Family secrets may shape us all, but it’s the rich, complicated layers of friendship that can save us.

Cate, Renee, and Abby have come to New York for very different reasons, and in a bustling city of millions, they are linked together through circumstance and chance.

Cate has just been named the features editor of Gloss, a high-end lifestyle magazine. It’s a professional coup, but her new job comes with more complications than Cate ever anticipated.

Her roommate Renee will do anything to nab the plum job of beauty editor at Gloss. But snide comments about Renee’s weight send her into an emotional tailspin. Soon she is taking black market diet pills—despite the racing heartbeat and trembling hands that signal she’s heading for real danger.

Then there’s Abby, whom they take in as a third roommate. Once a joyful graduate student working as a nanny part time, she abruptly fled a seemingly happy life in the D.C. suburbs. No one knows what shattered Abby—or why she left everything she once loved behind.

Pekkanen’s most compelling, true-to-life novel yet tells the story of three very different women as they navigate the complications of careers and love—and find the lifeline they need in each other.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Sarah Pekkanen

Sarah Pekkanen is the internationally-bestselling author of the novels The Opposite of Me and Skipping a Beat and the upcoming These Girls, as well as the linked short stories available for ereaders titled “All Is Bright” and “Love, Accidentally.” Please find her on Facebook and twitter! For more information please visit her website at www.sarahpekkanen.com.

Editorial Reviews

“Sarah Pekkanen’s latest celebrates the healing power of female friendship for three very different young women sharing a New York City apartment. At turns bittersweet, laugh-out-loud funny, and painfully real, you’ll wish you could move in with these girls.” —Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Lone Wolf and Sing You Home

“The honesty and complexity that Sarah Pekkanen brings to her three main characters in These Girls is impressive and rare. You can’t help but root for each one of them as they struggle to strike that elusive balance between professional success and personal happiness. The bonds among Pekkamen’s female heroines will have you reaching for the phone to hold your own best girlfriends a little closer.” –Nicolle Wallace, New York Times bestselling author of Eighteen Acres

“In These Girls, Sarah Pekkanen again proves her innate understanding of women’s relationships. With a style that’s both wry and heartfelt, readers will absolutely recognize themselves and their friendships on the pages. These Girlsis lively and engaging and ultimately satisfying, so get comfortable because you won’t be able to put it down!” –Jen Lancaster, author of Bitter Is the New Black

Sarah Pekkanen promotes latest book, “These Girls”

The Washington Post Book Review – April 14, 2012 (Excerpt)

Growing up in Bethesda, Sarah Pekkanen used to wander the shelves of Barnes & Noble, making a little space at the spot where her novel would go one day.

Tuesday she was there promoting her latest book, “These Girls.”

Now an international bestseller, with a glowing endorsement from Jodi Picoult, Pekkanen has a new three-book deal with Atria/Simon & Schuster to bring out a novel every spring through 2015.

A former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, she wrote her first novel at Chuck E. Cheese’s while her three boys ran through rolls of tokens. With no idea how to find an agent, she went to Barnes & Noble and looked for books like hers. [Read the full article...]

THE SABRINA STRONG SERIES by LORELEI BELL

Book One: Vampire Ascending [More Info...]

Book Two: Vampire’s Trill [More Info...]

In the tradition of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and Carolyn Jessop’s Escape, Unorthodox is a captivating story about a young woman determined to live her own life at any cost.

The Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism is as mysterious as it is intriguing to outsiders. In this arresting memoir, Deborah Feldman reveals what life is like trapped within a religious tradition that values silence and suffering over individual freedoms.

The child of a mentally disabled father and a mother who abandoned the community while her daughter was still a toddler, Deborah was raised by her strictly religious grandparents, Bubby and Zeidy. Along with a rotating cast of aunts and uncles, they enforced customs with a relentless emphasis on rules that governed everything from what Deborah could wear and to whom she could speak, to what she was allowed to read. As she grew from an inquisitive little girl to an independent-minded young woman, stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to imagine an alternative way of life. She had no idea how to seize this dream that seemed to beckon to her from the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but she was determined to find a way. The tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until, at the age of seventeen, she found herself trapped in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she had met for only thirty minutes before they became engaged. As a result, she experienced debilitating anxiety that was exacerbated by the public shame of having failed to immediately consummate her marriage and thus serve her husband. But it wasn’t until she had a child at nineteen that Deborah realized more than just her own future was at stake, and that, regardless of the obstacles, she would have to forge a path—for herself and her son—to happiness and freedom.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Deborah Feldman

Deborah Feldman was raised in the Hasidic community of Satmar in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. She attends Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City with her son.

Editorial Review

In her debut memoir, Feldman recounts the many struggles endured while growing up within a particularly orthodox branch of Hasidic Judaism. The daughter of mentally unstable parents, the author was raised by her Hasidic grandparents, whose allegiance to their religious and cultural traditions often proved problematic for the young Feldman. Cloistered from the secular world, the author’s pinhole-sized view of New York kept her at a continual disadvantage, providing a singular narrative for understanding the world beyond her neighborhood. As she matured, Feldman became more aware of the inner turmoil “brewing madly between my own thoughts and the teachings I was absorbing.” As she continued to question her faith, she soon recognized the tyrannical aspects of the traditions, the culmination of which led to an arranged marriage for her and another young Hasid, Eli. Despite the sect’s blessing, the marriage soon faltered, primarily due to sexual problems spurred by an utter lack of knowledge by both partners. The Hasidic community’s uncompromising insularity rendered the young couple woefully unprepared for their relationship, as well as the parental responsibilities that followed soon after. After Eli continued to place his strict observance of Judaic tradition above the health of his pregnant wife, Feldman acknowledged her own unimportance in their relationship. Having endured her second-class citizenship long enough, she took her child and fled to the outside world, basking in her newfound liberty. It was a bold move, but Feldman doesn’t fully capture the significance of her departure. – Kirkus Reviews

“Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots” by Deborah Feldman

The Washington Post Book Review – April 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

“I can’t help my natural impulse to talk back,” Deborah Feldman writes, describing her tendency as a child to correct a teacher’s grammatical mistake or misquotation. “It results in a world of trouble that I could easily save myself from, if I could only learn to keep quiet.” In “Unorthodox,” her memoir of growing up in the strict Satmar Jewish community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that rebellious streak eventually led to the ultimate act of defiance: leaving the community behind.

From a young age, Feldman never quite fit into a restrictive world where Yiddish is the vernacular, and women never go to college and are frequently married off in their teens. Branded an outcast because of her mother’s flight from the community and her father’s mental illness, she was raised by her grandparents and lived in constant fear of being caught reading secular books in English. (Naturally Roald Dahl’s “Matilda,” who also had to keep her bookworm ways a secret, was among her favorites.) But once her son was born, that inkling of rebellion became an urgency to escape. [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

Anne Tyler gives us a wise, haunting, and deeply moving new novel in which she explores how a middle-aged man, ripped apart by the death of his wife, is gradually restored by her frequent appearances—in their house, on the roadway, in the market.

Crippled in his right arm and leg, Aaron spent his childhood fending off a sister who wants to manage him. So when he meets Dorothy, a plain, outspoken, self-dependent young woman, she is like a breath of fresh air. Unhesitatingly he marries her, and they have a relatively happy, unremarkable marriage. But when a tree crashes into their house and Dorothy is killed, Aaron feels as though he has been erased forever. Only Dorothy’s unexpected appearances from the dead help him to live in the moment and to find some peace.

Gradually he discovers, as he works in the family’s vanity-publishing business, turning out titles that presume to guide beginners through the trials of life, that maybe for this beginner there is a way of saying goodbye.

A beautiful, subtle exploration of loss and recovery, pierced throughout with Anne Tyler’s humor, wisdom, and always penetrating look at human foibles.

About Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is her nineteenth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Editorial Review

Some might consider the latest from Tyler (Noah’s Compass, 2010, etc.) typically wise and charming, while others will dismiss it as cloying. She employs a first-person narrator, a 36-year-old man named Aaron, who works for a small-family publishing firm that specializes in its Beginners series. “These were something on the order of the Dummies books, but without the cheerleader tone of voice,” explains Aaron, who proceeds to offer the sort of insight that could come from almost any Tyler novel: “Anything is manageable if it’s divided into small enough increments, was the theory, even life’s most complicated lessons.” At the start of the book, Aaron is in the beginning stages of mourning, after a tree crashed through his house and crushed his slightly older wife. She was a doctor; Aaron is “crippled” and something of an oddball. As Tyler’s readers recognize, we are each of us crippled and oddball, deep down inside, and the fact that Aaron’s was a marriage of misfits makes it no different from any other. Early on, Aaron receives visits from his dead wife, whom no one else can see, and whom he admits might well be a projection or an apparition. If he is an unreliable narrator, he is also a flawed one, often sounding more like a much older woman than like a man his age (very few of whom use terms like “busy-busy”). Mourning is both a rite of passage and a process of discovery for Aaron, who early worries that, “I can’t do this…I don’t know how. They don’t offer any courses in this; I haven’t had any practice,” but who is ultimately not a tragic but comic figure, one who will (more or less) live happily ever after. – Kirkus Reviews

Anne Tyler’s ‘The Beginner’s Goodbye’: Widower keeps running into his late wife

The Washington Post Book Review – March 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

The opening line of Anne Tyler’s 19th novel is self-consciously clever: “The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.” For a few pages, “The Beginner’s Goodbye” sounds like the sort of droll story Jose Saramago might write if he lived in Baltimore. But Tyler drops the spectral comedy almost immediately and returns to Earth with another wry tale of mournful folks with quirky occupations. In other words, it’s like the ghost of an Anne Tyler novel — a little immaterial but with enough residual matter to remind us of what we love about her books in the flesh.

Not that we see much of Tyler in the flesh. The 70-year-old Baltimore writer, who was raised as a Quaker, isn’t a Thomas Pynchon-style recluse, but she’s grown far more media-shy than most best-selling authors who bring out a book every two or three years. No glad-handing on the bookstore circuit for her, no chatty Facebook page, no bons mots over Twitter. On Friday, the author will give what’s being billed as her first broadcast interview in 35 years to NPR.

The timing of that rare appearance is odd. Fans who remember the author’s wonderful “Saint Maybe”; “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and “Breathing Lessons,” which won a Pulitzer in 1989, will have to concede that “The Beginner’s Goodbye” is one of Tyler’s minor novels, along the lines of “Noah’s Compass” from 2010.

The narrator, Aaron Woolcott, works as an editor at his family’s vanity press, which publishes the “Beginner’s” series, “something on the order of the ‘Dummies’ books,” he tells us, “but without the cheerleader tone of voice — more dignified”: e.g., “The Beginner’s Colicky Baby,” “The Beginner’s Monthly Budget,” “The Beginner’s Spice Cabinet.” It’s 2007, but the Internet has passed over Woolcott Publishing, which glides along in this model-train version of an American city that looks closer to Mayberry R.F.D. than to the largest city in Maryland. [Read the full article...]

The Art Of The Everyday: The Alchemy Of Anne Tyler

NPR Book Review – March 30, 2012 (Excerpt)

Authors today vie for the attention of the reading public with interviews, Facebook postings and tweets. But Anne Tyler, whose 20th novel, The Beginner’s Goodbye, is poised for release next week, has maintained her distance from the din. Famously shy, Tyler hasn’t done a face to face broadcast interview in years, preferring perhaps to let her books speak for themselves.

“I did do one about 35 years ago,” she says. “I don’t have that much to say, so I figure about every 35 years will do it, right? It does make me very self-conscious when I go back to writing, after I talk about writing.”

The Beginner’s Goodbye is set in Baltimore’s picturesque Roland Park, the community she has immortalized in her fiction — an idyll of winding, tree-shaded streets and beautiful old houses. Of course, Tyler jokingly points out that her characters live on “the wrong side” of the neighborhood — an area no less lovely, but with slightly smaller houses. [Read the full article...]

Grieving Lessons - ‘The Beginner’s Goodbye,’ by Anne Tyler

The New York Times Book Review – May 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

Over five decades of exuberant shape-shifting across the fictional landscape, Anne Tyler has cut the steady swath of a literary stalwart, writing novel after novel whose most memorable characters inhabit a cosmos all their own, a contemporary meta-­Baltimore populated by ordinary if idiosyncratic citizens, middle-class homebodies cocooned yet smothered by their families. What makes each story distinctive is the particular way its characters rebel against hereditary confines, cope with fateful crises or forge relationships with new acquaintances who rock their world.

Tyler must have fans who can peg a life’s joys and trials to her books: backpacked through Greece with “A Slipping-Down Life,” honeymooned with “Celestial Navigation,” juggled “The Accidental Tourist” with nursing infant, maintained sanity with “Breathing Lessons” while negotiating cutthroat divorce, lost self in “Ladder of Years” during chemo infusions, was downloading “Noah’s Compass” when phone rang with news of first grandchild. My introduction to Tyler was, as for so many readers, “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.” I opened it on a People Express flight from Newark to Burlington, Vt., in 1983. Somewhere over New England, I fell in love. I was captivated, charmed and moved. How captivated readers will be by Tyler’s 19th novel, “The Beginner’s Goodbye,” may depend in part on how receptive they are to ghosts — more precisely, to the notion that a loved one can loiter with us beyond death because of “unfinished business.” [Read the full article...]

