Tag: books

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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Writing on Mondays: yea or nay?

Is it the worst day for writing or what?

In the introduction to Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott‘s classic book about the writing life, Lamott writes:

Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all the freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.

Continue reading “Writing on Mondays: yea or nay?”