Friday, November 23, 2018

Perfect potato-chip book


       Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. 100 Malicious Little Mysteries (1981) A wonderful potato chip book. The stories are mostly 3 to 4 pages long, with a few outliers. Common plot twists feature poetic justice, radical shifts in point of view, or sudden recognition of a minor clue’s meaning. Each could be redone as a full-length novel, which makes this book a reference work of sorts. Most are little gems of narrative art, the whole book a master class in how to put much meaning into a very small frame. A keeper. ***

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Mice in the Beer (Ward, 1960)

 Norman Ward. Mice In the Beer (1960. Reprinted 1986) Ward, like Stephen Leacock, was an economics and political science professor, Leacock...