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Review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

December 29, 2018

Writing a review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, by Paul Torday, is an exhilarating experience. I get to talk about the brilliance of the novel and the hopeless mediocrity that surrounds us.

Indeed, it’s interesting to give you a quick briefing of how I discovered The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce.

I saw the book at the local library. As I sometimes do with authors I haven’t read before, I took a quick look at Goodreads reviews. The average rating of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce is (at the time of this review) 3.49/5. The thing is, I have the experience to know that if a book (or a film) features bad ratings by the social masses, it might mean it’s actually good.

Taking a look at one or two reviews, I felt certain it was a book I wanted to read. People complained that there was no resolution to the story. Others gave the book 2 stars because… the protagonist was in denial.

The level of ignorance and mediocrity is appalling, when it comes to unsophisticated readers.

And so, let’s see what I thought about Torday’s novel. This is a review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce. It’s also another chance for me to express my dismay at the social mediocrity that has enthralled the world. Ironically enough, the two processes are metatextually related as you will see.

review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce
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Authors Talk: a Discussion with Scott Peters

December 9, 2018

This article is a part of a series of blog entries, which I refer to as “Authors Talk”. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual chat with Scott Peters, author of – among others – adventure stories set in ancient Egypt. A detailed list of useful links to Scott Peters’s work can be found at the end of this article.

Scott Peters
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Hypocrisy Today: a Literary Excerpt

November 27, 2018

It almost sounds like the name of a newspaper, doesn’t it? Hypocrisy Today. I don’t know if patterns of human behavior are timeless or not, maybe they are. Or, perhaps, it is only their drives that are unchangeable.

In other words, maybe love, hate, and the desire for power are eternal, whereas courtship, warfare, and hypocrisy depend on a given culture and society. Hypocrisy today might not be the same as it once was.

If something has changed in the way hypocrisy today propagates, that is certainly the levels of audacity it can reach. To put it simply, there used to be a fig leaf covering hypocritical actions. Politicians didn’t dare to lie blatantly. This has changed, drastically.

As any self-respecting author, fiction is for me a way to express the inexpressible, to channel a savage need to understand reality. And so, I’ve been lately working on a novel that is partly about hypocrisy in today’s world.

Instead of writing an article about it, here’s an excerpt from this upcoming novelI am referring to Illiterary Fiction. I have slightly modified it for online use.

hypocrisy today
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