Month: July 2025

Ten Years After: a Video Interlude

Posted by

80

A 1987 photo I took of ‘Peanuts’ cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000) on the right, ‘Terry and the Pirates’/’Steve Canyon’ cartoonist Milton Caniff (1907-1988) on the left, and Snoopy.

Today, I’m doing something different in this usually literature-focused blog of mine. 🙂 I was surprised and pleased to see on the Bluesky social-media platform three days ago that my Canadian writer friend Dan St.Yves had re-posted a filmed interview he did with me almost exactly ten years ago, so I decided to re-post it again here instead of going with a more typical lit post.

In that summer of 2015 conversation, we talked about various syndicated cartoonists and columnists I had met and covered while working for Editor & Publisher magazine from 1983 to 2008 — before I started blogging on literature. Among the creators discussed: Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”), Jim Davis (“Garfield”), Lynn Johnston (“For Better or for Worse”), Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), Stan Lee (“Spider-Man”), humor columnist Dave Barry, and twin-sister advice columnists Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”) and Ann Landers.

When Dan and I had our conversation, we were in Indianapolis attending the 2015 conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists — for which I was a board member from 2009 to 2023.

Again, this is not a typical book post for me, although all the cartoonists and columnists mentioned above have seen MANY sales of paperback (and in some cases hardcover) collections featuring their work, and some have written some non-collection books as well. (For instance, Dave Barry has authored and co-authored a number of novels.) Also, the 2012 Comic (and Column) Confessional memoir I wrote about my time at Editor & Publisher comes up during the interview. I could add that Alexandre Dumas wrote an 1845 sequel to his famous 1844 novel The Three Musketeers titled Twenty Years After — twice the length of time since this post’s 2015 video of ten years ago. So, if one read half of Twenty Years After…

Anyway, below is a link to the video, which lasts a bit over 20 minutes. Whether you watch it or not (no obligation!), I’ll be back with a more normal literature post next week. Actually, Misty the cat is soon due for another guest blog effort here to discuss books from his feline perspective, but he’s not sure yet if that will be on August 3 or sometime later in the month. In the meantime, Misty is reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Treats and hoping for a happy ending.

Misty the cat asks: “Why is there smoke in July when the new Pope was chosen in May?”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and the aforementioned 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the cancellation of “The Late Show,” whose host Stephen Colbert is a resident of my town — is here.

Self-Therapy By Book

Posted by

97

Thomas Mann (Picture Alliance/Ullstein Bild)

Sometimes, novels are semi-autobiographical confessionals and/or expressions of authors’ repressed thoughts and/or a way for them to “work out issues” and/or a way of reckoning with their past and/or an exercise in wish-fulfillment, etc. Sort of self-therapy by book.

I thought about this when recently reading Thomas Mann’s novellas Tonio Kroger (1903) and especially Death in Venice (1912), and seeing that there was a whole lot of male longing for other males by the protagonists. Sure enough, a little online exploring showed that Mann — the father of six with wife Katia — was sexually attracted to men, though there’s no conclusive evidence he acted on that during a more homophobic time. But he sure made his feelings known in some of his writing, as when middle-aged Death in Venice protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach (a famous author…hmm) becomes obsessed with a teen boy he finds very good-looking.

Several years later, in 1918, Willa Cather wrote perhaps her best novel: My Antonia. In it, male protagonist Jim Burden holds Antonia in such high regard that he might well be a stand-in for Cather, who was probably gay. Meaning she could have narrator Jim (i.e. Willa) express some feelings the author might have found more difficult to express if that character were a woman.

While sexual orientation isn’t a subtext (as far as I know) in Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic 1826 novel The Last Man, the author did base the male protagonist Lionel Verney on herself despite the different gender and modeled two other characters — Adrian and Lord Raymond — on her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their late friend Lord Byron, respectively. So, Mary was kind of remembering and analyzing her relationships/interactions with the two famous poets.

Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853) also has a semi-autobiographical element: characters Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel are partly based on Charlotte and the real-life Constantin Heger, who Charlotte fell in love with (?) while enrolled in the Belgian boarding school run by Heger and his wife Zoe. And the downbeat tone of some of Villette was shaped to a degree by the 1848 and 1849 deaths-before-their-time of Charlotte’s younger novelist sisters Emily and Anne.

The Brontes’ contemporary Charles Dickens used a number of his novels to indirectly work through the childhood trauma that would help shape his social conscience. The future author’s father was sent to a debtors’ prison, and 12-year-old Charles had to leave school to work in a miserable factory to help support his family. Echoes of that can be found in the impoverished young characters Dickens created in David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1838), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and other works.

Amid the compulsive plot of his 1940 novel Native Son, Richard Wright wrestled with such matters as racism (which he experienced plenty of as a Black person) and his complicated feelings about the Communist Party USA (which he joined but later broke from).

Some authors who served in the military and were perhaps wounded in action indirectly worked through that trauma in war novels they would later write. Erich Maria Remarque — in books such as 1929’s All Quiet on the Western Front — is one prominent example of that.

Also, authors’ unrequited “crushes” in real life can provide rather intense fodder for novels, as was the case with Mann in his aforementioned Death in Venice and with Goethe in his The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Thoughts about and examples of this topic?

Misty the cat says: “Halley’s Comet won’t be back until 2061, so you may not see it in this video.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — a time-warped look at a long-closed movie theater that might open again — is here.

They’re Serious about Series and Standalone Novels

Posted by

65

Some authors are good at two or more things: novels and short stories, fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction and mass-audience fiction, etc. For this post, I’ll add to that by focusing on authors who are good at series as well as standalone novels. It certainly requires some different writing muscles to wrap up things in one book vs. extending things across multiple books.

