“I have no hatred in me.” Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler offers a wonderful short story collection that explores the complexities of the Vietnamese-American experience. It’s a beautiful, slightly sentimental short story collection about Vietnamese-American…
Star Trek Book Review: Mudd’s Angels (1978) by J.A. Lawrence
Mudd’s Angels marks the fourteenth and final installment in what began as James Blish’s Star Trek novelizations of the original series episodes. When Blish tragically died of cancer in 1975, his wife Judith Ann “J.A.” Lawrence was tasked with “giving a little polishing” to his then-unfinished scripts. In fact, she…
1992 Pulitzer Prize Review: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
“At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute…” Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres is a modern reimagining William Shakespeare’s King Lear, but instead of taking place in ancient Britain, the story is set on an Iowa farm in the late 1970s. This is the era…
Star Trek Book Review: The New Voyages 2 (1978) edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath
There is a fascinating connection between the creation of The New Voyages 2 anthology and the late ’70s political battle to save NASA from oblivion. Around the time of publication, NASA was struggling and facing steep financial cuts (in fact, the introduction to The New Voyages 2 mentions that some…
