Bruce Douglas Reeves's Blog
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May.20.2013
I’ve always been restless, but the year I turned twelve I was desperate to escape my life and discover a bigger, better world. Other people, the elite, the rich, people who worked in big offices, got to fly around the world on airplanes, why couldn’t...
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May.13.2013
I’m addicted to exploring the world. Over the years, I’ve visited many countries, often more than once, nosing around, talking with people, seeing how they live, what they’ve created and built, the direction they seem to be heading, from the cities...
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May.08.2013
Delphine was shocked when she first visited Palestine. She discovered a massive wall slicing brutally through towns and farms, keeping people from work, schools, hospitals, and sometimes their families. She found a land in which...
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Apr.26.2013
Why, people ask, do I wander the world? Why do my wife and I spend time in other countries, seeking out places that are different from those we’re used to and are comfortable in?
...
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Apr.22.2013
Like most Americans, I’m terrible at learning languages. I’ve studied several, but only varying amounts of each language stuck. Of course, I should’ve started when I was a small child, but elementary schools didn’t teach languages then...
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Apr.16.2013
Twenty years after the events portrayed in the movie “Argo,” I set foot in Tehran for the first time and began almost a month of exploring the complex, sometimes surprising, country of Iran. We were experienced travelers who had...
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Mar.30.2013
The princess was young, beautiful, spoke English better than Maggie Smith, carried a smart phone everywhere, and we were her guests. One of the most modern countries in the world, India also remains one of the most traditional. It...
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Mar.14.2013
The Palace of the Maharaja of X was going to be our home for the next few nights, while we explored the region.
“This should be fun,” we told each other, and the...
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Mar.04.2013
For four tortuous hours we bounced and lurched over narrow, crumbling mountain roads to a remote forest village in the eastern part of India, an area of tribal people who still live as they did hundreds, even thousands, of years ago...
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Feb.24.2013
The voodoo priest tucked up his white dhoti and knelt on a cloth spread across the dirt in front of the low altar he’d pieced together against the hut wall. Shoulders hunched forward, he chanted prayers while burning incense...
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Feb.18.2013
A spike-like needle piercing one cheek and running through his mouth until it pushed through his other brown cheek, the youth trembled violently five or six feet away from me. Costumed in a multicolored robe and cape, a mirrored crown on...
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Feb.13.2013
Our SUV passed scores of men, women, and children, often colorfully dressed, many barefoot, most carrying heavy burdens on their heads, hiking in the dirt at the edge of the narrow road, on their way to the Full Moon Harvest...
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Feb.07.2013
"She is the grandmother of all tigers," nine year-old Jai told my friend P. and me, as we gazed from the top of our elephant upon the gold and black tiger reclining in the tall grass. Jai, son of the Lodge manager, and the two of us had ridden with...
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Jan.17.2013
A man sits on a low stool while another hunkers next to him on the sidewalk, lathering and shaving his face. A shoeshine man is setting out his tins of polish and brushes on a square of cloth next to a building wall and positioning the foot rest for his...
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Jan.13.2013
In a few hours, we will leave for our third visit to India. The subcontinent is so vast and so complex, we know that we will never finish exploring this ancient, astonishing part of the world. India, of course, leaves...
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How much time do we want to spend with a young, beautiful, talented, self-sufficient, self-confident woman who dictates terms for life herself and to hell with everyone else? Turns out we want to spent a lot of time with her. By the end, one cannot help but to have fallen in love with her...and to feel how deeply she feels her need to give herself and her talent in an attempt to make a better world.
-- Clay Reynolds, series judge on my prize-winning novella DELPHINE, Texas Review Press, November 2012”
—Clay Reynolds' announcement of the prize and his quote for the book blurb
About Bruce
My novella DELPHINE won the Clay Reynolds Novella Competition and was published as a book by Texas Review Press; I've also published three novels: THE NIGHT ACTION (NAL hardback, Signet paper; Great Britain: Andre Deutsch hardback, Mayflower Books paper;...
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Bruce’s Favorite Books
Seven almost perfect novels: THE GREAT GATSBY, LOLITA, THE END OF THE AFFAIR, THE WARS OF LOVE, THE GRASS IS SINGING, LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS, THE GOOD SOLDIER....