The 2024 Presidential election is the most interesting and engrossing election I have ever been through in my life, and part of the reason, for me, is that I would like to at least be alive for four more years–which is at least how long it would take to complete and publish my remaining books,…
I feel great compassion for anyone suffering from a mental disease, or a mental breakdown or deterioration, because it’s usually not their fault. My father suffered PTSD as a result of his nearly three years of being a Prisoner of War of the Japanese during World War II–his memoir is titled Eaten by the Japanese–and…
[Post-dated addition: This blog post was written before thousands of brave and conscientious students of the United States (including students from Columbia, where I did my MFA (I have written about that experience in my book The Killing of an Author), community leaders and activists around the world, and many conscientious Jews including the astonishingly…
Here it goes, the Top Ten plus a few songs of the Master (that mind-blowing genius called Bob Dylan) that have most moved me, or that I can sing along with, or that make me laugh. Because it’s so hard to choose only ten, I may add a few more, as part of a shortlist…
In 2010, after a bad experiences with a “regular” publisher, I was seduced by the promise of total freedom and instant publication on Amazon (and a handful of its competitors), possibly allowing me to write and publish much, much more. Much has changed since those early days. While Jeff Bezos’s net worth has shot up…
March 30, 2020: One score and zero years ago, my father’s World War 2 prisoner-of-war memoir, Eaten by the Japanese,** had its official national launch at the India International Centre, New Delhi (along with the launch of the U.S. edition, which was the same paperback product, except for having U.S. ISBNs on the copyright page…
No matter what you and I think of the rest of Boris Johnson, whose personality embraces bits of both the diabolic Joker (Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger playing him) and “akratic” (his description, in his only novel, of a character much like him), his United Nations General Assembly speech made history (of sorts), and the…
This is a thought that has occurred to me, on and off, right from the time Salman Rushdie issued an apology for The Satanic Verses. And it returns, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologizes for his various instances of blackface–though books are a very different kettle of fish from crude actions such as blackfacing….
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