THE LONDONDERRY AIR

Testament of an Ulster Gunman
A Novel by Garrad Gawler 

It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.

With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.

The Londonderry Air is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon Kindle (US), Amazon.co.uk, Amazon Kindle (UK), Barnes & Noble, smashwords.com, and any other good bookstore.

For more information on Garrad Gawler and to read an excerpt of “The Londonderry Air,” please see the author’s section on this website.

In All There Is, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay shares stories of love and marriage from the revolutionary oral history project, revealing the many and remarkable journeys that relationships can take.

In stories that carry us from the excitement and anticipation of courtship to the deep connection of lifelong commitment, we discover that love is found in the most unexpected of places—a New York tollbooth, a military base in Iraq, an airport lounge—and learn that the course it takes is as unpredictable as life itself.  As the storytellers in this book start careers, build homes, and raise families, we witness the life-affirming joy of partnership, the comfort of shared sorrows, and profound gratitude in the face of loss.

These stories are also testament to the heart’s remarkable endurance. In All There Is we encounter love that survives discrimination, illness, poverty, distance—even death. In the courage of people’s passion we are reminded of the strength and resilience of the human spirit.  This powerful collection bares witness to real love, in its many varied forms, enriching our understanding of that most magical feeling.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Dave Isay

Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting honors, including five Peabody Awards and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He is the author/editor of numerous books that grew out of his public radio documentary work, including two StoryCorps books: Listening Is an Act of Love and Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps, both New York Times bestsellers.

Editorial Review

Peabody and MacArthur winner Isay (Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps, 2010, etc.) presents readers with another compelling collection of stories centered on love and marriage. In more than 30 touching personal accounts, interviewees talk of falling in love, remembering a lost loved one or finding love when they felt it was no longer possible to love or be loved. Covering long-term relationships and newlyweds, gay and straight partners and long-distance interracial bonds formed via e-mails and letters, the devotion to another person continues despite wars, illness and death. A look, a touch, a smile, the color of someone’s hair—these are the tiny details that we remember because “love is all there is…when you take your last breath you remember the people you love, how much love you inspired, and how much love you gave.” Full of warmth and affection, friendship and tenderness, the overall feeling of the collection is summed up by contributor Sonya, who states, “there’s nobody I’d rather travel through life with than you.” These stories, writes Isay, “speak to the enduring and redemptive power of love…In a culture that often feels consumed by all that’s phony or famous, these stories give me hope.” – Kirkus Reviews

In A StoryCorps Booth, Love Is ‘All There Is’

NPR Book Review – February 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

Dave Isay begins his new book with a quote from co-worker Lillie Love, whose name resonates deeply with his latest project. Shortly before she died in 2010, Love said, “Love is all there is … When you take your last breath, you remember the people you love, how much love you inspired and how much love you gave.”

Love worked with Isay at the Atlanta office of his StoryCorps project. In the organization’s new book, All There Is: Love Stories From StoryCorps, everyday people narrate their personal experiences with love.

“One theme that keeps coming up is that no one should ever, ever give up hope on love,” Isay tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “It seems like it’s not in the cards for people, and then it just sneaks up behind you and there it is.”

In one interview, 93-year-old Paul Wilson tells his daughter, Marty Smith, how he met her mother. “One day I was waiting in the lobby for the elevator, the door slid aside, and there she stood: the prettiest girl I had ever seen,” Wilson recalls.

His future wife was the elevator operator. The first few times he took her lift, he couldn’t muster the courage to say much more than his floor number and “thank you.” But he didn’t even have to say that much — she remembered his floor.

“Thank goodness she broke the ice!” Wilson says. “She said, ‘Do you know where you can get some good chop suey?’ How about that for an opening line? I said, ‘Sure. The cafe across the street is a Chinese cafe. They serve chop suey.’” [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Written with charm and wit, No Cheating, No Dying investigates one of the most universal human institutions–marriage. Elizabeth Weil and her husband Dan have two basic ground rules for their marriage: no cheating, no dying.  For ten years it’s worked fine, but Elizabeth started to wonder if it could be better.

Elizabeth Weil believes that you don’t get married in a white dress, in front of all your future in-laws and ex-boyfriends but gradually, over time, through all the road rage incidents and pre-colonoscopy enemas, good and bad dinners, and all the small moments you never expected to happen or much less endure.  In this book, Weil examines the major universal marriage issues—sex, money, mental health, in-laws, children—through bravely recounting her own hilarious, messy, and sometimes difficult relationship. She seeks out the advice of financial planners, psychoanalysts, therapists, household management consultants, priests, rabbis, and the United States government. Woven into this funny and forthright narrative is Weil’s extensive research on marriage and marriage improvement. The result is an illuminating and entertaining read that is a fresh addition to the body of literature about marriage.

About Elizabeth Weil

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a platform she frequently uses to explore the pressing issues in her life. She has also published numerous personal essays in Vogue, Real Simple, Glamour, and other magazines.

Editorial Reviews

“Weil approaches this creative act with unfaltering self awareness, and this is what makes her pursuit so successful and readable. Indeed, the author’s own surprise at what she finds when rooting around the depths of her union translates to moments of unanticipated beauty on the printed page.” -Booklist

“This is such a smart and rich and insightful book (sometimes painfully funny, other times funnily painful) about what it really takes to keep the turbines of modern marriage going. Reading this memoir, I found myself rooting not only for Liz and Dan, but for all of us — all married couples who’ve been humbled by life and stress, but who keep struggling and striving, year after year, to somehow keep it together.” –Elizabeth Gilbert

“Ever wish you had a really articulate, thoughtful friend who had the guts to tell you every important and ridiculous thing about her marriage? Allow me to introduce you to the wise and generous Elizabeth Weil. You’ll love her.” —Kelly Corrigan, New York Times bestselling author of The Middle Place and Lift

‘No Cheating, No Dying’ author on making a good marriage better

The Washington Post Book Review – February 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

Elizabeth Weil is a striver, working constantly to be a better mother, a faster runner, a more successful writer.

She has been married for more than a decade, too, but that role never got much of her effort. “I had an attitude about it that it was either star-crossed or it wasn’t star-crossed,” she explains.

But at some point, Weil realized her marriage was getting short shrift, and she began to wonder if it could be enhanced by some deliberate attention.

With her initially reluctant husband, she embarked on a year-long relationship-improvement project, documented in her just-released book, “No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried to Make It Better” (Scribner, $25).

The book is a nakedly honest account of the sometimes painful attempts she and her husband make to understand their relationship and enhance it through therapy, marriage education, sex coaching and religious counseling.

Weil makes it abundantly obvious that she adores her husband, Dan Duane, who is also a writer. But she doesn’t spare details about his occasional bouts of depression, the pain he caused her at the beginning of their relationship or his complicated relationship with her family. Nor does she paint herself as anything other than a deeply flawed woman, sometimes nagging and often ignoring Duane for the sake of their two daughters. [Read the full article...]

The Marriage Plot - ‘No Cheating, No Dying,’ by Elizabeth Weil

The New York Times Book Review – March 9, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Elizabeth Weil and Dan Duane married in July 2000, they made a straightforward pact: no cheating, no dying. Other less dramatic problems might lie on the horizon, like money (both are writers) and religion (she’s Jewish, he’s not). Over time, neither of these issues created difficulties, but nine years and two daughters later Weil came up with the idea of improving their good marriage by undertaking a year of marital-skills improvement — a project she wrote about for The New York Times Magazine. Reluctantly, her husband agreed to the plan, even though both were aware of an old saying: “If you’re going to poke around the bushes, you’d better be prepared to scare out some snakes.”

Along the way, Weil and Duane do encounter some snakes, but the story of their marital-improvement journey is both hilarious and insightful. “No Cheating, No Dying” places an intimate relationship under scrupulous, self-imposed scrutiny.

Significantly, Duane is someone who works tirelessly (“O.K., obsessively,” according to his wife) at the acquisition of skills. He teaches himself to be a master carpenter while doing house repairs and a master chef while preparing the family’s daily meals. In fact, he’s so dedicated a cook that the couple are eventually spending more on food than on their mortgage. Weil also assesses her own faults: being stingy about giving compliments to a spouse who has grown up in an atmosphere of lavish praise, and wishing to spend family weekends with her parents in a gated community he loathes. [Read the full article...]

VAMPIRE ASCENDING
by Lorelei Bell

Exciting Hunt For A Vampire Serial Killer in Chicago

Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...]

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

As a little girl growing up in Boston, Miriam Bluestein fantasized about a life lived on stage, specifically in a musical. Get married, have a family—sure, maybe she’d do those things, too, but first and foremost there was her career. As a woman, she is both tormented and consoled by those dreams in her day-to-day existence with her family, including a short-tempered husband, a cranky mother, and three demanding children, one of whom, Ethan, shows real talent for the stage.

It is through Ethan that Miriam strives to realize her dreams. As she pushes him to make the most of his talent, the rest of her life gradually comes undone, with her husband becoming increasingly frustrated and her other two children—Sam, a mass of quirks and idiosyncrasies, and Julie, hostile and bitter—withdrawing into their own worlds. Still Miriam dreams, praying for that big finale, which, when it comes, is nothing that she ever could have imagined.

Broadway Baby marks the fiction debut of a nationally acclaimed award-winning memoirist and poet, “an acute observer of moments, people, art and language [who] packs even seemingly simple stories with many layers of meaning” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

About Alan Shapiro

Alan Shapiro is the author of ten volumes of poetry and two memoirs, one of which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, among other honors. He currently teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Find him online at www.alanshapiro.org.

Book World: ‘Broadway Baby,’ by Alan Shapiro

The Washington Post Book Review – January 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

The world can be divided into people who have impossible mothers and those who don’t. These two groups will never understand each other. Those with loving mothers will never get it. A mother, after all, is supposed to be capable of the highest, strongest love; it beats brotherly love by a mile, God knows. If we’re perishing in a burning building, our mothers are supposed to drop whatever they’re doing and run in to pull us out.

But what if Mom set the fire? What if she looks over one balmy summer evening, as my mother once did to my little sister, and utters the decisive words, “You make me sick.”

The children of women like these are doomed to spend a lot of their lives figuring out their mothers — or trying to. But they’re an enigma. Alan Shapiro, a prize-winning poet with 10 ­volumes of verse and two memoirs behind him, tackles the problem in his first novel, “Broadway Baby.” He sketches a bereft little girl, Miriam, with an awful mother who’s taken her to see a Broadway musical. Miriam decides immediately that life is far better behind the footlights than out in the seats. After all, life in a musical comedy is clean and easy to explain. She grows up in the 1940s to the music of “Oklahoma!” and lives for many months taking on the persona of Julie, the tragic mulatto from “Show Boat” as her avatar, her protector, her Blessed Mother. [Read the full article...]

The Sabina Strong Series Continues – Vampire’s Trill

Lorelei Bell has created another unique and mesmerizing mystery masterwork that tops its prequel Vampire Ascending in drama, fast-paced action, love, passion, heartache, and devastation. New friends, new adventures, shocking revelations, and harrowing experiences make for riveting reading in this second installment of the Sabrina Strong Series. Sabrina learns more details – through Vasyl’s recounting of his human and vampire life – of what her role as a sibyl means and how the past and the future will come together. She finally learns what role Vasyl has played in his search for the next sibyl and why she is so tremendously important. [Read more...]

Vampire’s Trill is available at Amazon.Com – including the Kindle Version, Barnes & Noble – including the Nook Version, and any other good bookstores.

Also available in the United Kingdom at Amazon.co.uk including the Kindle version.

Penny Vincenzi, queen of riveting family drama, delivers her most page-turning saga yet in this novel of intrigue, sure to please her legions of fans. The night before her lavish wedding, Cressida Forrest went to bed serene and happy. By morning she had vanished–without apparent cause, and without a trace. Shocked, anxious, and uncomprehending, the two families face a long day of revelations, as a complex, fragile web of sexual, marital, and financial secrets is ripped apart by Cressida’s disappearance.

About Penny Vincenzi

PENNY VINCENZI before becoming a novelist, worked at such magazines as Vogue, Tatler, and Cosmopolitan. She is the author of The Dilemma, Almost a Crime, No Angel, Something Dangerous, Into Temptation, Sheer Abandon, An Absolute Scandal, An Outrageous Affair, Windfall, and Forbidden Places.

