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BOOK REVIEW

Asterios and the Labyrinth | Gold Book Award Winner, Reviewed by Literary Titan

Leave a Comment / June 1, 2026

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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Cortona: The City That Calls to Me

Cortona: The City That Calls to Me

Leave a Comment / June 1, 2026

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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Women's Power in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy

Women’s Power in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy

Leave a Comment / May 31, 2026

By law, by Church doctrine, and by the unspoken consent of a society, power was a man’s possession in the Florentine Republic of the Quattrocento. A woman passed as property from her father to her husband. Her purpose, as the age defined it, was procreation and domestic service. Non-conformity was frowned upon, and in extreme

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Domini canis: The Hound of the Lord

The Hound of the Lord

Leave a Comment / May 29, 2026

There is a Latin pun at the heart of medieval Dominican identity so perfect it could only have been God’s own joke—or the devil’s. Domini canes: the Hounds of the Lord. It sounds almost exactly like Dominicanus, the Latin name for a member of the Order of Preachers founded by Saint Dominic in the early

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The Inquisition Was Not Exclusively Dominican: Franciscans Also Investigated

The Inquisition Was Not Exclusively Dominican: Franciscans Also Investigated

Leave a Comment / May 28, 2026

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

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The Cosmological Thread: Souls Finding Each Other Across Lifetimes

The Cosmological Thread: Souls Finding Each Other Across Lifetimes

Leave a Comment / May 28, 2026

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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The Pen Name and the Alter Ego: Who Is Edmond Thornfield?

The Pen Name and the Alter Ego: Who Is Edmond Thornfield?

1 Comment / May 28, 2026

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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Cortona, 1450 AD | Building the World of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy

Building the World of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy | Cortona, 1450 AD

2 Comments / May 27, 2026

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

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BOOK REVIEW

Asterios and the Labyrinth | Reviewed by Leonard Smuts for Readers’ Favorite

Leave a Comment / May 26, 2026

Set on the island of Crete during the Minoan Bronze Age some 3,500 years ago, Asterios and the Labyrinth (Mythos of Knossos) by Edmond Thornfield is a tale of gods, kings, heroes, revolts, and magical powers. The Minoans, a wealthy people known for their farming and commerce, experienced some turbulence following the death of King

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PART TWO | The Heroes at the Gate: Assembling the Hunters of Khalydōn

PART TWO | The Heroes at the Gate: Assembling the Hunters of Khalydōn

Leave a Comment / May 25, 2026

In the world of Atalanta of the Wild, worthy men do not simply walk into a king’s megaron. They are announced. A court herald strikes his staff upon the stone floor, and the name, lineage, and fame of the arriving hero ring out across the hall before the man himself has taken three steps into

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