For Those Seeking Invisible Reality within the Visible
By David A. Sylvester
No sports season has been more thrilling than Indiana University football’s 16-0 record last season… until one brutal hit left its star quarterback lying in the grass… and all the euphoria popped… revealing the ugly truth of tackle football we choose to ignore…
By David A. Sylvester
In downtown Oakland, at 4 o’clock in the morning, I go out for an early coffee. No one is around… yet, there’s the skunk, the sickening burning smell coming from … a security guard doing his rounds… lights illuminating ghost-like clouds trailing behind wherever he goes…
Photos from files and family
Holy Trinity Church was a landmark in the tree-lined, thriving center of Duquesne, PA, outside Pittsburgh, where my cousins grew up in the 1960s. Then the steel mill closed, and the town and church collapsed.
By David A. Sylvester
In today’s reading, the uncaring rich man was cast into hell, the impoverished Lazarus was “carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham.” Which of one these are we, the U.S. Catholics at Mass?
What is meaning but a droplet
of the ordinary in which
we glimpse something
true and beautiful, slight but real?
By David A. Sylvester
He was a very old man … in his late 70s… absorbed in one of the simplest tasks on earth …but his movement had a dignity that I do not remember seeing in the city with its more important tasks.
By David A. Sylvester
I was standing on the white deck around a blue pool, shielding my eyes from the sun… Her face was too close… my bare feet burning on the cement… two parallel walls encircling us and the pool like a corral…
By David A. Sylvester
It’s early morning in Oakland’s Skid Row, and Steve F. is coming at us… bouncing from leg to leg… grinning his manic drug grin.. Artie G. and I dread his approach… until he says something I’ll never forget…
Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain
STORIES: By G. Pascal Zachary, Late Harvest Press, 2025
March 16, 2026
Greg Zachary’s new short stories, collected in Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain, are some of the most memorable stories that I’ve read in a long time. They reveal the inner world of people forming relationships across international boundaries and cultures and describe an emerging globalization of human consciousness.
By John Barth
NOVEL: 1967 revised edition of 1956 original.
June 21, 2020
John Barth’s first novel, The Floating Opera may seem like a warm-up to the author’s later “post-modernist meta-fictions,” On re-reading, I see a model of what a novel can be – a new vision of everyday life, imbued with love and delight at all the world’s absurdities and pleasures.
TV series, Apple Studio
Directed by Mimi Leder. Season 1: 10 Episodes, 2019. Apple TV+.
June 1, 2020
Well-written, deliberately nuanced perspective on male sexual exploitation of vulnerable, ambitious women in a high-pressure news corporation modeled on NBC. Identifies with the victims – at last! – but how about the the poor and powerless around the world, victims of American policies left out of the “news”?
TV SERIES: CBS
Producer Bruno Heller. 7 Seasons, Amazon Prime Video, 2008-15.
June 1, 2020
The story of a whimsical but charming nihilist seeking revenge. Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) works as a “consultant” for the FBI, but is perfectly candid that his real mission is to find and kill the serial killer who murdered his family, legal procedures be damned.
By Kim Steinberg
“Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. I never imagined I would lose my son, Kieran, at thirty-two. I thought he would marry, have his own children, that I would be a grandmother one day.“