Blind Horse Books

  Grey helped establish the cultural phenomenon of the Western with his prolific output of cowboy novels. Grey, who gave up a career in dentistry to write full time, was one of the first superstar novelists who earned big-time paychecks from writing. He also wrote children’s literature and books about his other passions – hunting, fishing, and baseball. Best known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature and the arts; he idealized the American frontier. The critics never liked his work - too full of larger-than-life characters, too violent and too unrealistic. Grey did not care – he was too busy selling the movie rights to his books to Hollywood producers or having a good time. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book. In addition to the commercial success of his printed works, they had second lives and continuing influence when adapted as films and television productions. His novels and short stori

  TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: Remembering Anton Chekhov, Russian playwright and short story writer famous for The Seagull and Three Sisters, on his birthday. (1860)   A Russian playwright and short story writer, who is among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress." Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull flops at its premiere in St. Petersburg. The audience boos and Chekhov leaves the audience after the first two acts, spending the rest of the play hiding backstage.   After the performance, Chekhov vowed never to write

                                                   DID YOU KNOW…… He claimed many of his ideas came from dreams; throughout his writing life he arranged to be awakened every 90 minutes during his sleep period so he could write down his dreams. In his early writing, van Vogt displayed a wild talent, creating stories of vivid imagery and sudden, dream-like twists of plot and perspective that found an appreciative audience in a genre trying to shake off its image of rockets and ray guns. Encouraged by editor John W Campbell, van Vogt brought his interest in psychology and language to traditional science-fiction themes such as alien contact, interstellar war, time travel and its paradoxes, immortality and the superhuman. He was always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge (akin to modern meta-systems)—the characters in his very first story used a system called "Nexialism" to analyze the alien's behavior, and he became interested in th