There are many people around us we tend to avoid: loud, dangerous and especially sick. There are also many people who suffer from genetic diseases we’ve never even heard about. Unless, we ourselves or our friends or relatives are the ones who are affected.… Read the rest
Red Primer for Children and Diplomats by Victor Vashi, 1967
Imagine a boy growing up in a totalitarian state where sexism, chauvinism, homophobia and general disrespect to human life and personal freedom were a norm. Imagine this boy growing up as a coward and a liar because he feared to tell others, even with his own parents and siblings, the only thing about himself he knew for sure: he was a girl on the inside.… Read the rest
How many modern Russian books have you read or contemporary Russian authors you heard of? Outside Russia its literature is primarily associated with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Their books are often in top 100 must-read lists. Yet, it’s strange that the riches of Post-Soviet literature don’t spread much to the West as if being stopped by an invisible barrier.… Read the rest
READING A BOOK..By LUNARIX-PIX (source: www.flickr.com/photos/manueluna/4497531493)
Some people say that the best way to write a great story is to write a book you’d want to read yourself. Holden Caulfield, the troubled teenager from The Catcher In The Rye, thought about it in his unique way:
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
Your story needs to be interesting enough to make the reader to want more, it needs to transport the reader into the world he’d like to stay in for longer.… Read the rest
Time for a silly blog post (actually, it’s an experiment to test if I’m capable of writing just about anything).
You most certainly have Internet since you are here, maybe you also have a gigantic flat screen television, you can shoot pigs with Angry Birds on your phone and spread gossip on Facebook, flip through newspapers on iPad and watch a 3D zombie blockbuster splashing your popcorn all over.… Read the rest