Editorial Review

Set in 1990s England (and originally published in 1994), this novel features several situations that could only exist in an era without ubiquitous cell phones. When Cressida, delicate daughter of society gynecologist James Forrest, disappears the morning of her wedding day, she’s well and truly incommunicado. Unfolding over two days, the Cressida debacle wreaks no end of recriminations (and accompanying flashbacks) among James’ overprivileged and ingrown circle of family and friends. James himself is at the epicenter—his only brush with malpractice resulted in the birth of Ottoline (now 20, a supermodel, and for reasons that defy cursory explanation, a wedding guest) and the stillbirth of her twin sister. Cressida’s older sister Harriet has always resented her—for being their parents’ favorite and for causing Harriet’s banishment to a bleak boarding school. Now Harriet’s fashion business teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. James’ oldest friend Theo, a billionaire, unwittingly abetted Cressida’s escape by paying for her flying lessons, and was, until his marriage to fifth wife Sasha, carrying on an affair with Harriet. Their mutual attraction lingers. Elderly but still vital godparents, world traveler Sir Merlin and French sophisticate Janine, attempt unsuccessfully to lighten the prevailing gloom. The younger generation, including Theo’s dissolute son Mungo, Rufus, son of James and his long-term mistress Susie, and Oliver, the American groom left at the altar, are as mired in melodrama as their elders. Facts emerge revealing Cressida to be less English rose than shrewd operator. As the search for Cressida intensifies, we learn interesting information about the other characters. – Kirkus Reviews

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The opera singer Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci was one of the most famous celebrities of the eighteenth century. Mozart and Bach both composed for him. He was nothing less than a rock star of his day, with a massive female following. He was also a castrato.

Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, Helen Berry’s compelling account of the unconventional love story of the castrato and his wife offers fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain. Berry vividly describes how women flocked to Tenducci’s concerts and found him irresistible. Indeed, his young singing pupil, Dorothea Maunsell, found him so irresistible that she eloped with him. A huge scandal erupted and her father persecuted them mercilessly.

Dorothea joined her husband at his concerts, achieving a status she could never have dreamed of as a respectable girl. She also wrote a sensational account of their love affair, an early example of a teenage novel. Embroiled in debt, the Tenduccis fled to Italy, and the marriage collapsed when she fell in love with another man. There followed a highly publicized and unique marriage annulment case in the London courts. Everything hinged on the status of the marriage, whether the husband was capable of consummation, and what exactly had happened to him as a small boy in a remote Italian hill village decades before.

Telling the remarkable story of Tenducci for the first time, The Castrato and His Wife is both an exhilarating read and a perceptive commentary on the meaning of marriage, one that still resonates today.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Helen Berry

Helen Berry is Reader in Early Modern History at Newcastle University. She is the author of numerous articles on the history of eighteenth-century Britain, and is the co-editor (with Elizabeth Foyster) of The Family in Early Modern England (2007). This is her second book.

Editorial Reviews

“By using classical opera and the life and loves of a prominent castrato as a lens, Berry explores the themes of romance, sex and marriage, and, more broadly, 18th-century European social life and customs. Recommended for readers who enjoy opera, classical music in general, and European history.” – Library Journal

“Writing clearly, judiciously, and sympathetically about all the dramatis personae, especially the heroic but improvident Tenducci, who retained his professional stature throughout, historian of the family Berry rescues an eighteenth-century scandal from oblivion. Utterly enthralling.” – Booklist

“Berry addresses a topic we still find mysterious, and Tenducci’s distinctive situation is surprisingly relevant to the ongoing question of what constitutes legal marriageEL An intriguing story of a castrato’s unprecedented marriage and its implications for society at large.” –Shelf Awareness

“The Castrato and His Wife” by Helen Berry

The Washington Post Book Review – January 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

In 1775, Dorothea Maunsell and her new husband, William Long Kingsman, went to court to show that they were indeed legally married. They had already had two wedding ceremonies (one in Italy, the other in England), but there was a problem: a long, public record of Dorothea already being married to opera singer Ferdinando Tenducci. Those two had eloped in 1766 and had lived as a couple in England and then Italy. But Dorothea and William went to court to argue that the earlier liaison was in fact no real marriage. Tenducci had been castrated as a boy so as to preserve his pure voice. As a eunuch, he was deemed physically and legally incapable of being married.

Helen Berry, a gifted historian with a great story to tell, relates that the intentional removal of testicles was banned by the pope in 1587, as was the marriage of eunuchs. But the surgical mutilation continued for the next two centuries because, as Berry writes, “The fully trained castrato voice epitomized everything about Baroque style — artifical, sensuous, luxurious, and exotic.” As a youngster Tenducci was singled out for his lovely voice, and “someone in authority” probably suggested that having him castrated could lead to some money for his poor family. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Set against the tragic events of the Oklahoma City bombings, Breaking and Entering follows Christian/Jewish couple Louise and Richard Shapiro as they move from California to rural Michigan with their daughter Molly in an attempt to save their marriage. They find their core beliefs about life and love tested as school counselor Louise’s students blame Satan for their homosexuality while Richard’s new buddies gather arms to defend themselves against enemies at home and abroad. Pollack’s America is divided and splintered, yet she writes with hope and humor…Breaking and Entering challenges the stereotypes we hold about our fellow Americans, reminding us of the unexpected bonds that can form across the divide between so-called Red and Blue states.

About Eileen Pollack

Award-winning novelist EILEEN POLLACK is the Zell Director of the University of Michigan’s MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Editorial Reviews

Eileen Pollack’s new novel, “Breaking and Entering,” takes place in rural Michigan in 1995 — the epicenter and high point of the militia movement, before increased scrutiny and revulsion at the Oklahoma City bombing put some militia groups out of business and sent others underground. (Though not a militiaman, the bomber Timothy McVeigh attended their meetings and spent time on a Michigan farm with his fellow conspirator Terry Nichols.) The Oklahoma City attack comes about a third of the way through Pollack’s book, a real-world event that informs and shadows the fictional ones. …Quite a lot of bad things happen in “Breaking and Entering.” Pollack is an engaging writer with a first-rate eye for the telling sociological detail…. Since the author’s intent is to explore intolerance, hatred and evil, it is not enough that these forces merely simmer and self-perpetuate. The stakes are raised, and escalating consequences play out. …–Jean Thompson, The New York Times Book Review

A compassionate, humorous new novel about the ambiguities of modern life. After his patient commits suicide, a shattered Richard Shapiro and his wife, Louise, both therapists, move from upscale, liberal Marin County, California, to a rural Michigan village in 1995. But so much for the great escape: Louise takes up with a magnetic married minister, and Richard befriends members of the local militia, which has ties to the Oklahoma City bomber. Set against the backdrop of a divided America, Breaking and Entering by Eileen Pollack is a novel laced with compassion, humor and wisdom about the ambiguities of modern life. –Lynn Schnurnberger, More Magazine

Louise Shapiro is thoroughly beset in this thorny, lucid novel. Her bad luck begins in California, where her husband abandons his psychology practice and takes a job in a rural Michigan prison. Louise struggles to adjust to the heartland, which seems overpopulated with religious nuts and militia members. Her husband drifts away into a rebellious, gun-toting fugue, and the lover she takes becomes remote in his own way. … Her increasingly nuanced view of the sociopolitical divide is reflected in Pollack’s sensitive portrayals of both liberal Louise and her ilk, and their conservative counterparts. Weaving the personal with the political, Pollack… creates an encompassing haze of dissatisfaction and misdirected passion. Despite the unrelenting misfortune, though, the tone is more solemn than dark; there’s a beautiful contemplativeness, and a believable sense of redemption in the end. –Publisher’s Weekly

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

In the new novel from the author of Last Night at the Lobster, a middle-age couple goes all in for love at a Niagara Falls casino

Stewart O’Nan’s thirteenth novel is another wildly original, bittersweet gem like his celebrated Last Night at the Lobster. Valentine’s weekend, Art and Marion Fowler flee their Cleveland suburb for Niagara Falls, desperate to recoup their losses. Jobless, with their home approaching foreclosure and their marriage on the brink of collapse, Art and Marion liquidate their savings account and book a bridal suite at the Falls’ ritziest casino for a second honeymoon. While they sightsee like tourists during the day, at night they risk it all at the roulette wheel to fix their finances-and save their marriage. A tender yet honest exploration of faith, forgiveness and last chances, The Odds is a reminder that love, like life, is always a gamble.

About Stewart O’Nan

Stewart O’Nan is the author of twelve previous novels, including Songs for the Missing, A Prayer for the Dying, and Snow Angels. In Faithful, he and Stephen King chronicled the 2004 Boston Red Sox. He was born, raised, and lives in Pittsburgh with his family.

Editorial Review

An emotional richness permeates this short novel about a couple on the verge of ending their marriage while pondering whether they can salvage it.

In recent years, O’Nan (Emily, Alone, 2011, etc.) has emerged as an accomplished chronicler of the bittersweet mundane, the everyday stories of characters who are no better or worse than their readers, but simply human, suffering through lost jobs, disintegrating families, dashed dreams, while showing a resilience in the appreciation of whatever blessings their lives afford them. Marking their 30th wedding anniversary, Art and Marion prepare for their impending divorce by taking one last trip together, a re-creation of their honeymoon at Niagara Falls. It’s a splurge they can no longer afford, as they’ve both lost their jobs and they’re about to lose their house, but Art hopes that going for broke at the casino with what little they have saved can reverse their fortunes. And though they’ve both had affairs that neither have been able to forget and at least one has found it hard to forgive, they still love each other. Or are comfortable with each other. Or at least used to each other. She recognizes that she has “succumbed to the inertia of middle age” while he worries that “without Marion he wouldn’t know what to do or even who he was.” So they spend their weekend drinking and gambling, grumbling about the tourist attractions, attending a Heart concert with a bunch of other middle-aged fans (a hilarious set piece), stumbling toward making love, complaining about uncomfortable shoes and going to the bathroom (a lot, for such a compact narrative). Each chapter title gives the odds on something to do with the novel (“Odds of a married couple making love on a given night: 1 in 5,” “Odds of Heart playing ‘Crazy on You’ in concert: 1 in 1”). Given the novel’s subtitle, A Love Story, the odds of it not ending tragically are pretty good. – Kirkus Reviews

Take a chance on ‘The Odds’

The Washington Post Book Review – January 17, 2012 (Excerpt)

Stewart O’Nan seems incapable of writing a false line. Whether describing the unimaginable (losing one’s child) or the mundane (losing one’s appetite), his modest sentences crystallize the lives of ordinary people. His previous novel, “Emily, Alone,” described the daily outings of an 80-year-old widow in Pittsburgh. Emily’s pulse beat stronger than her story, but with all the novel’s insight and charm, that lack of action didn’t matter. O’Nan is a author you learn to trust, no matter what he’s writing about.

That tension between husband and wife could grow moldy in the close confines of these largely action-free pages, but O’Nan knows how to break up the passages of recrimination and regret. In short, finely cut scenes, we see the Fowlers whiling away the hours before their big game in the casino: They tour the Falls; they dress up for a fancy dinner; they get high during a revival Heart concert — all the corny cliches of romance laid out in the brochures. They even dutifully make love in the giant hot tub, a hilariously awkward bit of acrobatics for two 50-year-olds trying to recapture the magic. And each chapter offers a wry statistic to set the mood: “Odds of a U.S. tourist visiting Niagara Falls: 1 in 95,” “Odds of vomiting on vacation: 1 in 6,” “Odds of being served breakfast in bed on Valentine’s Day: 1 in 4.” [Read the full article...]

‘The Odds’ Stacked Against A Struggling Couple

NPR Book Review – January 19, 2012 (Excerpt)

Love is a gamble. So, for that matter, is writing. What are the odds that Stewart O’Nan, oracle of the ordinary and maven of the middle class, will strike a chord with readers in his 13th novel? Given his track record, which includes Last Night at the Lobster, a poignant tale of a soon-to-be-disenfranchised chain restaurant manager, and Emily, Alone, a moving portrait of a widow soldiering on: high. Factor in the subject of The Odds — a last-ditch effort to save a marriage and avoid bankruptcy by staking everything on a Valentine’s Day weekend at Niagara Falls — and the odds are elevated to excellent. Of course, in both life and literature, sure bets are rare. If this slim novel doesn’t deliver quite the massive payout we anticipate, chalk it up to overly high expectations and some unfortunate patches of mundane prose. [Read the full article...]

Review: ‘The Odds: A Love Story’ by Stewart O’Nan

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – January 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

his is how we meet them: “The final weekend of their marriage, hounded by insolvency, indecision, and, stupidly, half-secretly, in the never-distant past ruled by memory, infidelity, Art and Marion Fowler fled the country.” This middle-age Midwestern couple doesn’t go far: just to Niagara Falls, where they spent their honeymoon. There is a cache of cash involved and a desperate gambling plan that, if Art has his way, will make everything right.

The novel shares DNA with Albert Brooks’ 1985 film “Lost in America”: a married couple, poor decisions, bright-eyed scheming and that unusual mix of humor and seriousness. Art and Marion spend Valentine’s Day weekend in Niagara Falls, visit a handful of tourist attractions, eat at restaurants they can’t afford, see Heart in concert, drink, gamble and have sex (finally, if you ask Art). On the surface, it’s routine, expected, and that’s what Art is counting on: His plan involves taking the last of their money and making a cash mountain out of a secret molehill. [Read the full article...]

