Thanks for reading the July 2026 issue of This Awful Awesome Life. I hope you try the recipe for Mushroom Barley Soup in our “Twelve Months of Grain.” Previous issues of This Awful Awesome Life are available to read on our website.
Go to www.thisawfulawesomelife.com and start scrolling or you can enter specific search criteria.
August is Vacation/Staycation in This Awful Awesome Life.
I hope to feature an interesting travel article about a trip to Japan along with fabulous photos.
Orlando Bartro, Tony Valerino, Sheila Kirk, Scarlet Carter, and I will be back with more interesting poems, stories, and articles for you.
Our featured author with an August birthday will be American author Daniel Keyes who wrote the Nebula Award winning novel, Flowers for Algernon.
I’ll have my review of Dark Horse, the latest novel in the Calvin Watters Mystery series by Luke Murphy. I always select an exciting mystery when I go on vacation or have a staycation.
We’re moving some of our regular features around to shake things up a bit and keep you on your toes. I’m also hoping to expand our Artist Page to feature more talented creatives. Some people manage to elevate their work to the level of an artform, and we want to support their efforts.
I’ll have more streaming and reading recommendations. “What’s in a Word?” will be back but we’ll be alternating some of our content. We’ll continue the monthly quizzes to exercise our brains, and we’ll continue reviewing books.
For the time being, I’m holding off on a new subscription-based Patreon account featuring short stories and chapter installments of my books as I write them. I also hoped to provide opportunities for book discussions and narrations of short stories. It’s something I want to do, but pesky life keeps getting in the way. When and if this happens, it will remain separated from our online magazine which will always be free and available to everyone. I’m considering the Patreon option because traditional and Indy publishing have changed so drastically in recent years. Now that AI has entered the equation, more changes are coming.
Stay safe. Stay well. You are important, and you are loved.
All my best,
Fran
Answers to the July 2026 American Authors Quiz:
Washington Irving (1783-1859) “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Walden (1854)
Ralph Waldo Emmerson (1803-1882) Representative Men (1850)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860)
James Fenimore Cooper 1827 (1789-1851) The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) “The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
Herman Melville (1819-1891) Moby Dick (1851)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) The Scarlett Letter (1850)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) Little Women (1868)
Henry James (1843-1916) The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
Mark Twain (1835-1910) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Zane Grey (1872-1939) Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) The Awakening (1899)
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) Sister Carrie (1900)
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) The Age of Innocence (1920)
Willa Cather (1873-1947) O Pioneers! (1913)
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) Main Street (1920)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) The Great Gatsby (1925)
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
William Faulkner (1897-1962) The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Harper Lee (1926-2016) To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
Maya Angelou (1928-2014) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)
George R.R. Martin (1948-present) A Game of Thrones (1996)
Louise Erdrich (1954-present) The Night Watchman (2020)
William Styron (1925-2006) The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968)
Joseph Heller (1923-1999) Catch – 22 (1961)
Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) Invisible Man (1952)
James Baldwin (1924- 1987) Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) The Bluest Eye (1970)
Alice Walker (1944-present) The Color Purple (1982)
Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) Wise Blood (1952)
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) Our Town (1938)
Richard Wright (1908-1960) Native Son (1940)
Carson McCullers (1917-1967) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) Naked Lunch (1959)
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) The Big Sleep (1939)
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) All the King’s Men (1946)
Norman Mailer (1923-2007) The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) On the Road (1957)
John Updike (1932-2009) Rabbit, Run (1960)
Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
Colson Whitehead (1969-present) The Underground Railroad (2016)
Tommy Orange (1982-present) There There (2018)
Sherman Alexi (1966-present) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)
Philip Roth (1933-2018) Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) Blood Meridian (1985)
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Arthur Miller (1915-2005) The Crucible (1953)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Leaves of Grass (1855)
Truman Capote (1924-1984) In Cold Blood (1966)
Joan Didion (1934-2021) The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Dominick Dunne (1925-2009) the Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1985)
Ken Kesey (1935-2001) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) I Robot (1950)
Stephen King (1947-present) The Shining (1980)
Joyce Carol Oates (1938 -present) Black Water (1992)
Jesmyn Ward (1977- present) Salvage the Bones (2011)
Michael Chabon (1963-present) The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988)