Do you miss stories that feel alive, where the world breathes, where every word has been chosen by a human hand that hesitated, reconsidered, and chose again? Have you grown weary of fiction that tells instead of shows, of worlds that feel thin and formulaic, assembled rather than imagined? In an era when AI-generated content […]
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Every few months I set aside the novelist’s desk and return to the reader’s chair. These are six books I return to, recommend without hesitation, or simply cannot stop thinking about. They span centuries, continents, and registers—Gothic Louisiana, medieval Cornwall, the towers of Notre-Dame, Revolutionary France, the streets of Salvador da Bahia—but they share the
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The question of point of view is the first serious decision a novelist makes, and it shapes everything that follows—the texture of the prose, the range of the story, the emotional distance between reader and character. Writers have many options: first-person, second-person, omniscient third, limited third, close third, or some combination of these. For my
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FEB 2026 Literary Titan Gold Book Award Winner Asterios and the Labyrinth follows Prince Asterios of Knossos as his father dies, political rivals rise against him, foreign powers threaten the island, and love pulls him in directions that the laws of his world barely allow. The story blends palace intrigue, war, prophecy, and a passionate
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I first became aware of Cortona as a teenager, poring over the history of the Etruscans, those singular people who were neighbors of the ancient Romans. Their art held me fast from the start. I remember dreaming of their magnificent bronze casting of the Chimera and of the feasting scenes painted on the walls of
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There are scenes in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy that unsettle readers who arrive with their assumptions intact. The inquisitors who descend upon Cortona in 1450 are not the black-and-white Dominicans of legend, the Domini canes, the Hounds of God, the scholastic terrors immortalized in every gothic retelling of the medieval
The Inquisition Was Not Exclusively Dominican: Franciscans Also Investigated Read More »
There is a thread that runs through everything I write. It does not announce itself. It does not appear in chapter summaries or back-cover copy. But it is there in every novel, in every narrator’s voice, in every reunion between characters who meet for what the plot calls the first time and recognize each other
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There is a moment known to every writer who has ever chosen a nom de plume when the invented name becomes more real than the given one. I cannot say when that moment arrived for me. I know only that it has. The name Edmond Thornfield was not assembled at random. Each of its two
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In my visits to Cortona, I always enter the citadel at the beginning of Via Nazionale, still known by the Cortonesi as Via di Ruga Piana, as it has been for centuries, the only leveled street in the whole city. The first time I did, the moment I laid my hands upon the remaining stones
Building the World of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy | Cortona, 1450 AD Read More »
Of all the gods of the Greek pantheon, Artemis is the one most commonly misread. Popular imagination has settled on her as a figure of cold severity, the virgin huntress, remote and punishing, more comfortable among animals than among people, quick to anger and slow to forgive. There is evidence for this reading in the
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