This topic occurred to me last week as I read Val McDermid’s A Place of Execution, a superb standalone novel with a concluding twist that will knock your socks off. My previous experience with McDermid was with her series fiction, including the books starring “cold case” detective Karen Pirie.

I followed A Place of Execution with Martin Cruz Smith’s Independence Square — his 10th in the series starring Russian investigator Arkady Renko that began with Gorky Park. (Independence Square was okay; not as good as the earlier Renko books.) Smith has also written standalone novels such as Rose.

Sometimes, authors toggle throughout their careers between standalone books and series — as has been the case with Smith and McDermid as well as authors such as Walter Mosley with his Easy Rawlins books and much more. Other times, authors start with standalone novels before hitting on a hit series and focusing on that — as did Sue Grafton, who wrote two standalones before launching her popular Alphabet Mysteries (25 in all; she reached the letter “Y” before she died).

J.K. Rowling has also written many more series novels than standalone ones: seven Harry Potter books, then The Casual Vacancy one-off, then seven Cormoran Strike/Robin Ellacott crime novels (so far).

L.M. Montgomery followed her classic Anne of Green Gables with seven sequels over the years, during which time she also penned the Emily trilogy and standalones such as The Blue Castle.

Stephen King is known mostly for standalone novels, with a sprinkling of sequels and trilogies, but has also written many books in The Dark Tower series.

Some long-ago authors also toggled. For instance, James Fenimore Cooper wrote the five “Leatherstocking” novels (including The Last of the Mohicans) as well as various standalone books. Alexandre Dumas did both as well — many standalones (most famously The Count of Monte Cristo) as well as The Three Musketeers and its five sequels (sometimes published as fewer sequels when certain books were combined into one edition).

Your thoughts about and examples of this topic?

Misty the cat says: “My fitness tracker better record backward steps.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a lot of school news during a non-school time — is here.

An Array of Admirable Activists

Posted by

122

Zohran Mamdani walking New York City’s streets during his mayoral campaign.

I’ve written about activist authors (in 2014) and courageous characters (last year), but as far as I can recall I’ve never written specifically about activist characters in novels. So, today I will. 🙂

My inspiration for this topic was 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani winning last month’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor — and, thrillingly, the results weren’t even close. If Mamdani also wins the general election this fall he’ll become the youngest NYC mayor in more than a century, the city’s first Muslim mayor, and clearly the most progressive mayor the biggest U.S. city has ever had. Among Mamdani’s November opponents will be current NYC mayor Eric Adams, a cartoonishly corrupt politician who escaped multiple criminal charges by making a sell-out deal with Trump’s ghoulish Republican regime.

At a time of ever-growing economic inequality in NYC and the rest of the country, the charismatic Mamdani ran an energetic grassroots campaign that focused on freezing rents, making buses free, offering universal childcare, raising the inadequate minimum wage, and other pocketbook proposals — all to be paid for by raising the too-low taxes on the very rich.

Much of the very rich, of course, went bananas, and many of them during the primary backed Mamdani’s mayoral opponent Andrew Cuomo — the conservative-leaning former New York governor who resigned in disgrace four years ago after causing thousands of deaths by sending COVID patients into nursing homes and after being credibly accused of sexual harassment by 13 women who worked for the state. Plus, plenty of corruption in his administration. Many of those wealthy Cuomo supporters are now backing the aforementioned Adams, a right-wing Democrat who sat out the June primary and is now running as an “independent.”

Mamdani, who has an activist history, is also the rare American politician who supports equal rights for Palestinians and has publicly decried Israel’s genocide of innocent civilians in Gaza — drawing bogus accusations of anti-Semitism from people who wrongly equate being against Netanyahu’s far-right Israeli government with being anti-Semitic. In fact, Mamdani received many Jewish votes amid many votes from young people, Asian-American residents, etc. Also, Mamdani and Jewish mayoral candidate Brad Lander cross-endorsed each other — something they were able to do under the election’s ranked-choice system.

I should mention that I feel a connection to New York City because I lived in its Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens boroughs for a total of 16 years and worked in Manhattan for 30 years. My current town of Montclair is 12 miles west of NYC in New Jersey.

Anyway, on to some inspiring activist characters in literature!

There’s lapsed preacher Jim Casy, one of the memorable supporting players in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Casy tries to organize migrant workers after he tags along with the Joad family to California, where conditions for financially struggling newcomers are appalling.

Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds was clearly inspired by The Grapes of Wrath, though that 2021 novel is original in many ways. It tracks the radicalization of Elsa Wolcott, who’s part of a cast that also includes union organizer Jack Valen.

Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code (also 2021) focuses on a memorable trio of female British code breakers during World War II.

Another compelling historical novel is Leon Uris’ Mila 18 (1961), about the desperate Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis.

And Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) features the part-fictionalized sisters who opposed the regime of brutal Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo.

Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) has a supporting cast that includes radical lawyer Boris Max, who represents protagonist Bigger Thomas.

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments — the 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) — includes the Daisy character (birth name: Nicole) who infiltrates the repressive, patriarchal society of Gilead.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Dellarobbia Turnbow is an initially apolitical young farmer’s wife who joins the fight against climate change.

Then there’s the against-the-odds activism in these two classics: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

While activism occasionally succeeds, many other times it doesn’t — given the formidable/well-funded forces on the other side: powerful politicians, heavily armed military and police, giant corporations trying to increase their already-huge profits, bend-the-knee mainstream media outlets, etc. In fact, some of the fictional characters I mentioned in this post ended up being killed, making for riveting reading but very depressing reading.

Examples of activist characters in novels? Thoughts on this topic?

Misty the cat says: “When I groom myself near a window, it’s ‘A Groom with a View.'”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my younger daughter’s June 26 high school graduation (again), a Township Council meeting, and more — is here.