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QUEEN OF MISFORTUNE
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same strange who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

The New York Times bestselling journalist and author of The Girls from Ames, Jeffrey Zaslow, takes us to a multi- generational family owned small-town bridal shop to explore the emotional lives of women in the 21st century.

You may not have heard of Fowler, Michigan, much less Becker’s Bridal. But for the thousands of women who have stepped inside, Becker’s is the site of some of the most important moments of their lives-moments that speak to us all. Housed in a former bank, the boutique owners transformed the vault into a “magic room,” with soft church lighting, a circular pedestal, and mirrors that make lifelong dreams come true.

Illuminating the poignant aspects of a woman’s journey to the altar, The Magic Room tells the stories of memorable women on the brink of commitment. Run by the same family for years, Becker’s has witnessed transformations in how America views the institution of marriage; some of the shop’s clientele are becoming stepmothers, or starting married life for a second time. In The Girls from Ames, beloved author Jeffrey Zaslow used friendships to explore the emotional lives of women. In The Magic Room, he turns his perceptive eye to weddings and weaves together secrets, memories and family tales to explore the hopes and dreams we have for our daughters.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Jeffrey Zaslow

Jeffrey Zaslow is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller The Girls from Ames and coauthor of Highest Duty, with Chesley Sullenberger, as well as The Last Lecture, with Randy Pausch. A Wall Street Journalcolumnist, he lives in suburban Detroit with his wife and their three daughters.

Editorial Review

Wall Street Journal columnist Zaslow (The Girls from Ames, 2009, etc.) delivers an emotive excursion through the world of parents and daughters and the state of marriage in the United States.

The author approaches his subjects via a small-town Michigan bridal shop, a canny choice in that he can take measure of the heartland while framing the bigger picture through sociological studies and then tightening down to his own fears and hopes as a father of three girls. The town of Fowler has only 1,100 residents, but it is a major crossroads in many lives: Becker’s Bridal has sold more than 100,000 gowns over nearly eight decades and four generations of Beckers. Zaslow writes in a tone of inclusive intimacy, focusing on six women who went to Becker’s to find the right dress. The author plucks at the heartstrings as he relates all the yearnings of the brides-to-be and the travails they encounter on the way to the alter. Zaslow offers plenty of statistics about love and marriage, but they pale in comparison to the everyday stories of the complex circumstances that often surround the big day. “A wedding is a happy life-cycle event, yes, but the harsher life-cycle moments aren’t kept at bay until after the wedding […] weddings are often optimistic islands surrounded by oceans of uncertainty, loneliness, and grief,” he writes. “For some women, a bridal gown can feel like a life preserver.” The author’s vignettes of the six women are wildly dissimilar, but they weave together into a complicated damascene that holds true to much age-old wisdom: Marriage involves serious demands on patience, endless petty annoyances and many compromises, as well as modesty, respect and duty.

Zaslow’s profile of the bridal shop, from the geopolitics of dressmaking to the effects of TV shows like Bridezillas, is almost as riveting as the bridal tales. – Kirkus Reviews

“The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters,” by Jeffrey Zaslow

The Washington Post Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

I mostly blame the programming executives at TLC. It was their genius idea to put cameras in the dressing rooms at Kleinfeld Bridal in Manhattan, making what was once a retail destination for high-end brides into a rite-of-passage holy land for women everywhere. Once there, a bride must quiver, cry, pout, shriek and cry once more before her conversion experience is complete. Once she’s done all that and turned her mother into a puddle, gotten the unanimous approval of a bickering 10-person entourage and said yes to The Dress, she’s ready to walk down the aisle to Happily Ever After.

Or whatever. We don’t really give a fig about that part.

In a wedding-obsessed society fueled by an industry constantly churning out new, expensive ways for couples to outdo their friends and make theirs the best big day(s) ever, the dress has assumed the position of a crown jewel. We don’t have many debutante balls anymore, so this is it — a woman’s a chance to show the world how stylish/pretty/thin she really is. As a bridal magazine executive recently told me, “It’s her one red carpet moment in life.”

These are the glittery waters Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow chose to wade into for his new book, “The Magic Room.” Zaslow has also written “The Girls From Ames,” which tracked the lives of 11 women whose deep friendships started in girlhood, and he co-authored Randy Pausch’s bestselling memoir, “The Last Lecture,” as well as Gabrielle Gifford and Mark Kelly’s book, “Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope.” Zaslow tends to be uplifting and lesson-bearing. So in an attempt to capture what modern romantic relationships look like and “how all of us can best show love to our daughters,” he hit upon the idea of focusing on the bridal gown and the significance it carries in our private lives and cultural landscape. [Read the full article...]

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CRIMSON DAWN
Book One of the Darklife Saga by Ronnie Massey

Two Women Hunting A Rogue Vampire

Vampire Valeria Trumaine must confront old demons and face new possibilities as she struggles to bring a rogue vampire to justice. Her best friend and powerful Sidhe princess, Irulan, joins the hunt. Valeria will find that Irulan’s motives for keeping her safe are not what she thinks. And soon she is faced with an undeniable attraction that makes her question everything she knew about herself. [Read More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

“I’ve never bought loose diamonds but the idea of them appeals to me, sparkling stones that I imagine come wrapped in a velvet cloth . . . ”

With her wonderful sense of humor, marvelously candid voice, and astonishing perception, Amy Ephron weaves together the most insightful, profound, and just plain funny stories of her life to form a tapestry of a woman’s experiences from childhood through young adulthood, marriage, divorce (and remarriage), and everything in between. Writing with great honesty and exacting prose, Ephron gives us an evocative, engaging, and often piercing look at modern life.

Along the way, we meet colorful and unforgettable characters such as the Birdman, who invited Ephron when she was a young girl into his Spanish-style home that he’d magically turned into an exotic aviary. And there’s Honey, the Cristal-loving Southern beauty, who struggles in her affairs with men and who orders “champagne by the case.” Ephron also recounts the afternoon she spent with the infamous Squeaky Fromme, and describes what happened after one of the mothers at her son’s school rear-ended her car. Did it have anything to do with Ephron’s soon-to-be ex-husband? And through it all is Ephron’s mother, whose perspectives on everything—from shoes to egg cups—pervade this book, and whose alcoholism was a constant challenge, forcing Ephron out on her own at an early age. Finally, Ephron professes her lifelong love affair with Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City, a touchstone and a companion in a world that always moves too fast and is sometimes upside down. It is an ode to a simpler time of elegance and style, and an incisive look at today’s times.

Throughout Loose Diamonds, Amy Ephron celebrates these memories and her friendships, as well as her romances and marriages, and the things that make life livable (such as her Filofax, which she would be lost without). She writes unflinchingly about the fragility and tenuousness of life, how fortune can turn on a dime and circumstances aren’t always in our control.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Amy Ephron

Amy Ephron is the bestselling author of the acclaimed novels One Sunday Morning and A Cup of Tea. Her magazine pieces and essays have appeared in Vogue; Saveur; House Beautiful; the National Lampoon; the Los Angeles Times; the Huffington Post; Defamer; her own online magazine, One for the Table; and various other print and online publications. She recently directed a short film, Chloe@3AM, which was featured at the American Cinematheque’s Focus on Female Directors Short Film Showcase in January 2011. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Alan Rader, and any of their five children who happen to drop in.

Editorial Review

Sex and the City meets Erma Bombeck in this gossamer gathering of recollections from novelist Ephron (One Sunday Morning, 2005, etc.).

True to its title, the book flaunts the glimmers of memory that the author haphazardly crafts into vignettes detailing her bohemian-chic adventures in Los Angeles and New York—with an emphasis on the chic. Starting off as a wild child in the 1970s, she recounts swilling champagne with glamorous friends, buying couture from Saks Fifth Avenue and interviewing Manson Family member Squeaky Fromme at the Spahn Ranch. Ephron’s most entertaining anecdotes date from this era, as she name-drops celebrity friends and shines a light on the inner workings of the National Lampoon during its heady countercultural years. Less sparkling are her attempts to frame her contemporary life with her second husband and five children as a Beverly Hills version of Cheaper by the Dozen. Readers may find it difficult to conjure much empathy for a woman who disparages Elizabeth Taylor’s gigantic diamond ring as extravagant, but laments the theft of her own baubles fashioned by the likes of Tiffany, Cartier and Elsa Peretti. This theft, one of several that hit the Los Angeles area, understandably shook up the author, and the event functions as a sort of connecting thread for the collection. However, even when commenting on the serial burglar’s habit of creating a different persona for each house, she fails to delve further. Accounts of the hostile mothers at her son’s private school similarly fail to engage. While Ephron has enough of a sense of humor to keep these pieces from completely lacking in self-awareness, her writing too often skims the surface, even for comic musings. Likewise, the more somber essays addressing her mother’s depression and Ephron’s own experience with date rape are meandering and unfocused.

These bagatelles offer glittering diversion but little of lasting worth. – Kirkus Reviews

Book review: ‘Loose Diamonds … and Other Things I’ve Lost (and Found) Along the Way’ by Amy Ephron

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – December 27, 2011 (Excerpt)

Shelve this one under a category that should be named ”bouquet memoirs.”

Books like Amy Ephron’s “Loose Diamonds … and Other Things I’ve Lost (and Found) Along the Way” are a nosegay of life essays whose pronouns are mostly “I” and “we,” but are also by implication “you” — as in, “here’s my experience of this or that life-changing moment; what’s yours?”

So the essays in such collections fall into two sorts. The first are the accounts of seminal events that the author shares with many of the rest of us — friends, work, marriage, divorce, remarriage, families blended and un-blended, dealing with parents and dealing with being a parent. Who doesn’t have some version of this echt Ephron first-love comedown: “What I took for a laconic, laid-back nature was really a heroin addiction”?

The second kind of essay has to do with the one-off moments that the reader will probably never get to experience. This is where I would lump the stories that I tell to my friends, like the one that begins, “The second time I met Cary Grant…” They love hearing them, but unless they met Cary Grant, there’s no equivalent of their own. [Read the full article...]

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BOILED PEANUTS
A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Hal is a mild-mannered IRS bureaucrat who suspects that his wife is cheating with her younger, more virile coworker. At a drunken dinner party, Hal volunteers to fly to Belize in search of Susan’s employer, T.—the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s much-lauded novel How the Dead Dream—who has vanished in a tropical jungle, initiating a darkly humorous descent into strange and unpredictable terrain.

Salon raved that Millet’s “writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself.” In Ghost Lights, she combines her characteristic wit and a sharp eye for the weirdness that governs human (and nonhuman) interactions. With the scathing satire and tender honesty of Sam Lipsyte and a dark, quirky, absurdist style reminiscent of Joy Williams, Millet has created a comic, startling, and surprisingly philosophical story about idealism and disillusionment, home and not home, and the singular, heartbreaking devotion of parenthood.

About Lydia Millet

Lydia Millet won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for her third novel, My Happy Life, and her short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was one of three finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel, Ghost Lights, is due November 2011 from W. W. Norton.

Editorial Reviews

“[Lydia Millet] takes aim at the metaphysical jugular…her gorgeous narration…exists in some extraordinary place, at once discursive, editorial, and ruminative…. If literature can under the best circumstances transport, then Millet’s extraordinary vision brings us in on the float.” (Minna Proctor - Bookforum )

“In Lydia Millet’s brilliant new novel, a skeptical tax man follows a runaway millionaire to Latin America.

Can it be a coincidence that this year — when the issue of taxes has become an abyss that both divides and conquers our national government — we also have two new books about IRS workers by important novelists of ideas? The first, of course, is David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published The Pale King…. The second is Lydia Millet’s new novel, Ghost Lights….

…Millet is seldom compared to J.M Coetzee, who seems an obvious and fruitful influence on…Ghost Lights…. Their prose has a similar, lovely stillness, and both portray characters nudged beyond typical human navel-gazing….” (Laura Miller - Salon.com )

Reader Review

Attuned to the winds of change that roar unexpectedly through the most ordinary of lives, Millet dissects the interior landscape of IRS employee Hal Lindley in Southern California circa 1994. Susan and Hal’s placid, quiet world has already been shaken by an accident that renders their daughter, Casey, a paraplegic. By habit, Hal measures daily life in small increments, the surface of domesticity most recently ruffled by the disappearance of Susan Lindley’s ambitious boss somewhere in South America. Susan anxiously awaits the return of “T.” in the flourishing real estate business with the only other employee, Robert, an enthusiastic Yale graduate, all business on hold. Unsettled, Hal ruminates on the minutiae of marriage to Susan, fueling the vague fears and suspicions of an insecure man learning too late he might have been sleepwalking through his days. In a burst of jealousy and rebellion, Hall volunteers to go to South America in search of the missing young mogul.

