Beneath a Scarlet Sky
Mark Sullivan's 2017 novel based on the life of Pino Lella, an Italian teenager who guided Jews over the Alps and then spied on a Nazi general as his driver. Sullivan spent about a decade on it, and it became…
Tag: Historical Fiction
Historical fiction has to satisfy two masters: the record and the story. These articles cover researching a period, keeping the details honest, and writing characters who belong to their own time, not ours.
Ancient RomeReading Josephus: Pick the Right Translation and Watch His Bias
The Jewish War by Josephus is one of my favorite books, and the translation you pick decides whether you finish it. Josephus wrote for the Romans who spared him, so trust his map and doubt his numbers.
Book ReviewsAnna: American Journey
Book two of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy takes fifteen-year-old Anna through Ellis Island and onto a train to Chicago, where she learns how people fear and prey on immigrants. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsAnna: American Dream
The final book of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy follows Anna through war, the great influenza epidemic and the temperance fight, as a Lithuanian girl builds an American life between 1914 and 1919. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsAnna: Going to America
Book one of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy follows a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl and her stern mother across Europe by rail and across the Atlantic in steerage in 1914. A tribute and a review.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: The Mysterious Island, Neb’s Side
Verne gave Neb one job and no interior life. He is on almost every page of the original and never once in a sentence that matters. This version is the correspondent’s private record, and it exists to correct that.
Ancient RomeClaudius the God
Claudius the God trades the first book's cunning for something harder to watch: a man stripped of the one advantage that kept him alive. Graves shifts from court intrigue to administrative detail, and the prose flattens because Claudius himself has…
Ancient RomeI, Claudius
I, Claudius works because Graves solved the problem every historical novel faces: how to put a witness in the room without making them a liar. Claudius is present and irrelevant, which means he gets to see everything and report it…
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Reincarnation
I have landed on Iwo Jima. I have died in the mud of the Western Front. Not as belief exactly, but as memory that does not belong to this life and will not leave. This novel began there.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Eurydice
Jules Verne gave Tom Ayrton about thirty pages and never went inside him. Twelve years alone on Tabor Island, marooned as punishment, rescued and reformed and killed off as machinery for somebody else’s adventure. This is his account.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Verne wrote political manifestos with a plot wrapped around them. The situation is strong and there is nobody inside it, so this version hands the narration to the harpooner who wants off the ship.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: A Treachery of Legions
The general who won 69 AD for Vespasian and then disappeared from history. Here is the story behind my Roman novel about Marcus Antonius Primus.