The Heroes Vs Villains Writing Contest’s Final Fight
Cast your votes!
By David M. Swindle
Announcing the winners, runners up, and honorable mentions from last year’s contest.
New Fiction: The Problematic Journey of Mr. Scratch
The Winner of The Villains Half of The Contest
By Gene Kendall
Read this story and the winner of the Heroes contest and then cast your vote here for which story should triumph.
New Fiction: The Gift
The Winner of The Heroes Half of The Contest
By Henry Vogel
Read this story and the winner of the Villains contest and then cast your vote here for which story should triumph.
Welcome to A Post-Literate Society
The Bad Road Rising Scribe Sounds Off on a Culture in Decline
By Mike Baron
Remember Borders and B. Dalton’s? They were chain bookstores that are no longer with us. Barnes & Noble struggles to survive, slashing book inventory, turning more and more floor space over to toys, collectibles, DVDs, and games.
Transformative Titles: From St. Augustine to Koontz’s Frankenstein, The Exorcist, & Dinesh D’Souza
Which books and authors most shaped your life? Part 3
By Fred Tribuzzo
Books have been transforming me, getting under my skin, ever since I read Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis as a boy. Many books, and many years later, here are some that I currently enjoy.
PreTeena: February 19-25, 2018
Sunday Comics!
By Allison Barrows
You won’t want to miss these hilarious cartoons depicting the ups and downs of adolescence. Now each week’s strips will debut on Sundays as the lead strip of Liberty Island’s Sunday Comics feature. If you draw a comic and would like to have your work featured on Sundays, please contact us: [email protected]
It’s Time to Begin Your BAD ROAD RISING Binge!
Behold the first two action-packed adventures in Mike Baron’s exhilarating series!
By Mike Baron
Pick up Biker and Sons of Privilege on Amazon. More provocative tales of Josh Pratt are coming soon…
Rites of Passage in Classical Literature for Boys, Part 3: Treasure Island
By David Churchill Barrow
“’One more step, Mr. Hands,’ said I, ‘and I’ll blow your brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,’ I added, with a chuckle…. Something sang like an arrow through the air; I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment – I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim – both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands. They did not fall alone; with a choked cry the coxswain loosed his grasp upon the shrouds, and plunged head first into the water.”
What inspired the author, Robert Louis Stevenson, to place his protagonist in such a precarious position; high up the mizzenmast, looking down upon a half-drunk, half hungover pirate twice his size, bent upon seeing the young Jim Hawkins to “Davy Jones’ locker?”
The Anti-Trump Zone: A Land Beyond Imagination
When the personal is political then every goddamned thing is political, and that’s just insane
By Roy Griffis
From the New York Review of Books, in a discussion of the work of Rod Serling, after a description of a how a character suffers from fevered dreams, comes what is a tiresome and all-too-predictable (bordering on, if not actually invading and annexing) cliché: “I also wake up adrift, in a desperate and unfamiliar reality, wondering if the last year in America has been a dream—I too expect catastrophe, but it’s impossible to know from which direction it will come, whether I am right to trust my senses or if I’m merely sleepwalking while the actual danger becomes ever-more present. One thing I do know is that I’m not alone: since the election of Donald Trump, it’s become commonplace to compare the new normal to living in the Twilight Zone.”
From the wails of our betters, you’d think the Nazi flag was flapping over the entrance of the Pentagon…
7 Book Pairs That Transformed My Life
Join the discussion! Which authors and books have influenced your the most?
By Mark Ellis
After reading excerpts from the Liberty Island Klavan symposium, I decided to take David Swindle up on his call for others to write about books that transformed their lives. For writers, in addition to literature that had great personal impact, books that change the way they approach writing in my opinion qualify as life-changing.
If you’re a person with two or three books going at all times, it may be hard to pinpoint the life-changers; for this exercise I came up with seven pairs that seemed to fit together, and reflected chronological milestones in my history of literary appreciation.