Burning with shame at the duplicity he has discovered on the home front, Hal embarks on an otherworldly quest as the pieces of his life fall into place far from the familiar parameters of home. With the sleight of hand of a true storyteller, Millet’s protagonist escapes the confines of his own limitations with an urgency that propels him into a dimension of consciousness that is both enlightening and tragic. This is a conventional life examined, the secret corridors of Hal’s psyche thrown open to the howling winds of new experience. Memories of home blend with the novelty of adventure, all enriched by Hal’s discoveries, though he cannot avoid paying the high tariff on wisdom: “He had turned out to be a hothouse flower- a hothouse flower from the first world that wilted in the third.” The quietly forceful Millet explores Hal’s newly-awakened interior world, an introspective man assaulted by truths that had thus far eluded him, caught in the extremes of T’s failed enterprise, slyly delivering her coup de grace in a deceptively simple tale that might leave you breathless in recognition. – Luan Gaines, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Melancholy Frontiers

The New York Times Book Review – November 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

At a glance, 2011 seems to have been a banner year for the Internal Revenue Service in fiction. It began with “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s orphaned novel about employees at an Illinois branch of the organization. Now comes Lydia Millet’s “Ghost Lights,” in which an I.R.S. agent goes looking for his wife’s missing boss in a Central American jungle. If Philip Roth puts out the story of a retired tax collector’s amour fou with a young libertarian by January, we might look for fireworks over the Treasury ­Department.

What, if anything, does all this literary attention mean? That the Tea Party controls every aspect of the national conversation? That fiction has run out of interesting subjects? That taxes really are as inescapable as death? Possibly, although a closer look should reassure us, because it reveals that in Wallace the animating (sic) theme is actually boredom, and in Millet the hero’s occupation is incidental to the book’s primary question: whether recognizing that your life has become a sleepwalk allows you then to wake up.

The hero of “Ghost Lights” is named Hal (the connections with Wallace end here, or once it’s noted that Hal lives in Southern California, as Wallace did). He’s married, in his early 50s, and the father of a 20-something daughter. He would be happy, except that his wife is cheating on him and his daughter is paraplegic as the result of an accident for which he blames himself. Also, he has for some time been in limbo, bored by his colleagues, by Los Angeles and by himself. [Read the full article...]

VAMPIRE ASCENDING
by Lorelei Bell

Exciting Hunt For A Vampire Serial Killer in Chicago

Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...]

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Throughout Lily Tuck’s career, she’s been praised by critics for her crisp, lean language and sensuous explorations of exotic locales and complex psychologies. From Siam to Paraguay and beyond, Tuck inspires readers to travel into unfamiliar realms, and her newest novel is no exception. Slender, potent, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness combines marriage, mathematics, and the probability of an afterlife to create Tuck’s most affecting and riveting book yet.

“His hand is growing cold, still she holds it” is how this novel that tells the story of a marriage begins. The tale unfolds over a single night as Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Still too shocked to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long union, beginning with their meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician—a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As we move through select memories—real and imagined—Tuck reveals the most private intimacies, dark secrets, and overwhelming joys that defined Nina and Philip’s life together.

Editorial Reviews

“A breathlessly mannered, affecting new work . . . Small, vital snapshots make up two lives closely shared, and beautifully portrayed in this triumph of a novel.”—Publishers Weekly

“A full and satisfying potrayal of a marriage . . . Great fodder for readers who enjoy pondering life’s larger questions.”—Library Journal

“Affecting, original . . . Rich in sentiment, poignancy, and honesty.”—Booklist

About Lily Tuck

Born in Paris, Lily Tuck is the author of four previous novels: Interviewing Matisse or the Woman Who Died Standing Up, The Woman Who Walked on Water, Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man, which was nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and The News From Paraguay, winner of the National Book Award. She is also the author of the biography, Woman of Rome, A Life of Elsa Morante. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and are collected in Limbo, or Other Places I Have Lived. She divides her time between Maine and New York City.

Reader Review

Lily Tuck`s novel, I Married You for Happiness, is the story of a woman mourning the sudden death of her husband. It was shortly before dinner when Philip came home from his college teaching position. When Nina calls him for dinner he is dead. She lies by his cold body all night remembering their lives together. The prose is spare and lovely, recalling their joys, passions and pains of their forty-two years together.

Recently, I’ve read three memoirs about grieving a spouse after sudden death: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name: A Novel. Lily Tuck’s book covers similar territory as these memoirs but in novelistic form.

Nina is an artist and Philip is a mathematician specializing in probability. They have one daughter, thirty-five year old Louise. This book takes place over the course of one night following Philip’s death. As the story unfolds, Louise does not yet know her father has died. Nina just wants to spend this one night next to Philip. “In the morning she will make telephone calls, she will write e-mails, make arrangements; the death certificate, the funeral home, the church service – whatever needs to be done. Tonight – tonight, she wants nothing. She wants to be alone. Alone with Philip.

Nina tries to remember their lives together, the big things and the little things. She is especially focused on thoughts about a woman that Philip had known before meeting her. Iris and Philip were in a car crash and Iris died. Had Iris lived, Nina wonders, would Philip have married her instead of Nina? She puts together different theories of probability in her mind for different scenarios and tries to think like her husband would in these situations. “What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer.”

Simple things cause her great anxiety. What were the exact last words she said to Philip? What did they do yesterday, last weekend? She is not sure and this bothers her. She wants to know and hold the past close to her, remembering all that she can.

She and Philip were so different. Nina paints mostly landscapes and portraits, usually with water colors. Philip gives lectures on probability. She remembers lots of mathematical problems and information that Philip has shared with her even though many are beyond her capacity to understand. “Most mathematical functions, Philip tells her, are classified as two-way functions because they are easy to do and easy to undo – like addition and subtraction, for example. The way turning a light on and turning it off is a two-way function. A one-way function is more complicated because although it may be easy to do, you cannot undo it. Like mixing paint, you can’t unmix it, or like breaking an egg shell, you can’t put the egg back together.” Nina thinks about the physics of alternate universes and wonders if Philip can be alive and dead. Is he really dead?

Nina also gives a lot of thought to the existence of an afterlife and what the great philosophers had to say about it, especially Pascal. Pascal believed it was a better probability to believe in God than not because if God existed and one behaved righteously, they could have eternal life. Still, Nina is not convinced. Ironically, Philip the mathematician had more of a belief in afterlife than does Nina. Philip believes in a libertarian God, “a God who allows room for free will.”

Nina struggles to remember where they’ve lived, what countries they’ve visited, how many houses they resided in, how many animals they’ve owned. These little things help her feel closer to Philip as she spends the night next to him holding his hand and stroking his face. This is her night to be with him, her last night to shower herself in their love.

Philip’s favorite color was red. He once brought her a red embroidered coat from Hong Kong. She rarely ever wore it. However, tonight she puts it on over an old coat she is wearing and parades around the room in it wondering if Philip would have found this silly. She is doing this as an homage to their love.

During their marriage, Nina had an affair and once was raped. She kept both of these occurences secret from Philip. She worries about Philip’s faithfulness to her. “Sometimes when Philip comes back from being away, she sniffs through his laundry, searching for the scent of an unfamiliar perfume – patchouli, jasmine, tuberoses. What is her name? The name of a city. Sofia.”

The prose is spare and the book is written in short vignettes, each about some aspect of their life together or their belief system. As the night progresses, Nina drinks wine, dozes occasionally, but mostly stays up and remembers and imagines their time together. Theirs was a great love and one that has withstood the test of time. Lily Tuck understands what it is like to be with one person for forty-two years. She understands great love and passion.

Interestingly, Ms. Tuck has borrowed information from some of the greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, and philosophers for this book: Pascal, Einstein, Wilczek, Erdish, Hofstadter, Hawking, and Feynman to name a few. Though the parts about physics and math were sometimes difficult for me to get my head around, they served nicely to illustrate the yin and yang of this marriage. This is a short and lovely book, an homage to a great love, now lost in real time, but forever present in Nina’s heart and mind. – Bonnie Brody, Amazon.Com Customer Review

A Mournful Mix Of ‘Happiness’ And Mathematics

NPR Book Review – September 6, 2011 (Excerpt)

In Lily Tuck’s luminous fifth novel, I Married You For Happiness — her first since winning the 2004 National Book Award for The News From Paraguay — a woman sits vigil at the bedside of her husband of 42 years, who has dropped dead of cardiac arrest while she’s preparing dinner. Over the course of a single night and a full bottle of wine, her mind ranges over their life together, beginning with their meeting at a Paris cafe in the 1960s, when he was teaching math on a Fulbright scholarship and she worked in an art gallery.

Tuck, who lost her second husband, a lawyer (to whom this novel is dedicated), to cancer in 2002 after 25 years of marriage, reflects on marriage and loss, but I Married You For Happiness is not yet another memoir of grief. Her protagonist, Nina, a painter who especially prizes clarity in art, mulls over her imperfect but abiding marriage, her unexpected bereavement, and the unfathomability of her husband’s nonexistence. What lifts this book above the mourning fray is the fact that she does this against the backdrop of the probability theories about which her husband, an MIT-trained mathematics professor, was forever lecturing her. [Read the full article...]

Portrait of a marriage sketched by grieving widow

The Boston Globe Book Review – September 8, 2011 (Excerpt)

The cover of Lily Tuck’s new novel, “I Married You for Happiness,’’ features a photograph of two metal folding chairs turned away from one another. The simple image possesses a feeling of closeness and remoteness at the same time. The credit printed inside the book’s jacket indicates that the German photographer Marianne Breslauer took the photo at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in 1929. It’s a fitting choice for this beautiful, elliptical narrative that encompasses both the isolation and intimacy of a 43-year marriage that begins after a chance meeting at a cafe at the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain and rue du Bac in Paris.

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

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Mary Clearman Blew’s education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband. This Is Not the Ivy League is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman—pressured by husband and parents to be the conventional wife of the 1950s, persisting in her pursuit of an education, trailed by a reluctant husband and small children through graduate school, and finally entering the job market with a PhD in English only to find a whole new set of pressures and prejudices.

This memoir is Blew’s behind-the-scenes account of pursuing a career at a time when a woman’s place in the world was supposed to have limits. It is a story of both the narrowing perspective of the social norm and the ever-expanding possibilities of a woman who refuses to be told what she can and cannot be.

Editorial Reviews

“The author of this lucid, elegant memoir was a pioneer both literally and figuratively: Raised on a Montana homestead, she became a trailblazing woman in the academy.”—Ms. Magazine

“Handle with care: this crucial book explodes all preconceptions. The history of women’s rights unfolds under Mary Blew’s candid (sometimes comic) assessment of the roles of circumstance—and choice—in every aspect of her life.”—Judith Kitchen, author of Distance and Direction

“Mary Blew’s episodes of her life in this brave and important memoir are as sharp and illuminating as chain lightning on the great American prairie. The remembrance of things past doesn’t get any more honest and sure-footed than this.”—Ivan Doig, author of Work Song and The Whistling Season

About the Author

Mary Clearman Blew is the author of the acclaimed essay collection All but the Waltz and the memoir Balsamroot. She is the editor of When Montana and I Were Young: A Memoir of a Frontier Childhood, available in a Bison Books edition. Her most recent novel, Jackalope Dreams, is also available in a Bison Books edition. She is a professor of English at the University of Idaho and has twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, once in fiction and once in nonfiction. She is also the winner of a Western Heritage Award and the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

From New Haven to Northern Montana

The New York Times Book Review – September 2, 2011 (Excerpt)

In one chapter of her new memoir, “This Is Not the Ivy League,” Mary Clearman Blew splices the story of a shooting spree in Moscow, Idaho, into an account of raising her children while going to graduate school: “When cornered, I lashed out, if not with a rifle, and then turned the blame on myself.” This is extreme, to say the least, and Blew admits it. But she insists the comparison holds.

Things get worse once she finds her first academic job, at Northern Montana College, in Havre, in 1969. She had actually been to the town once before, in hot pursuit of a stolen milk cow, and she never expected to return. In fact, she’d gone to graduate school partly to escape the Montana ranch where she was raised. But damned if she was going to pass up this job at the insistence of her almost-ex-­husband, who wanted her to run their household while he hunted elk and went fishing. Stuck in a “no-exit world,” Blew rebelled. She devoted herself to the school’s theater program, drank until the bars closed, slept with students. “Looking back at that anger and self-pity and despair, I ask myself what I would have told that young woman (if I had known her then, I almost write).”

The conceit of any memoir — the conceit of memory — is that a person can turn the ambiguous distance between “that young woman” and “I” into a credible story. “This Is Not the Ivy League” (part of the American Lives series edited by Tobias Wolff) is broadly framed as Blew’s coming of age as a young professor in a claustrophobic place. But that’s not what it really is. Blew’s memoir is a kind of anti-memoir — an incredulous account, a catalog of confusion. She doesn’t just look back at her anger and self-pity and despair. She looks back with anger and self-pity and despair. [Read the full article...]

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Crimson Dawn

Book One of the Darklife Saga by Ronnie Massey

Two Women Hunting A Rogue Vampire

Vampire Valeria Trumaine must confront old demons and face new possibilities as she struggles to bring a rogue vampire to justice. Her best friend and powerful Sidhe princess, Irulan, joins the hunt. Valeria will find that Irulan’s motives for keeping her safe are not what she thinks. And soon she is faced with an undeniable attraction that makes her question everything she knew about herself.

