Steven J. Kolbe
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For the trip back, we mapped a route that would hit four new state capitals. Number one on the list was Tallahassee, and since no trip to Florida would be complete without visiting Florida-cousins, we coordinated with my sister and her girls to meet us there. As a native Floridian, I was excited to finally…
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On the drive to Panama City Beach, I tasked the children with looking for signs that we were getting closer to Florida. These included things like seagulls, boats, sand, palm trees, and men holding up liquor stores with an alligator as his weapon. We found nearly everything before we’d even left Mississippi, but Margot was…
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Why do you travel? After returning from a three-week vacation to Florida, I decided to take a page from my high school and college students’ playbooks and, instead of reflecting, asked Chat GPT. “Curiosity drives us to see what’s beyond the familiar. We want to understand other cultures, landscapes, foods, languages, and ways of life,”…
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Friends, Family, and Current Residents, I’m always daunted by the Herculean task of condensing the lives of the Millers into two pages. How can all the key events of an entire year fit onto such a small space? An account of the variety and amount of cereal we ate alone would take up an entire
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-for Lulu and Gogo Lucy doesn’t look back. She climbs in her idiosyncratic way—right foot, left knee, right foot, left knee—like one of Margot’s patterns from school. (Which comes next?) And I climb behind her, a human safety net against the treacherously steep and impossibly narrow staircase leading up to the slide. When she does
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At the end of his life, the great American physicist Richard P. Feynman wrote two books not about physics but about his adventures through life–and adventures they certainly were. By twenty-seven years old Feynman, whom everyone called Dick, had met and married the love of his life, earned a PhD from Princeton, been hired onto
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While everyone was falling in and out of love with Kundera in the 1980s, I was learning how to moo like a cow, oink like a pig, baa like a sheep, so you’ll have to forgive me for coming to this, the last of Kundera’s “middle period novels” so late in the game. Fortunately, as…
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Told through four alternating points-of-view, Kundera’s 1967 debut follows the repercussions of a joke told by an undergraduate student in soviet-occupied Czechoslovakian. Kundera draws on three traditions: the senseless labyrinth of fellow Czech writer Franz Kafka, the satirical works produced by citizens of and refugees from the Soviet Union, and the revenge tragedy in which…
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Having read my fair share of craft books, several of them devoted to the mystery genre, I wasn’t sure how much new advice P. D. James’ classic would offer. So I was surprised to find that in eight succinct and highly readable chapters James adumbrates the history of the genre and its challenges as well
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Who is Daniel Quinn? That may be the central mystery in Paul Auster’s first installment of his New York Trilogy, City of Glass. Identity and language are of the utmost importance to the novel from the very beginning, often taking precedence over the stated mystery. Chapter one opens in Quinn’s apartment in “the dead of
Steven J Kolbe 