Leningrad was not a funny place to be during the German’s siege on the city in World War II. When you are starving, hunting rats for dinner, and nibbling small rations of rock-hard “bread,” there is little room for joking around. Somehow though, and without forcing it, author David Benioff mixes humor and brutal reality [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Llalan'
City of Thieves by David Benioff
December 8th, 2009 No Comments
Tags: Book Reviews · City of Thieves · David Benioff · Llalan
Crushed
October 18th, 2009 6 Comments
The author crush. One of the many varieties of crushes a person can experience, and particularly powerful to those of us who fancy ourselves writers. We all know we have them. One book, one sentence, even just one turn of phrase takes a reader from being appreciative to being awe struck to wanting to [...]
Tags: author crush · Chuck Thompson · Llalan · Pico Iyer · reading · writers
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
September 22nd, 2009 No Comments
Many a day around seven pm I look in my empty kitchen cabinets and wish pasta al a carbonara would start raining from the skies. No hassle of cooking, no tipping the delivery guy–just spaghetti from heaven. I’m sure I’m not the only one in this gravy boat.
It sounds like a tall tale, I know, [...]
Tags: Book Reviews · children's books · Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs · Llalan · Reading Rainbow
Professor Profile: Jeff Seglin
September 12th, 2009 No Comments
Let’s just be honest here: it takes a lot to get me off my ass. I’m not lazy, per se, just not an “above and beyond” kind of girl. (Feel free to disagree here.) But when I finished Jeff Seglin’s column writing class and had already published two small pieces, I began to suspect subliminal [...]
Tags: Emerson College WLP Department · emerson courses · emerson professors · Jeff Seglin · Llalan
The Tam, a Memoir
September 2nd, 2009 2 Comments
One time I walk in and the bartender says to me, “We won Best Dive in Boston. I dunno, they just gave it to us,” then shrugged like he wasn’t sure what a dive was. Which is why The Tam is a great bar.
Photo courtesy rebuildingsince92 on Flickr using Creative Commons License.
Tags: Boston Confidential · Llalan · The Tam
The Silence of Lost In Translation
August 14th, 2009 1 Comment
Lost In Translation won the Oscar for Best Writing, Original Screenplay in 2004 not just for the words written, but for the words omitted. Silence plays as important a role in this movie as dialog. As important even as that infamous opening shot of Scarlett Johansson’s sheer underwear.
Silence surrounds the relationship of the two main [...]
Tags: big screen/small screen week · Llalan · Lost in Translation · movies · screenwriting
THE BIG and small Screens
August 9th, 2009 No Comments
Welcome to a week of encouraged couch potato-ness! All across America, you students are nearing the end of your free time–so let’s all make the most of it! Make perfect you-sized dents in the sofa cushions. Try eating popcorn three meals a day. Or even…and here’s the challenge that looks a bit like an over-the-summer [...]
Tags: big screen/small screen week · Llalan · movie writing · screenwriting · tv writing
The New Valley by Josh Weil
August 6th, 2009 No Comments
That a collection of three novellas was published at all, let alone by a new author who then received high praise and numerous glowing reviews, is an event worth writing about. Josh Weil’s The New Valley is an impressive anomaly. But how does one write about novellas? Yeah, yeah: like a novel only shorter. I [...]
Tags: Book Reviews · Josh Weil · Llalan · The New Valley
Bookstores’ Online Presence -or- Now What?
July 21st, 2009 No Comments
What does it mean when a bookstore enters the digital age? This is a question Robert Gray has been looking at in his past few posts on Fresh Eyes Now and Shelf Awareness, book trade blogs. This is also a question I’ve been asking myself since I became editor of The Globe Corner Bookstore blog [...]
Tags: blogs · bookstores · Independent bookstores · Llalan · self promotion