Half Full or Half Empty?
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EE Sean Kinch returns to Bacon today with a delicious fiction roundup featuring his favorite novels published in 2017. Stop in and enjoy this tempting Top Ten! You’ll recognize old friends – and discover new enchantments. From Sean: Twenty-seventeen started…
It’s not a snow day in Nashville yet – but it might be! The schools are closed. I’ve cancelled my morning appointment and dinner plans. This is how we roll in the South, dear readers who live elsewhere. Billy Collins…
There’s something to be said for the things we can’t make New Year’s Resolutions about. The things we can’t change, coming at us like a freight train – or with a whisper. Today’s poem by Ellen Bass offers some food…
Lions bridge in Sofia, Bulgaria Today’s post features my favorite read of 2017: The Ninth Hour, by Alice McDermott. I’m trying hard to be fair to the other novel in today’s post, which most of my couples’ book club enjoyed….
It’s 5 degrees in Nashville this morning and there’s not much to recommend it. In times like these one turns to art for consolation. A winter song comes to mind, sent by my friend Jack Barnwell and dreamt up by…
Friday’s Bacon featured a year’s worth of nonfiction reads for 2018. Today’s post offers only one recommendation for fiction readers: if you haven’t devoted yourself to a big brick of a novel lately – one that could be used as…
The world today is noisy with news. We’re yanked from one story to the next with hardly a moment to pause and reflect. Anger sometimes simmers just beneath the surface of those making – and reporting – the news. It’s…
Even a joyful holiday ballet like The Nutcracker nods gently towards madness, darkness, and fear: in the dangerous Mouse King, first and foremost, and also in the mysterious magician and uncle, Drosselmeier. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story – on which it is…
I dreamt of a city too strange to be believed. A ship sailed through the sky, a flower docked on the shore, a lion with a mermaid’s tail guarded the bay. Mighty metal Super Trees rose above a garden and…