morning there is a winter weather advisory—high winds and sleet. I had...Towards the next novel
On reading War and Peace (Tolstoi), On War (Clausewitz) and War (Sun Tsu) March 15, 2011 In writing my next novel “Wounded,” I have been thinking how to create the eminence grise, Alexander Soroka, is a disillusioned Bolshevik Russian Jew who had had a...Featured Books
The Executioner’s Son
In the spring, 1953, Danton Larionov, son of NKVD officer, Captain Volk Larionov, spies Ekaterina Soroka, the Ukrainian, herding sheep in the shadow of the Suzdal's medieval fortress. He intends to rape her, but she pauses him with a fairy tale beginning his time of troubles. Suzdal is now a GULAG. As Stalin's death convulses the Soviet Union, she holds him a bay with Russian tales. In the fall, she disappears, as if Koschei, the Deathless, has taken her. He vows to find her, and begins his journey through distant and strange lands to battle an implacable and cunning enemy armed with the most improbable and powerful weapons, the American soldier, Richard Belisle, hero of the first and second novels of The Long War Series.
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