All Stories

Hearing that a fellow North Carolinian author had written a surprising fictional bestseller, I was curious to see if she would produce something closer to Where the Crawdads sing, a dark and satisfying murder epic, or possibly Safe Haven, a romantic thrill ride that was the high point of Nicholas’ Sparks career. Instead, after reading it, I felt quite figuratively but emotionally like I was dying on a boat, not by drowning, but by sunburn. A friend once criticized one of my

“Feminine intuition” may not be a perfect compass, but it led Olivia Rodrigo here, and here is a good place. The Filipina-American female former acolyte of Taylor Swift has shed the rock-chick cosplaying and come into her own on the unfortunately-named “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love,” which was a factor in this reviewer’s 3-star review of her work, because a title is supposed to be a capture of the whole work, and in this case, the title is an overlong hindrance f

The literary world was shocked when an unassuming book about an old man who waltzed around a small Southern town called Golden became a multimillion-selling bestseller. The Wall Street Journal said it “broke every convention” of publishing. Yes, when every convention of publishing is to treat every old white man as a form of societal cancer. Somehow, an elder lawyer named Allen Levi, (a Christian at that!) convinced a publisher to give his book a try, and the result – altho

“Any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely and entirely false.” -Wexner testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and government Reform, dated 2/18/2026 I. At Beth Tikvah Columbus in 1956, as the first paved asphalt roads started to be oiled down in the suburban neighborhoods, there was a BRIGHT boy who lived in the Levittown house on Elm Street. It was a 12-year-old Leslie Wexner, on his scooter on his way to the synagogue. The Torah study the othe

The South Side of New Orleans in the 90s was a terrible place, so Olivia Jacques accepted her scholarship out of the city at the age of eighteen and suddenly found herself in with a briefcase and two sacks of Louisiana squash in Berkeley, California. Her Creole mother cried at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport: “don’t lose who you are,” she said with a mixture of pride and disbelief. Her daughter, from the French Quarter, was going to the Bay.

For all of accounted history the Ojatai people of Villenevue Planet in the Great Barrier Galaxy depended on the prophecy of a single herald for their self-preservation. Their god Imami wrote in the Sacred Texts that he would appoint a single Ojatai, called the Herald, every one hundred forty years to deliver a prophecy of great doom to the People, and that failure to listen would result in their race’s destruction. The Herald was chosen by casting lots over a hollow disc of

Zhang woke up to a scorching headache on her left side. The man who had directed a scholarship for her was snoring, his big fat body with jelly rolls of mass leaking out in all directions sprawled out over the cushion of the bed in the Westin 70th floor in Palm Beach