CRIMSON DAWN by Ronnie Massey is not just another vampire novel. Yes, the story line includes the favorites of all young adults – plus those who stayed young-at-heart – such as vampires, werewolves, witches, and fairies, but they represent a framework that is seamlessly incorporated in a captivating story that is well worth to be characterized as extraordinary. [Read More...]

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Though The Art of Fielding is his fiction debut, Chad Harbach writes with the self-assurance of a seasoned novelist. He exercises a masterful precision over the language and pacing of his narrative, and in some 500 pages, there’s rarely a word that feels out of place. The title is a reference to baseball, but Harbach’s concern with sports is more than just a cheap metaphor. The Art of Fielding explores relationships–between friends, family, and lovers–and the unpredictable forces that complicate them. There’s an unintended affair, a post-graduate plan derailed by rejection letters, a marriage dissolved by honesty, and at the center of the book, the single baseball error that sets all of these events into motion. The Art of Fielding is somehow both confident and intimate, simple yet deeply moving. Harbach has penned one of the year’s finest works of fiction.–Kevin Nguyen, Amazon.Com Review

More Editorial Reviews

“That baseball rewards languid virtuosos and frothing monomaniacs about equally is one of the game’s weird fascinations. That Academe does the same would not be useful information in the hands of a hack. But The Art of Fielding marries the national pastime to the life of the mind, takes off running, and never flags. Chad Harbach’s pen shatters stereotypes like fastballs shatter bats. His sentence-making keeps things fluid and tense as a September pennant race. When the best shortstop alive sounds believably like a Tibetan lama, and when a thrown ball striking a shovel head at dawn leaves your own head ringing with certainty that truth and friendship have triumphed, you know you’re in the hands of a writer you can trust.” (David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why )

“Here is that rarest of pleasures, a baseball novel by someone who really knows baseball. The beautiful part is that The Art of Fielding is mere baseball fiction the way Moby Dick is just a fish story. I read this vividly written, powerfully imagined story of a group of young ballplayers and the small-college world they inhabit in a single weekend–read it when I was supposed to be going to the park, making lunch, seeing a movie. Chad Harbach is that kind of writer, so affecting, subtle, funny and true that he gets in the way of your plans and makes everything better.” (Nicholas Dawidoff author of The Catcher Was A Spy and editor of Baseball: A Literary Anthology )

“Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is one of those rare novels–like Michael Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh or John Irving’s The World According to Garp–that seems to appear out of nowhere and then dazzles and bewitches and inspires until you nearly lose your breath from the enjoyment and satisfaction, as well as the unexpected news-blast that the novel is very much alive and well.” (James Patterson )

Reader Review

This is a great book and definitely worth reading.

In a recent issue of Time Magazine, Jonathan Franzen said (while discussing The Art of Fielding), “It’s left little hole in my life the way a really good book will, after making room in my days for reading it…” (11 July, 2011, p48). I happen to agree with Franzen.

The book is really about the lives of 5 people. The story involves two elements as a background and setting: life on small college campus and baseball (I am a huge baseball fan, which increased my enjoyment of the book). Between these two things, the 5 characters interact in different ways, and both directly and indirectly, all 5 characters greatly affect each other. I do not want to give away too many plot threads, but as the story unfolds, you will want to learn more about each character. This is true even for those characters who were not my favorite–I still wanted to learn about their influences on each other.

What made the story and characters so great is that the author chose NOT to make it “ridiculously post-modern” (that is my own defined genre, and a genre I do not enjoy). In fact, of all the books I have read recently, I think Harbach took the most direct, “classical approach” to story telling. You can tell he had a plan and executed it from start to finish. Within each chapter, the plot moves forward while learning more about a character (or characters), both from the past and present perspective.

Despite my glowing review, there are some issues I had–mostly minor. It is possible these small things stem from this book being Harbach’s first. I do not want to get into too many details (again, they might affect the plot and your enjoyment of the book), but I can certainly elaborate in a future update.

Ultimately, all 5 characters related to the title of the book: The Art of Fielding. Although this is a baseball term, it can be abstracted and applied to each character. The theme is “life” and what we (and the characters in the story) do with it (the title of the book could be: The Art of Fielding…Life). The story, characters, and settings tie together perfectly, and I really did enjoy every page of the book. Life Franzen implied, I will miss some of these characters and I hope Harbach revisits them in the future.  - Herschel Greenberg, Amazon.Com Customer Review

‘Fielding,’ A Winning Take On Life And Baseball

NPR Book Review – August 31, 2011 (Excerpt)

A good baseball coach and a good novelist are a lot alike, according to Chad Harbach’s satisfyingly old-fashioned debut, The Art of Fielding. If you’re a coach, muses Mike Schwartz, catcher for the Westish College Harpooners, you should ask yourself of each player: “What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself?” And when you told him that story, Schwartz knows, “You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws.” Like a novelist, a coach doesn’t make it easy on the characters in his clubhouse. “A good coach made you suffer,” Schwartz tells us, but “in a way that suited you.”

The characters in The Art of Fielding do suffer. They lose jobs, marriages, ballgames. They see their futures snatched away without explanation, and hurt each other without justification. But Harbach is such an empathetic writer — such a good coach — that Schwartz and his teammates suffer in ways suited to them, and feel as smart and human and real as a reader could hope for.

It’s Schwartz, the sort of undergraduate go-getter who runs his program by sheer force of personality, who first recruits Henry Skrimshander, a phenom shortstop with a cannon for an arm. Henry is a field rat, willing, under Schwartz’s tutelage, to put in the hours in the weight room and the video room and the batting cage, and so by junior year he’s a legitimate pro prospect, and the Harpooners — a traditionally lousy team from a tiny college in Wisconsin — have a chance to win their conference. [Read the full article...]

Whale of a book

The Boston Globe Book Review – September 4, 2011 (Excerpt)

On the Wisconsin campus of Westish College, where most of “The Art of Fielding’’ is set, a statue of Herman Melville peers out over a lake. The college baseball team is nicknamed the Harpooners. The author refers to Mike Schwartz, the team’s most determined (monomaniacal?) player – who has both legs, but bad knees – as “the Ahab of this operation.’’ The college president dreams of owning “a big white whale of a house.’’

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BOILED PEANUTS
A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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A savagely smart, darkly comic literary debut, New World Monkeys exposes the false idols of marital tranquillity, small-town idyll, and corporate Darwinism in the dazzling voice of a major new talent.

Duncan and Lily, young and adrift in a prickly marriage and lackluster careers, flee Manhattan for the peaceful allure of a recently inherited crumbling Victorian home. But the two are left with little time to ponder the traditional “he said, she said” failings of a relationship: On an upstate road miles shy of their house, a wild boar leaps to his death in front of their Saab–an accident whose consequences will haunt them throughout the summer.

That was no ordinary hog.

Lily and Duncan arrive in the eccentric town of Osterhagen to discover the boar had a name: The Sovereign of the Deep Wood. That it was the town mascot. And, as the hapless urbanites are coerced into the vortex of tea socials, cannon fire, and communal history, they realize that the residents of the bizarre hamlet intend to seek justice for their fallen hero.

Next come the bones.

Duncan, an adman whose controversial new campaign could make or break his career, wants a temporary escape from the pressures of urban life. But his pastoral retreat darkens when an attempt at gardening turns up a human femur in the lawn, a headstone inscribed simply Tinker, 1902, and a sense that Lily’s family may have violence in its aristocratic blood.

And then there’s Lloyd.

Lily, conflicted about her marriage and her career, spends her days at the local library researching her impossibly arcane dissertation topic but can’t seem to make any progress. One day she observes the town pervert in action and befriends him.

Lloyd, a Peeping Tom, invites her to follow him on a bird’s-eye tour of Osterhagen that may help her home in on her own flaws and failings.

Keep digging.

Thrown together in their complicity over the boar’s death, fueled to exhume Tinker’s bones from the garden, and inspired by Lloyd’s philosophical savoir faire, Duncan and Lily begin to excavate the profound truth about themselves and their marriage. But how deep can the two dig before the summer’s violent beginning catches up with them?

Editorial Review

In this unabashedly eccentric debut, a young couple with a troubled marriage make the fateful decision to summer in a decaying upstate New York house, leading to a series of bizarre events. First, their car slams into a wild boar, and Lily, seeing it squealing in pain, smashes its skull with a tire iron. But when the two arrive in town, they realize the boar—Sovereign of the Deep Wood—was the town mascot and the beloved pet of a nasty local named Skinner, who is eager to find the culprits. Then Duncan uncovers a gravestone and a human bone in the house’s backyard, and the two barely speaking spouses excavate the skeleton and ponder a decades-old whodunit. Meanwhile, ad-man Duncan commutes back and forth to the city and struggles with a campaign that could make or break his career, while Ph.D.-thesis avoidant Lily befriends the town pervert. As the intrigues heighten to an absurd degree, the question of whether Duncan and Lily will reforge their bond in the midst of the macabre goings-on catapults the book to a surreally satisfying climax. It’s fun, funny and touching—a great summer book. – Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Nancy Mauro is a writer and has worked as a creative director at a Manhattan advertising agency. She has lived and worked in Toronto and in Vancouver where she was a fellow and graduate of the University of British Columbia’s MFA program in creative writing. Nancy is the recipient of several Ontario Art Council grants as well as Canadian Council grants for emerging writers. Her work has been nominated for the prestigious McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, received gold at the Western Magazine Awards, and placed in the international Toronto Star Fiction Contest. Nancy’s short stories and nonfiction have appeared in various magazines, anthologies and newspapers. Visit her online at www.NancyMauro.com.

Review

It’s a little difficult to review this book properly without giving too much of the plot away. Suffice it to say that if you like quirky characters and tongue-in-cheek plotting you will have a lot of fun with “New World Monkeys”. One drawback of the book is that it attempts to integrate a rather serious, traditional story about the difficulties of relationships and marriage into another, larger story which lampoons corporate mores and “country living”, and that larger story is presented in a surreal, humorous manner. Some readers might feel that all the pieces don’t quite fit together, but the book is written so well and the characters and humor are so “spot on”, that Ms. Mauro, at the end of the day, has crafted a successful first novel. The husband and wife protagonists, Duncan and Lily, are not very pleasant people, but it is a tribute to the author’s skill that we do care about these people and what happens to them. Just like real people, they make some decisions that other people might not make in the same situation, or even comprehend. Some might find some of their actions morally objectionable. But Duncan and Lily do learn from their mistakes. The book is a “page-turner” and I couldn’t wait to reach the end to find out how all the plotlines would turn out. This isn’t a perfect book, but it is a very good book and I am interested to see what Ms. Mauro comes up with in her second novel. – Bruce Loveitt, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Stuart Martin Berry has only three months left to find a publisher for his first novel. In a desperate attempt to reach his goal he leaves his home to live in New York. His wife has given him free rein to do whatever it takes to get a book deal. Her only request was not to give her any details on how he got there. If he fails he will be forced to give up his dream of being a famous writer and take a regular forty hour a week job. For Stuart this is sufficient motivation to start a three month adventure full of sex, lies, and deceit, without losing focus of the ultimate goal. When he finally reaches the finish line, he has evolved and become a top expert in the publishing world.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

American Male Prostitute is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Some secrets can’t be kept . . .

Years ago, they were all the best of friends. But as time passed and circumstances changed, they grew apart, became adults with families of their own, and began to forget about the past—and the terrible lie they all shared.

But now Gordon, the youngest and wildest of the five, has died and the others are thrown together for the first time in years.

And then the revelations start.

Could their long-ago lie be the reason for their troubles today? Each one of these old friends has to wonder if their secret has been discovered—and if someone within the circle is out to destroy them.

About Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman grew up in Baltimore and returned to her hometown in 1989 to work as a journalist. After writing seven books while still a full-time reporter, she left the Baltimore Sun to focus on fiction. She is the author of eleven Tess Monaghan books, including Baltimore Blues, Another Thing to Fall, and The Girl in the Green Raincoat; five stand-alone novels, including Every Secret Thing, To the Power of Three, What the Dead Know, and Life Sentences; and one short story collection, Hardly Knew Her. She is also the editor of another story collection, Baltimore Noir. Lippman has won numerous awards for her work, including the Edgar, Quill, Anthony, Nero Wolfe, Agatha, Gumshoe, Barry, and Macavity.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Amazon Exclusive: Kate Atkinson Interviews Laura Lippman

Source: Amazon.Com

Kate Atkinson‘s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, was named Whitbread Book of the Year in the U.K. in 1995, and was followed by Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird,Not the End of the World, Case Histories and One Good Turn.

Kate Atkinson: You employ the first person plural in parts of the new novel. It’s quite a startling device (I loved it in Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End). Why did you use it in The Most Dangerous Thing?

