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Michael A. Kahn

Tag: Joseph Conrad

Great Closers of Fiction

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Michael Kahn
While the Internet teems with posts listing the best opening lines in all of literature, I have learned over years of reading and writing novels that a great opening line is nevertheless overshadowed by the importance of a great closing line. Yes, a great opening line will lure the reader into the novel. But even…
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Flipping Edmund Wilson the Bird: When Does a Work of Literature Qualify as–egads!–a Mystery?

Posted on October 1, 2022 by Michael Kahn
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of one of the leading literary critics of his time, Edmund Wilson. While many of his readers, especially in academia, admire him as the author of such influential works as To the Finland Station (1940) and Patriotic Gore (1962), for this humble scribe, whose books are…
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Jay Gatsby and Notorious B.I.G.: A Match Made in Baseball Heaven

Posted on May 8, 2021May 10, 2021 by Michael Kahn
Ah, baseball season has arrived! And with it, the joy of the walk-up song. For the true baseball fans among us, name a favorite player and you can name his walk-up song. Same for your team’s closer (whose walk-up song is known as the “entrance song”). Including even those greats who’ve retired. What Yankees fan, when…
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My 5 Favorite Narrators (Part 3)

Posted on October 23, 2013May 25, 2016 by Michael Kahn
In my last post, I discussed the 2nd of my 5 favorite narrators, Raymond Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe. As I now turn to #3, it’s worth noting his surprising overlap with #2. In several important ways, Chandler’s The Big Sleep, set in the Los Angeles of the 1930s, is similar to Joseph Conrad’s brilliant novella, The…
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Mystery #1 for Literary Snobs: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Michael Kahn
The topic of my last post on the Poisoned Pen Press blog was about the challenge of convincing literary snobs that there are indeed great works of literature that meet all criteria of that lowly genre known as Mystery. The 3 basic requirements of the genre (as more fully explained in the original post) are:…
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Michael A. Kahn

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