"So sweet! I just love D.E. Stevenson's stories of the Scottish countryside and the unusual characters that inhabit the region.

In this one, Bel Lamington works in an office in London, until her circumstances change and she ventures into Scotland and finds true happiness. Yes, I'll just say it -- Stevenson usually leaves the reader with a happy and satisfying ending :)

Now I'm planning to read the sequel: Fletchers End !"

"Watch out for my frenzied jazz fingers and my ferocious, flapping tail, ‘cause I’m all worked up, folks. Worked up into a fine lather here.

My main man Langston (who I never thought of as Black, but I always thought of as Poet) has defied the odds here and has offered me up exactly 14 short stories, published in 1933, and has managed to keep them IN PRINT. Hot damn, Mr. Hughes, I hope you’re laughing in your grave.

Poet? Yes, I know it. He was the first poet whose verse I painstakingly copied into my poetry journals, starting from the young age of seven. Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg and EE Cummings are the three poets whose influence has run the longest in my life and my passion for their work has never left me. I love their work MORE, not less, as I have aged. I can claim that I read at least one of their poems every week.

But, Mr. Hughes as a writer of prose? I never went there before, and that mistake ENDS HERE.



I will plunk this powerful prose right next to my two other favorite short story collections, J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories and Ray Carver’s Short Cuts.

These are brilliant, truly. Wowza, man!

Spring that year was all too sudden and full of implications. The very earth seemed to moan with excess of joy. Life was just too much to bear alone. It needed to be shared, its beauty given to others, taken in return. Its eternal newness united."