Laura Lippman: The decision was intuitive at first—that is, I knew it was right, without knowing why it was right. When I finished the book, I realized that these passages are a consensual version of what happened in the past, that the survivors have agreed on what happened and that’s why the story is, at turns, unflattering to each of them. They are working out their level of culpability in several tragedies and they just can’t face this alone. And that voice allowed me to include a subtext of gloom and foreboding—the story is being told by people who know how badly it ends.

KA: Do you think you write better now than you did when you first began to write novels? (I only ask because I think I’m a much better writer than I used to be but no one else seems to have noticed.) Do you feel you can trust your “inner critic” or are you plagued by doubts the whole time you are writing?

LL: At the risk of sounding obsequious, I have to say that you set the bar awfully high for yourself with Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but I’ve noticed how your work has changed, although I think the word that comes to mind isn’t better, but bolder. You take such big risks and yet you manage them with aplomb. The frustration of being a fan of your work is that there’s nothing quite like it. There are lots of wonderful writers in crime and literary fiction, but there’s only person who can write a Kate Atkinson novel.

I didn’t start out on the same level. That’s not poor-mouthing, as my Southern relatives would have it, but a fact on which everyone agrees. People tell me all the time—really, all the time—how far I’ve come since my first book. But, whether one writes a great first novel or simply a decent one, what are the choices? One can get better, worse, or stay the same. I shoot for better and I accept that there may be some dips, but they’ll come from trying new things at least, not doing the same things over and over. I do trust my inner critic, but I’m happy to have a circle of external critics that I trust as well.

KA: You “honor” the dead in your novels rather than exploit them for sadistic effect. Do you think that’s due to your background as a reporter butting up against real lives rather than fictional ones? Or because you’re a woman? Or just a decent human being?

LL: All of the above? At least, I hope I’m a decent person. I do think crime writers need to take a moment for introspection about the stories we’re telling and the bodies that are piling up around us. It’s somber stuff. There should be an agenda beyond sensation.

KA: How many novels do you have on the back burner at any one time? Have you ever sat down to write and not had any idea what you were going to do?

LL: Once—just once—I managed to have two projects going on simultaneously, a novel and a novella. I do best with one thing in front of me. And, increasingly, I have no idea what I’m going to write next. But that’s part of the job and, for me, part of the fun. I know a book is finished when I’m ready to sit down and ask myself, “What next, what interests me right now?” With The Most Dangerous Thing, I was interested in the way life becomes a kind of horror film at middle age. About two months after I started this book, my father-in-law died after a long decline. About the same time, one of my husband’s oldest friends, dating back to his days on the college newspaper, had a stroke at the age of 48, and died within hours. Yesterday, I picked up The New York Times and happened on a first-person piece by a former colleague, who wrote about having ALS and his intention to commit suicide while he was still able-bodied. He’s only 66.

But I also became a parent for the first time last year, which isn’t one of the typical milestones of middle-age, yet there it was. And it had a huge impact on the book.

KA: Do you feel guilty when you’re not writing, even when the other thing you’re doing is totally fulfilling or completely altruistic or utterly well deserved?

LL: If I’ve been disciplined—gone to my desk every weekday morning, written at least 1,000 words—I seldom feel guilty. I feel much more guilt-ridden about not reading enough.

But I will steal a line from Anne Lamott, who once said if people knew how good she felt writing they would set her on fire. Just this morning I was working and it wasn’t an on-fire moment, but it wasn’t a bad day either. Just an average one, the kind of days one has in the dead middle of books. I took a sip of my latte, looked at the clock on my computer and thought: It is 10:10 a.m. and my job is to sit here and make things up. I am a very lucky person.

KA: “I’ve never wanted people to feel good at the end of my novels,” you said in a Publishers Weekly interview. But do you feel good when you finish?

LL: I feel fabulous. It’s the best day of the year. But even on a book-a-year schedule, that means I feel fabulous only one day a year. As someone who takes great pride in completing things, I’ve chosen an interesting little hell for myself.

Book review: ‘The Most Dangerous Thing’ by Laura Lippman

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – August 21, 2011 (Excerpt)

Beware the wild child. That’s the message of Laura Lippman’s “The Most Dangerous Thing,” a novel that occupies the unlikely middle ground between thriller and coming-of-age saga, shifting from present to past as it tells the story of five childhood friends and the fateful night in 1979 that changed their lives.

Lippman is known for her mysteries featuring Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan, and though this character makes a brief but pointed appearance in these pages, the book comes billed as a stand-alone. Rather, the protagonist, if we can call her that, is Gwen Robison, a former newspaper reporter turned editor of a Baltimore city magazine who, as the action begins, is caring for her elderly father. She’s also looking to get out of a stultifying marriage, wondering how, in her early 40s, she has lost any semblance of control over her life.

Loss of control is a theme in “The Most Dangerous Thing,” as it is in many of Lippman’s novels, which balance plot and social observation, offering mysteries that comment on the world. That has to do with Lippman’s background; a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, she is acute on the shifting social landscapes of her hometown and especially on the fate of newspapers, which come up as a subtext in her work. [Read the full article...]

Laura Lippman’s ‘Most Dangerous Thing’: Brooding look at old neighborhood

The Washington Post Book Review – October 9, 2011 (Excerpt)

What lingers beyond all else about Laura Lippman’s latest stand-alone thriller is its brooding depiction of the old neighborhood. Dickeyville, Lippman tells readers in a note at the end of “The Most Dangerous Thing,” is the out-of-the-way neighborhood on Baltimore’s western edge where she grew up. As she describes it, the Dickeyville of some 40 years ago was part small-town suburbia, part Hansel and Gretel hallucination. Residents of the mostly older houses in the area all knew each other (at least by sight); Halloween parades and other quaint civic entertainments were a staple; pharmacies sold ice cream sodas; and kids could play for hours, unsupervised, in the woods that run through the area. That last item accounts for the Hansel and Gretel reference. Woods are never a reassuring locale in suspense fiction, and the particular woods that rim the houses of Lippman’s Dickeyville are dark and deep and full of ghosts too restless to sleep.

“The Most Dangerous Thing” alternates between a present-day reunion of sorts among five former friends and flashbacks to the late 1970s, when that group first came together in adolescence. Gwen was the budding beauty, a doctor’s daughter who lived in an odd modernist house. Her friend Mickey was a cynical tomboy being raised by a swinging single mother. The three Halloran boys rounded out the pack: Part of a large, working-class Irish-Catholic brood, the Hallorans shared hand-me-downs as well as a massive chip on their shoulders. Lippman vividly summons up the formlessness of summer days of yore, when accidental bands of kids who had nothing much in common but their neighborhood would clump together and ask, “Whaddayawannado?” In the case of these five friends, the answer — “Go into the woods and mess around” — led to a grotesque incident that has haunted the kids and their parents ever since. [Read the full article...]

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BOILED PEANUTS
A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A Small Hotel chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after twenty-four years of marriage. The book begins on the day that the Hays are to finalize their divorce. Kelly is due to be in court, but instead she drives from her home in Pensacola, Florida, across the panhandle to New Orleans and checks into Room 303 at the Olivier House in the city’s French Quarter—the hotel where she and Michael fell in love some twenty-five years earlier and where she now finds herself about to make a decision that will forever affect her, Michael, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Samantha. An intelligent, deeply moving, and remarkably written portrait of a relationship that reads as a cross between a romance novel and a literary page turner, A Small Hotel is a masterful story that will remind readers once again why Robert Olen Butler has been called the “best living American writer” (Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram).

Editorial Review

Not appropriate for cynical readers, this novel culminates in a pretty dramatic flourish. But for those of us capable of enjoying a good romance, Mr. Butler’s story of a long-married couple who have decided to break up delivers. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 11 previous novels, he is, after all, a pro. He earns his ending with layered renderings of these two people and their marriage. The novel is a flipbook of the memories they have of each other, set on the day Kelly is a no-show at their divorce hearing. Holed up in their old, favorite room in a New Orleans inn, accompanied by a bounty of pills and Scotch, she remembers the night she met Michael, their wedding, her affair. Michael is also away at a hotel, but his companion is a gabby young girlfriend. He’s failing to stay in the moment too. (Maybe because his date calls him a “funny bunny.”) From each spouse’s point of view we witness the feelings that didn’t break the surface at the time, but never went away. – The New York Times

Reader Review

On the day scheduled for their divorce hearing, Kelly Hays flees to a boutique hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans while Michael Hays drives west of the city to a plantation called Oak Alley. Kelly brings bottles of Macallan and Percocet with her: an ominous combination of traveling companions. Michael brings Laurie Pruitt, the younger woman he has started seeing. Both destinations trigger memories; more than once, Kelly and Michael stayed together at the same small hotel (including the day they met) and at the plantation (where they got married).

Kelly passes her time in and near the hotel by telling herself a silent story, beginning with a flashback to the Mardis Gras celebration where she first met (and was rescued by) Michael. She reflects upon “how abiding and deep an early impression we can draw of another person from a single, unexamined incident.” Eventually that story moves on to another man in her life. In the meantime, Michael and Laurie attend a period party where Michael tries to stay in the moment, a task to which he is unsuited.

Few readers will like Michael although many will recognize in him some of the men they know. The women in Michael’s life, those closest to him — his wife, his daughter, his girlfriend — never know what Michael is thinking. Michael compartmentalizes his thoughts, the better to ignore those that arise from emotions. Laurie is trying to figure out Michael’s “silences and hard edges,” still believes she can, believes Kelly simply didn’t know how to love him. Laurie is waiting for “the nothing that is so often there” to “become a nuanced something.” The reader gets the sense that Laurie will, in that regard, be following a dead-end path that Kelly has already traveled. To use the phrase that has become so popular, Michael is not in touch with his emotions. In that regard, Michael is more extreme than most men: he can’t seem to express any emotion, no matter how obvious the need for expression becomes.

If this novel has a fault, it is that Michael’s inability to say “I love you,” even to his daughter, is almost impossible to believe. By taking Michael to an extreme, however, Robert Olen Butler illustrates a familiar divide between men and women: while Kelly and Laurie are waiting uncomfortably for Michael to say something, to express a feeling, Michael feels connected to them by their mutual silence. There are other moments involving other couples that reveal the different ways in which men and women think and perceive the world, but Kelly and Michael, independently remembering their shared lives, provide the sharpest examples of those differences.

That divide is one of the novel’s strongest themes. The nature of manhood is another. We see a bit of Michael’s life as a boy, enough to understand that Michael’s father conditioned Michael to believe that emotional displays are unmanly. Perhaps it is trite that Kelly’s father was emotionally unavailable and that Kelly is likely drawn to Michael for that reason, but sometimes trite is truth: women are often attracted to men who, consciously or not, remind them of their fathers, just as they are often attracted to “the strong silent type” until years of silence become oppressive.

As he explores these themes, Butler constructs sentences and paragraphs that move the narrative along like a locomotive gaining steam. There isn’t much of a plot here — you wouldn’t call the events that have shaped your life a “plot” — although Butler skillfully builds a sense of dread as the story unfolds. Two stories, really, seamlessly joined: one taking place in the present that has the reader worrying about Kelly alone in her hotel room with alcohol and pills, and the intertwined life stories that brought Michael and Kelly to this point. Butler condenses the life stories to their essence by focusing on those small defining moments in lives and relationships that become forever imprinted in memory. I’m not entirely satisfied with the ending — it seems designed to appease readers — but that’s a small complaint, an authorial choice that I can accept.

The scenes describing the end of the marriage are beautifully written but painful to read. If you’re looking for a book that is light and bright and cheery, look somewhere else. If you are willing to tackle an intense, insightful examination of two individuals, this is a rewarding novel. – TChris, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Book review: “A Small Hotel,” by Robert Olen Butler

The Washington Post Book Review – August 22, 2011 (Excerpt)

Robert Olen Butler’s new novel, “A Small Hotel,” is a brief, intense portrayal of the collapse of a marriage. It focuses on the three principals: the wife, Kelly, who has skipped out after failing to sign her divorce papers and fled from her home in Pensacola, Fla., to New Orleans; the husband, Michael, a lawyer, who is planning to formalize a new relationship; and his girlfriend, Laurie, a generation younger than Michael, who is confident that she has the insight and skills to satisfy a man who remains unsatisfied after two dec­ades in an apparently conventional marriage.

This may be the oldest story in the world, or at least in the monogamous world, but Butler, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” seeks to give it new life by anatomizing the feelings and perceptions of each of the principals. The time frame is short (a single weekend), and, unbeknown to the characters, the setting is confined, because Michael and Laurie are also in Louisiana. They had all traveled, as if by instinct, to the seminal ground of the marriage, the spot where Kelly was originally rescued from the chaos of Mardi Gras by Michael.

The result, of course, is retrospection, though Butler is careful to indicate that Michael’s and Kelly’s memories hardly match, or even coincide. The isolation that has led to their divorce is evident in how separately their minds work, and in how ineffectual their attempts at communication have always been. [Read the full article...]

