A Magical Poem

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Despite being an English major in college, poetry has never been at the top of my list of favorite art forms. But several years ago I came across a poem that I immediately fell in love with: “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats. Wanting to save that poem, I copied and pasted it into…
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Join me on November 19 at 6:30 pm . . .

Posted on by Michael Kahn
. . . for what the Maplewood Public Library has labeled An Evening with Michael Kahn. Here is a link to a description of the event, which should be lots of fun. I will be discussing and fielding questions on the topic of “Why Truth Is Stranger than Fiction?” Here is the Library’s description of…
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Was Yogi a Yogi?

Posted on by Michael Kahn
We in St. Louis joined Baseball Nation in mourning the recent death of baseball legend Yogi Berra, a beloved son of our town who grew up on the Italian Hill. As might be expected, the obituaries celebrated not only his remarkable baseball career but his equally remarkable quotations–sayings that might strike you initially as absurd…
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A Fun Conversation with Author Jonathan Watkins

Posted on by Michael Kahn
We authors are accustomed to being the interviewees, i.e., the ones giving the answers to the questions. Thus it was a pleasure to settle down with fellow attorney-author Jonathan Watkins and finally get to ask some of the questions I’ve often wished an interviewer would ask me. And it was even more of a pleasure to…
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The Big Lebowski Meets The Big Sleep

Posted on by Michael Kahn
The other night I settled down to watch “The Big Lebowski,” a terrific Coen brothers film that features three of my favorite actors (Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, and Steve Buscemi) playing three of my favorite characters (the Dude, Walter Sobchek, and Donny Kerabatsos). I’d last watched the movie about ten years ago. If you’d asked…
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Trollope versus Hawthorne: Where’s the “Beef”?

Posted on by Michael Kahn
There are many reasons to admire the 19th-century British novelist Anthony Trollope, beginning with his sparkling prose and vivid characters. And for those of us who write novels but haven’t been able to quit our day job, here’s another reason: during much of his writing career, the remarkably prolific Trollope (47 novels and more than…
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Justice Scalia’s “Jiggery-Pokery”

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Say what you will about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia–and, frankly, there is plenty to say–you have to admit that the man’s prose, especially when he’s in the role of outraged dissenter, can be colorful, as he again demonstrated in his response to the recent Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. That’s the case in…
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A Shout-Out to Poisoned Pen Press

Posted on by Michael Kahn
On this, the day after Independence Day Weekend, I pause to give a shout-out to my publisher and its support of independent bookstores–the ones who still have bookshelves with books on them. Like most mid-list writers, each of my first seven novels eventually went out of print and were available only as eBooks. But then…
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