Self publishing is on the rise. The number of self published book authors is up 181 percent from 2009, according to Bowker bibliographic company. Arizona author Charles G. Irion of Irion Books LLC is part of this growing trend.

As technology progresses, so do the standards and expectations of publishing.

In 1895, Willa Cather, as a young college student, read a paper on Poe to a meeting of literary societies at University of Nebraska, and she claimed:

“With the exception of Henry James and Hawthorne, Poe
is our only master of pure prose.”

To my mind, though, as I read about this paper slightly more than a century later while browsing through the chronology in the back of the Library of America edition of her later novels, I am not sure what to think of Cather’s youthful assessment.

Without further fanfare, I bid you temporary farewell from Novels, Stories, and More. Too much in life is more pressing, and passing time at the blogging keyboard seems wasteful.

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust

“The reader becomes the book; and summer night