Category: ideas

Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Perestroika’ author João Cerqueira

‘Perestroika ended the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. However, oddly enough, the topic was forgotten.’

Author João Cerqueira. Image via ReadersFavorite.com.

November 9 will mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall that once separated communist East Germany from democratic West Germany. While this event may sound like ancient history to some younger readers, I have vivid memories of watching in astonishment the TV news reports of the wall’s dismantling. Today, this act is seen as symbolic of the collapse of the Soviet Union’s style of communism, the collapse of that nation and its Eastern European satellites, a collapse hastened by the political reform movement in the Soviet Union known as “perestroika.”

The downfall of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe is the subject of Portuguese writer João Cerqueira‘s latest novel, Perestroika: An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth. The novel tells the story of a fictitious Eastern Bloc nation, Slavia, that is caught in the social and political upheavals of that era.

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Some writing advice about writing advice

In which a Substacker advises writers to ignore writing advice. Come again?

I had to snicker at the title of this post from Henry Oliver on his Common Reader Substack: Writing advice is a lie.

From there, Oliver offers some advice of his own. He tells us to ignore all that writing advice you see floating around Substack and in books. (Excluding his own, presumably.)

“Almost all of it is wrong,. Flat wrong. Plain wrong. Waste-of-time wrong,” he writes.

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