collection of stories, essays and poetry. Several are award winners. Bellucci has earned nine first-place awards.
I did a terrible thing once. I lent money to a friend. The amount was not huge, nor was it insignificant; just enough to cause the word "friendship" to feel like a dress that didn't fit right no matter how much you took it in or let it out. That admonition spoken by Polonius to his son, Laertes, to "Neither a borrower, nor a lender be..." must have dawned, too late, on an awful lot of other people as the most farsighted advice ever given to a human being.
Excerpt
All she had to do was mention the fact that the loan was on her mind. A simple remark to this effect...would have sounded like springtime birdsong to my ear.
Professional Reviews
Pastiche or Hodgepodge
5.0 out of 5 stars Pastiche or Hodgepodge, January 16, 2008
By C L Bishop (Florida) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pastiche: Stories and Such (Paperback)
Lucille Bellucci's sixth book, Pastiche, warmly welcomes the reader who already knows her writings back to familiar spaces, some more comfortable and others more menacing.
For the new reader of her work, the "hodgepodge" here presented is a virtuoso performance, including the collection here of numerous award-winning shorter pieces, that carries the reader around the world: from California to Brazil, China, Italy, and from there inward for thought-provoking introspection.
"Friends" of Nicolai Valentin Katcharovsky, a prominent presence in his grand coat and great hat first introduced in the Bellucci's fourth novel, the Stone of Heaven, will laugh and cry at his latest adventures. What can happen to him next?
Readers will enjoy Bellucci's poetry, including some haiku, published for the first time in this form.
Bellucci's plots surprise and delight, just as the adventures she describes as having experienced as her own seem authentic even when slightly incredible. It is her wit and insight that lead readers new and old deeper into the realm of Bellucci's discernment and understanding.
The world press dutifully publishes unending coverage of events across the world, reporting on events and turmoil that touch the lives of many. But such coverage is often superficial and insensitive.
Bellucci's writings are a welcome change. Across the pages of her several short pieces, her characters navigate times of great moment, sharing their survival, their success, their passion, and their laughter. Here there is much to learn.
As with her earlier, more extensive novels, the reader of Pastiche often stands at the protagonist's shoulder through revolution, great change, and the experiencing of once unimaginable events.
These pages beckon the reader to experience great events, meet believable characters, and ponder the meaning of that hodgepodge which is Life.
A Surprising Collection
5.0 out of 5 stars A Surprising Collection, January 28, 2012
By Maestra Déborah - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pastiche: Stories and Such (Paperback)
Pastiche surprised me with each story, with the wildly diverse settings and extraordinary characters. There's the gargantuan Nicholai Valentin Katcharovky, wearing down the immigration man in San Francisco, and Father Malachy "Murph" who built lasting relationships in Guatemala and China but never could get a handle on his Shanghainese. There's also the exquisite, swaying wearer of the obi, "naked above pliant hyacinth silk." Bellucci builds each story masterfully, with enough detail to allow the reader to see under the characters' fingernails and into their hearts. But the author's sense of humor is never overwhelmed by the harsh realities many of her protagonists face. Pastiche is gripping and fun, too--I recommend it highly.
Pastiche is a collection of stories, essays and poetry, not "action/thriller" as described. I will fix that when I find how to do it. What is true about Pastiche is that several of the stories and essays are award winners in literary reviews.
In this eccentric tale set in a small town in northern India, Pawan Mishra masterfully weaves ingenuity and sarcasm in a manner that’s simultaneously hilarious and tragic.
Helios is an award winning novel about a brilliant inventor of new technology, a fallen CEO seeking redemption, and an idealistic youth who comes of age in corporate America.
I Made My Boy Out of Poetry is a powerful literary vision of rare scope, beauty and emotional intensity composed of stories and poems that flow in and out of each other like the most lucid and articulate of dreams. These are portraits and studies of
