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Kate’s 2¢: “A flock of crows: and other short stories” by Devin Cabrera
“A flock of crows: and other short stories” by Devin Cabrera
NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…
This book was one of seven on the cartridge the NLS sent to me.
Joe Hempel did a good job narrating this collection of horror stories. Don’t be tempted to read one or two of these short stories at bedtime. You won’t be able to get to sleep.
From the web:
Devin Cabrera, a former filmmaker turned author, brings a cinematic edge to his gripping novels. Drawing from his experience in the film industry, Cabrera infuses his narratives with immersive scenes and dynamic characters. Through his transition to literature, he continues to showcase his talent…
I started my horror/thriller reading journey in June 2023, Welcome to Nightmare Island was my FIRST book into the genre and I absolutely loved …
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
A flock of crows: and other short stories DB129715
Author: Cabrera, Devin
Reading Time: 3 hours, 58 minutes
Production: National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, Library of Congress
Read by: Joe Hempel
Subjects: Occult and Horror Fiction, Short Stories
“A couple wins an all-expense-paid trip to an underwater hotel, but their dream vacation turns into a nightmare when an earthquake unleashes an ancient sea creature from its deep sea prison. Trapped beneath the ocean’s surface, they must fight for their lives against a monstrous predator that should have remained buried forever. A boy moves into a house by the swamp, only to discover that the marsh hides a dark secret. As night falls, a mysterious beast emerges, preying on the children that dare enter its territory. When giant, malevolent clowns invade Earth, a teenage girl is thrust into a world of chaos and carnage. With humanity on the brink of extinction, she must outsmart and outrun the bloodthirsty clowns before she becomes their next meal. A prank gone wrong leads a group of friends into a cornfield after they egg the wrong house, but the field is haunted by an evil scarecrow that will do anything to protect its crops. These and more stories await within the pages of this bone-chilling collection. Are you brave enough to listen?”– From publisher. Unrated. Commercial audiobook.
Old Saybrook : Tantor Media, Inc, 2025.
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Kate’s 2¢: “Fox” by Joyce Carol Oates
NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…
Max Meyers, Rachel L. Jacobs, Gail Shalan, Kirsten Potter, Matt Godfrey, Rebecca Lowman, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Eunice Wong, Ina Barrón, and Fred Berman did a good job of performing the various characters in this very disturbing novel. Pedophiles are so heinous, because of the horrible harm they inflict and they look like the neighbor next door.
A few take aways:
–All the older females, who have aged out of love, are sick with envy of the young.
–As the lighted match is brought close to the flammable’s material explodes, how is it the fault of the flammable material, not the match that ignites it?
–Skinner’s tenets of behaviourism: One is always conditioning others in order to make use of them at some future date; intermittent reinforcement
–How his very maleness assures authority.
–Poetry is a precise language
–dying is an art, like everything else.
–To ghost another is to make of yourself an absence in the life of another.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938)[1] is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award for her novel Them (1969),[2] two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.[3] From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters.[4] She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.[5]
Early life and education[edit]
Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent,[6][7] and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer.[6] She grew up on her parents’ farm outside the town.
Her brother, Fred Jr., and sister, Lynn Ann, were born in 1943 and 1956, respectively. Lynn Ann has autism[6] and is institutionalized, and (as of 2015) Oates has not seen her since 1971.[8] Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York.[9] She characterized hers as “a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status”,[6] but her childhood as “a daily scramble for existence”.[10] Her widowed paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside (née Morningstar), lived with the family and was “very close” to Joyce.[9] After Blanche’s death, Joyce learned that Blanche’s father had killed himself. Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother’s life in writing the novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).[9]
Violence marred the lives of Oates and her recent ancestors: Oates’s mother’s biological father was murdered in 1917, which led to Oates’ mother’s informal adoption. At age fourteen, Oates’s paternal grandmother Blanche survived an attempted murder-suicide at the hands of her own father. He did kill himself.[11] When Oates was a child, her next-door neighbor pleaded guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica Correctional Facility.[12]
Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child.[6] She became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche’s gift of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as “the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!”[13] In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose “influences remain very deep”.[14]
Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter.[9] Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools[6] and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper.[15] She was the first in her family to complete high school.[6]
As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[16]
University[edit]
Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined the Phi Mu fraternity for women. She found Syracuse to be “a very exciting place academically and intellectually”, and trained herself by “writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them”.[17] It was at this point that Oates began reading the work of Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O’Connor, and she noted, “these influences are still quite strong, pervasive”.[14] At the age of 19, she won the “college short story” contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior[18] and graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960,[19] and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961. She was a Ph.D. student at Rice University but left to become a full-time writer.[20]
Evelyn Shrifte, president of the Vanguard Press, met Oates soon after Oates received her master’s degree. “She was fresh out of school, and I thought she was a genius”, Shrifte said. Vanguard published Oates’ first book, the short-story collection By the North Gate, in 1963.[21]
From NLS/BARD/LOC”
Fox: a novel DB130683
Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
Reading Time: 25 hours, 6 minutes
Production: National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, Library of Congress
Read by: Max Meyers, Rachel L. Jacobs, Gail Shalan, Kirsten Potter, Matt Godfrey, Rebecca Lowman, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Eunice Wong, Ina Barrón, Fred Berman
Subjects: Mystery and Detective Stories, Suspense Fiction, Psychological Fiction
“Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be. A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery.” — Provided by publisher. Unrated. Commercial audiobook.
London ; New York : Penguin Random House, 2025.
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Kate’s 2¢: “The Foundling” by Ann Leary
NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…
Laura Benanti did a good job of narrating this story. Hopefully, there are no longer such misguided institutions in existence.
A few take aways:
–Gentle when stroked, fierce when provoked.
–They believe in real social change.
–suffragettes They wanted what men had.
–American ethnic homogeneity
–People want to feel they are worthy and that they belong.
–Better a coward for a minute, then dead for the rest of your life.
–luck always finds a foundling.
From the web:
Ann Leary is the New York Times bestselling author of a memoir and four previous novels, including The Good House, which was recently adapted as a film starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and she has written for the New York Times, Ploughshares, National Public Radio, Redbook and Real Simple, among other publications.
Her new essay collection, I’VE TRIED BEING NICE (Simon Element/MarysueRucci) will be published on June 4, 2024
Ann and her husband Denis Leary live in New York.
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
The Foundling DB111594
Author: Leary, Ann
Reading Time: 12 hours, 43 minutes
Production: National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, Library of Congress
Read by: Laura Benanti
Subjects: Psychological Fiction, Historical Fiction
“It’s 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She’s immediately in awe of her employer–brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women’s suffrage. Now, at age forty, Dr. Vogel runs one of the largest and most self-sufficient public asylums for women in the country. Mary deeply admires how dedicated the doctor is to the poor and vulnerable women under her care. Soon after she’s hired, Mary learns that a girl from her childhood orphanage is one of the inmates. Mary remembers Lillian as a beautiful free spirit with a sometimes-tempestuous side. Could she be mentally disabled? When Lillian begs Mary to help her escape, alleging the asylum is not what it seems, Mary is faced with a terrible choice. Should she trust her troubled friend with whom she shares a dark childhood secret? Mary’s decision triggers a hair-raising sequence of events with life-altering consequences for all.” — Provided by publisher. Unrated. Commercial audiobook.
New York : Simon & Schuster Audio, 2022.
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