Fernando Melendez

Erotic Wonder, 26. Juli 2000

This book has so much beauty and sheer writing virtuosity that it must stand separate and alone. Like the Chaconne, or the suites for unaccompanied cello, or Shakespeare's sonnets, this book takes your breath away.

An integral part of the narrative are the six paintings (handsome reproductions of world art by Fra Angelico and Francis Bacon, among others) which are woven as counterpoint to the storyline. Nowhere in literature does one encounter such a masterful and extraordinary melding of two art forms: it produces a delectable, erotic, and frightening little masterpiece.

It is a story of lust, love, revenge, of Eros, of sexual awakening, and of the punctilious attention to… Mehr dazu

Olympian Revenge, 25. Juli 2000

This book's central theme and its execution is of breathtaking vulgarity. It is focused on things below the waist, at the level of the male and female sex organs. The book attempts to be funny, and sophisticated, and very with it; but its vulgarity is so overpowering that the other matters it touches are easily lost.

Those of us who have been deeply offended by the near continuous degradation of the office of the presidency by its present occupant cannot help but notice how well this cheap excess of a book matches the atmosphere created by the occupants of the White House. There is, after all, a certain justice attached to the publication of this book; a book which has infuriated… Mehr dazu

It Is SO About The Bike (And About Much, Much More), 22. Juli 2000

This fantastic person, Lance Armstrong, faced cancer, nearly died, survived, and as I write this (July 22, 2000) is about to win his second Tour de France since his brush with death. He is a superb athlete and an extraordinary human being. The adversity of his disease and its brutal treatments changed him for the better both as a sportsman and as a person; and it is his bike that runs through this book as the unifying force and the symbolic icon for what Lance does. Yes, many of the important aspects of this book have to do with things of the spirit and not with pedaling; but it is on wheels that he first encountered fame, the lack of those wheels that brought him to near… Mehr dazu