Geoffrey Edmund Fox's Blog
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Dec.05.2012
A day late and a dollar short. I was supposed to do my "Blog Hop" entry yesterday, but things happened — including, believe it or not, a visit by Omar Sharif to our little fishing village in Almería (Spain), where he filmed part of "Lawrence of Arabia" 50 years ago! But back to this blog hop....
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Oct.31.2012
We love Paris, ma copine and I, for all the usual reasons. The great monuments, the museums including the famous and the smaller specialized ones, the good tastes in even modest bistros, the tradition of tradition-breaking in all the arts, the urban gaze and bustle and sounds of Paris — ambulance...
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Oct.20.2012
When I first stepped onto the tarmac of Caracas' Maiquetía airport in July, 1963, shortly after my 22d birthday, I knew just four words of Spanish: caballo, pistola, sombrero and mujer. Which may have given me a 2- or 3-word advantage over most of my companions, all of us volunteers recruited in...
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Oct.11.2012
This Book Baby post (Finding a Literary Agent) inspired these reflections.
Your situation may be different, but for me, this is an argument for skipping the whole process, which is why some of us created Thoth Books (named for the Egyptian god of writing seen at left). The kind of f2f...
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Sep.18.2012
This summer I invited three author-editor colleagues to join me in forming a new editorial collective, on a model that other self-publishing authors might want to imitate. We call it Thoth Books (after the ibis-headed god who taught the ancient Egyptians hieroglyphics).
In 2010 I self-published A...
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Sep.01.2012
I'm proud to anounce a new, expanded edition of what The New York Times Book Review described as a “frequently powerful collection of short stories" of Latin America that "leaves us thoroughly wrung out — and aware that we are in the presence of a formidable new writer.”
Smashwords —...
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Nov.09.2011
Eski Cami interior
Edirne, 8/11/2011 — Today as our bare feet padded on the thick carpet of Edirne's Old Mosque — the Eski Cami — and we looked up at its wide dome and laterally to the passionate calligraphy calling out from the walls, I thought again of the verses of the only Sufi...
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Nov.09.2011
Edirne, 7/11/2011 — It has been cloudy and chilly in this dusty city where Turkey's Thracian province reaches out to touch Bulgaria and Greece, a quiet day, the second day of the Kurban Bayramı or "Festival of the Sacrifice," and many businesses are closed.
Merely by looking at a map, even...
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Nov.09.2011
Istanbul, 6/11/ 2011 – We love this city, and since we had already seen the top 3-day tourist attractions on previous visits (Hagia Sophia, Topkapı, etc.) and since we're spending more than a week here (of the 3 we're devoting to exploring Turkey) we feel free to stroll around, take the feribot...
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Nov.09.2011
Istanbul, 1/11/2011 — We are in Sultanahmet in İstanbul now, at 6:30 pm Salı (Tuesday) and the muezzin is calling out from the Blue and other mosques. Despite this medieval throwback (amplified by 21st century loudspeaker technology), this is one of the most sophisticated, diverse and populated...
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Nov.09.2011
Madrid, 10/21/2011 — "We're heading for Turkey," is what that says.
We leave from Madrid on Tuesday, first for a week in the towns and villages of the Kurdish region in southeastern Anatolia (Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Nemrut, Yuvacali), some of the time staying in villagers' homes. I probably won...
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Oct.07.2011
This was fun to read. I admit I have scant knowledge of literary theory, though I have read some Jameson, and the reference here gives us much to think about regarding Proust and other French novels (our sometime collaborator Dirk will no doubt be interested), and the "negative criticism" of "...
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Oct.05.2011
A discussion in LinkedIn, about whether or not it is ethical for the editor of a work to publish a review posing as an independent critic— is deceit ever ethical? —, reminded me of Engels' many reviews and promotional copy for works that he himself had worked out with Marx, including his...
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Oct.05.2011
Dirk van Nouhuys' essay on the novels that have stayed with him (this blog, 2011.9.28) has got me thinking about how I choose fiction to read. Dirk has no patience for those lists of the 100 or 1,000 or however many books "you must read before you die"(try Googling "books"+"before you die" for...
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Oct.05.2011
Being Abbas El Abd by Ahmed Alaidy
In a Cairo circa 2003, inhabited entirely by 20-somethings, the narrator — who may or may not be named Abdullah — gets into terrible jams and awkward situations thanks to a slovenly roommate named Abbas el Abd, who is either a demonic trickster or a...
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He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America.”
—Carson McCullers on Jake Blount, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
About Geoffrey
After graduating from Harvard, I worked in Venezuela and other Latin American countries, finally getting a Ph.D. in sociology (Northwestern U.) and teaching and writing on Latin American themes. I began writing fiction later, including a book of short stories...
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Causes Geoffrey Fox Supports
Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières