Alex Kudera’s award-winning novel, Fight for Your Long Day (Atticus Books), was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea. Auggie’s Revenge (Beating Windward Press) is his second novel. His numerous short stories include “Frade Killed Ellen” (Dutch Kills Press), “Bombing from Above” (Heavy Feather Review), and “A Thanksgiving” (Eclectica Magazine).
"Writing is a precarious profession. We are broke, for the most part. We work jobs we often don't enjoy to keep the lights on: Faulkner at the post office, Vonnegut and his disastrous car dealership, every writer you know and their faculty gig. The average author doesn't make enough from their royalties to clear the poverty line. Most books do not even make back their advance, meaning they earn no royalties for the author at all. When Anna Burns won the Booker Prize, she thanked her food bank. Our work is stolen to train the software of multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence companies run by people who believe art is a problem to be solved."
~~ from One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
"[My father] had always wanted to be buried in Egypt, in the El Akkad mausoleum where my step-aunts and grandfather are buried. And so we take him there. I crawl on my hands and knees into the catacomb. I help ease the shrouded body to the ground, beside the bones of these people who loved him from the day he was born. Outside, dozens of our relatives stand waiting, people I love similarly and who love me and with whom, in another life where we never left, I would have shared the normal bonds of family. Instead, they appear to me now as foreigners because we did leave. And so it has only ever been, for me, the three of us. And now we are two."
~~ from One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
A review of POMEGRANATES OF THE SUN: 1970-2007 - SELECTED POEMS at Goodreads: These are lyric poems that depend upon alliteration, consonance, assonance, and dare, we confess, rhyme. They span decades and consider topics such as Vietnam, war in general, parenting, siblings, love, American history, and more; for example, so far in this book I've learned about the bravery of The First Minnesota regiment on behalf of the union during the American Civil War. The author served in frigid cold on the Korean wall during Vietnam, translates poetry into English from German, practices yoga, writes fiction, and occasionally sings, mimes, and otherwise entertains at homes for seniors around the country.
"There is in most literary biography a simple detail that speaks volumes about its subject. Thoreau never left home. Henry Miller was henpecked, Borges lived in fear of his mother, James Joyce was afraid of thunderstorms, Freud was angst-ridden on railway platforms, Wittgenstein was addicted to cowboy movies, Wallace Stevens to candy, Nabokov never once visited Moscow, Jack Kerouac had stacks of the National Review by his bed when he died."
~~ from Paul Theroux's "Greeneland," an essay included in Figures in a Landscape about Graham Greene and the biography Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry
"Because it isn't enough just to show off one's goods!
"A mercurial subtlety is required to sell. One must choose one's words and ideas carefully, flatter adroitly, chatter about things one neither thinks nor believes in, wax enthusiastic over trifles, score a point with a deprecatory gesture, be acutely interested in things one doesn't give a damn about, be many sided, flexible, and amusing, accept the smallest gewgaw with grace, not lift and eyebrow or take it personally if some gross remark is made, and suffer, suffer patiently—the waste of time, the sour, ill-tempered faces, the rude, annoying, rebuffs—suffer in order to earn a few centavos, because 'that's life.'"
~~ from Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt
"The bills, with their colored pictures, seemed more significant, the nickel-based coins jingled merrily as we juggled them in our hands. It's a fact, the money we acquired through trickery seemed more subtle and rare, the highest form of wealth. It seemed to whisper in our ears words of smiling praise and mischievous provocation. It was not the vile, hateful money that must be earned by hard work, but rather easy money, a silver disc with two gnomes' legs and a dwarf's beard, a clowning, dancing money whose smell carried us, like a good wine, to orgiastic thoughts."
~~ from Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt
In 2025, I had a chance to read Anne Applebaum's "Russia and China Are Winning the Propaganda War" from The Atlantic, Samuel Moyn's "Casus Belli: The origins of the war in Ukraine" in Harper's, Jon Lee Anderson's recent New Yorker reporting from the Congo region of Africa, and other pieces primarily from Harper's Magazine and The Atlantic's 2024 and '25 print issues. Goodreads says I read twenty-one books. A strong majority were under 250 pages.
