"To write anything worth reading you have to put everything you have into every sentence. There can be no lazy thinking, no clichés, no borrowed tropes, no third-hand experience; there can be no hiding.” Miranda Darling
January 2023
Look to the skies

Look to the skies

The novella Boundless as the Sky takes place in Chicago on a single day – 15 July, 1933. It is based closely on a true event, the arrival of a “roaring armada of goodwill” in the form of twenty-four seaplanes flown in a display of fascist power by Mussolini’s wingman Italo Balbo to Chicago’s Century of Progress...
History and 'the people'

History and ‘the people’

The stories in German Fantasia were written between 2016 and 2020. Although the times and the conditions under which each of these texts was written were different, they turn on themes and ideas that have been important to me for a long time: first and foremost that of the incoherence of history and the roles men play in it,...
Back to that place

Back to that place

José went in a car with two plainclothes policemen. I went in another with the detective and a muscular man covered in tattoos. The vehicle I was in drove slowly, up the same road that a few days earlier I had travelled up on foot, clothed and intact, and on the way down, torn and...
“With affection, wondrous sensible” – a life of reading Shakespeare

“With affection, wondrous sensible” – a life of reading Shakespeare

For Leonard Barkan, even the littlest things can mean the world. It is not size, but substance that truly matters. Readers of his (many, and “wondrous sensible”) books should take good note of this, and never skim, skip, or, worse even, skivvy, over his words or pages, for nothing in them is a mere “mouthful...