The Death of a Marriage in New Orleans

The New York Times Book Review – October 7, 2011 (Excerpt)

Toward the end of “A Small Hotel,” Robert Olen Butler’s feverish new novel, a Florida lawyer named Michael Hays tries to convince himself that his prospective lover, Laurie, blond and 26 years his junior, is something other than the “ditz” she proclaims herself to be. “She’s a perfect client,” he thinks. “Surprisingly smart and self-aware and honestly self-critical.” Michael could easily be describing any of the characters who populate Butler’s vast and diverse body of fiction — a dozen novels and some half-dozen story collections, some more successful than others — from the Vietnamese immigrants in “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” which won the Pulitzer in 1993, to the panoply of the famous damned in his 2009 novel “Hell.” Despite the humor threaded through his works, Butler’s characters are indisputably tragic, in that their abundant knowledge of their own needs and flaws traps rather than frees them.

This is, of course, the tragedy of “Hamlet,” remade by Butler in a distinctly post-Freudian style that reaches its apogee in “A Small Hotel,” a slim and wise, and painfully realistic, study of a contemporary marriage. The novel takes place over the course of an unseasonably warm day in November 2009, the day on which Michael and his wife of two decades, Kelly, were to finalize their divorce. Instead of signing the papers, Kelly drives to New Orleans and checks into the Olivier House hotel — where she and Michael fell in love, “their place,” “thick with the ghosts” of their former selves — carrying just one small bag, which contains little more than two bottles: Macallan and Percocet. Meanwhile, Michael, too, crosses the state line, with Laurie, who has persuaded him to don a swallowtail coat for an “antebellum fashion festival” on a sugarcane plantation. Kelly, we assume, has been traded in for a younger model. But as in many of Butler’s tales all is not as it seems. [Read the full article...]

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BOILED PEANUTS
A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul’s life—the Day of the Dead, 1938—his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. She is determined to rescue Firmin and their failing marriage, but her mission is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul’s half brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one significant day unfold against an unforgettable backdrop of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical.

Under the Volcano remains one of literature’s most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man’s constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.

Editorial Reviews

Under the Volcano is a 1947 semi-autobiographical novel by English writer Malcolm Lowry (1909–57). The novel tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac (the Aztec name of Cuernavaca), on the Day of the Dead. Surrounded by the helpless presences of his ex-wife, his half-brother and acquaintances, he descends into a mescal-soaked purgatory, moving inexorably towards his tragic fate. His self-destructiveness reflects a spiritual struggle born of wilful abnegation and passivity, a depressed, existential acquiescence to the futility of positive action. It was adapted to radio on Studio One in 1947 and made into a film in 1984. The 1976 Canadian Documentary Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry was nominated for an Academy Award. The Under the Volcano Festival of Art and Social Change takes place annually in North Vancouver, British Columbia, in the same location where Malcolm Lowry wrote the novel. – Wikipedia

Legend has it that Malcolm Lowry’s friends kept suitcases next to their doors, so they could pretend to be leaving town if he came by wanting to stay over. By the time you’ve finished this brilliant semi-autobiographical novel, you’ll understand why. Under the Volcano tells the story of an alcoholic British consul, Geoffrey Firmin, drinking himself to death in southern Mexico. Hovering blurrily in his vicinity as he stumbles from bar to bar (the book evokes drunkenness better than anything I’ve ever read) are a half-brother and an ex-wife who may or may not be betraying him. Firmin is an inveterate liar and a hopeless case. The book is dense with scenes (Firmin’s lonely, drunken ride on a ferris wheel comes to mind) that would be miserable to live through, but are pure pleasure to read about. – NPR Book Review

Review

Geoffrey Firmin, the former British consul to Mexico, is a prisoner of alcoholism. A victim of the shakes, he hears voices, talks to people who are not there, and hallucinates, though he is often able to hide the extent of his drinking. “True, he might lie down in the street, but he would never reel.” On The Day of the Dead in 1938, his recently divorced wife Yvonne returns to Quauhnahuac, over which two smoking volcanoes loom, to try to persuade him to reconcile.

Coincidentally, Geoffrey’s half-brother Hugh, with whom Yvonne apparently had a brief affair, also arrives that day, and the three share quarters, each hoping to recapture the past. When they take the bus to Tomalin to a bull-riding event, they see a wounded peasant dying beside the road, the peasant’s horse with the number 7 branded on its rump, a tricky pesado, and a group of vigilantes, all of whom play a role in the climax which follows.

Rich with details, both of the external world of Quauhnahuac and the internal world of Geoffrey, the novel, first published in 1947, reflects Lowry’s own experiences as an alcoholic. Geoffrey, a fully-rounded character, knows that he must stop drinking in order to function effectively, but he is unable to function at all without drinking. He both loves and despises Yvonne, wants to leave Mexico but wants to stay, and wants to find peace but creates chaos.

As Lowry reconstructs this one day in Geoffrey’s life, the Day of the Dead, the pervasive symbolism adds to the feeling of overpowering doom–the smoking volcanoes ready to erupt, the “hideous pariah dog” that follows Geoffrey and Yvonne to the house, a barranca (chasm) which exists beside the house and which contains a dead dog, an Indian carrying “the weight of the past,” vultures in the forest, Yvonne’s release of an eagle in a cage, and sudden storms. All add weight and intensity to this powerful story of dissolution.

Despite the depressing subject matter and a frustrating main character who cannot or will not help himself during the novel’s four hundred pages, the novel is breath-taking–elegant both in language and construction. Carefully plotted, filled with unique imagery, and enhanced by symbolism which brings it alive on new levels, it overwhelms the reader with its impact and approaches classical tragedy as the inevitable, doom-filled events play out. Though the novel includes peripheral political issues of the day–Mexico’s instability and the philosophical conflicts between fascism and socialism–it is primarily a variation on the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of man–full, rich, dense, and rewarding, despite its pervasive sadness. – Mary Whipple, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband Edward Sheffield, an unpublished writer. Now, she’s enduring middle class suburbia as a doctor’s wife, when out of the blue she receives a package containing the manuscript of her ex-husband’s first novel. He writes asking her to read the book; she was always his best critic, he says.

As Susan reads, she is drawn into the fictional life of Tony Hastings, a math professor driving his family to their summer house in Maine. And as we read with her, we too become lost in Sheffield’s thriller. As the Hastings’ ordinary, civilized lives are disastrously, violently sent off course, Susan is plunged back into the past, forced to confront the darkness that inhabits her, and driven to name the fear that gnaws at her future and will change her life.

Editorial Reviews

By framing a crime story within a domestic novel, Wright, an English professor and author of three previous novels, dissolves the fragile civility that often conceals violence. He also scrutinizes the institution of marriage, considers the nature of memory, and documents the potential impact of one’s choices, both large and small–all without sacrificing pace. At Edward Sheffield’s request, Susan Morrow reads his first novel, Nocturnal Animals , in which an impulsive change of plan delivers Tony Hastings and his family into the hands of strangers who terrorize them. Passages from Sheffield’s novel alternate between Susan’s memories of Sheffield (her ex-husband), to details of her current marriage, to her speculations about the writer’s and the reader’s obligations. By counterpoising the eroding compromises of Susan’s daily life with the sufferings of the Hastings family, Wright demonstrates that macho posturing, cruelty, and the refusal of individual responsibility infect both sexes and all classes. Highly recommended. - Jane S. Baker man, Indiana State Univ., Terre Haute for Library Journal

Austin Wright’s novel, first published in 1993, has been resurrected, first in England in 2010 and now here, and readers should be grateful. Wright, who died in 2003, masterfully blends Edward’s book – a taut, stylish, ultimately brutal thriller – with Susan’s experience, both as she remembers her life with Edward and as she lives her current life, one that combines comfort with ennui. The Tony in Wright’s title is the protagonist in Edward’s book, “Nocturnal Animals,’’ and while parallels between the two men are subtly drawn they are powerfully unnerving; both strain against their essential passivity, both wonder whether being civilized is a sign of weakness. Wright weaves the two threads together into an elegant meditation on the process of reading, the relationship between reading and writing, the dance between writer and reader. Tony’s story ends in violence, Susan’s in ambiguity; together, they are beautifully wrought, troubling, and hard to forget. – The Boston Globe

Review

The late Austin Wright gave readers a beautiful gift with Tony and Susan. He presented parallel stories, ushering us into two fictional worlds both of which are irresistibly compelling.

We first meet Susan Morrow who is surprised to hear from her first husband after 20 years – he has written a book, and would she like to read it? “Damn! But this book is good. How much he had learned about life and craft. He wanted to show her, let her read and see, judge for herself. ” When they were married this had been a touchy subject; she was a harsh critic and he was a nascent writer.

She receives the manuscript shortly, but sets it aside for some three months. Susan is a worrier. In addition to household chores and looking after the children, she spends time in worry, not always certain what it is that keeps crossing her mind although Arnold, her husband, is often in those plaguing thoughts.

Nonetheless, at last she picks up Edward’s manuscript titled Nocturnal Animals, and soon finds herself totally engrossed in the story of Tony Hastings. Married to Laura with one daughter, Helen, “He was a mathematics professor who took pride in reliability and good sense.” They were traveling by car in northern Pennsylvania on their way to their summer cottage in Maine. On a lark they decide to drive all night rather than stopping to rest. Tony “was liberated by the irresponsibility of not having to hunt for a place to stay….”

That feeling of freedom was short lived as the Hastings family suddenly and irrevocably loses every shred of the safety and serenity they once enjoyed. At the same time as Susan continues her reading of Edward’s manuscript she is forced to face the truth about herself, a truth she does not like at all.

So perfectly written, so imaginatively conceived Tony & Susan will stay with you long after reading the last page. – Gail Cooke, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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January 1917: five French soldiers are marched to their own front lines where they will be tossed out into no man’s land with their hands tied behind their backs and left for the Germans to shoot. They were, in civilian life, variously a pimp, a mechanic, a farmer, a carpenter, and a fisherman; now they are condemned because each had sought to leave the war by shooting himself in the hand. Taken to a godforsaken trench nicknamed Bingo Crépuscule, the five are reluctantly sent out into the darkness; days later, five bodies are recovered and the families are notified, merely, that the men died in the line of duty.

August 1919: Mathilde Donnay receives a letter from a dying man. In it, the former soldier tells her that he met her beloved fiancé, the fisherman Manech, shortly before he died. Mathilde goes to meet Sergeant Daniel Esperanza at his hospital and there hears the story of the execution. She also receives a package with a photograph of the men and copies of their last letters. As Mathilde reads and rereads the letters and goes over Esperanza’s tale, she begins to suspect that perhaps the story didn’t end quite so neatly. And so begins her very long investigation into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of five condemned prisoners–one of whom, at least, might not really be dead.

In Mathilde Donnay, Sebastien Japrisot has created one of the most compelling and delightful heroines in modern fiction. Though confined to a wheelchair since childhood, “Mathilde has other lives, varied and quite beautiful ones.” She paints, cares for her pets, enjoys a rich fantasy life, and is relentless in her search for the truth about Manech’s death. But she is by no means the only vibrant personality leaping off Japrisot’s pages. This author has a remarkable ability to draw even minor characters in three dimensions with economy and wit. Take Mathilde’s mother, for instance, caught in mid-card game: “At bridge, manille, bezique, Mama is a dirty rotten swine. Not only is she an ace with the pasteboards, but she throws her opponents off their mettle by insulting or making fun of them.” And even the characters we meet only through other people’s memories–the condemned men–are so fully realized that you find yourself torn over which one you hope may have survived. As Mathilde comes ever closer to solving the mystery of what happened at Bingo Crépuscule that January morning in 1917, Sebastien Japrisot proves himself a master storyteller and A Very Long Engagement a near perfect novel. –Alix Wilber, Amazon.Com Rveiew

Collect calls from prison are expensive, but at least it’s some form of contact. Mathilde, the heroine of Sebastian Japrisot’s A Very Long Engagement, isn’t even sure her fiance is alive. The last time anyone saw her man, a World War I soldier accused of treason, he was being marched with four other Frenchmen into “no man’s land” — a deadzone between the French and German lines. But that was back in January 1917. Two years later, the war has ended and Mathilde learns from a dying sergeant that at least one of those five men is still alive. The odds aren’t great, but Mathilde is maniacal in her determination. She embarks on a decades-long quest to try to cut through the fog of war — and to resolve the fate of her lost love and his four compatriots. – NPR Book Review

Review

A Very Long Engagement is a magical book, one which weaves a tale and catches you in its spell–it will haunt you long after you put it down. The novel begins as five condemned French soldiers walk to their doom during World War I. They have all shot themselves, trying to get out of fighting and as punishment, will be thrown into the no-man’s-land between the French trenches and the German trenches. Their families know nothing of this and after they die, are told them men died honorably. A few years later, Mathilde, the fiance of one of the men discovers some of the truth about what happened and she becomes convinced that her fiance has did not die–or at least did not die as she was told. She tries, doggedly, to uncover the truth. Along the way, she discovers many atrocities of that war. The novel pulls you along to its rather unexpected, yet still deeply satisfying ending, pulls you so much you won’t be able to put this one down. The power of love, the strength of friendship, the failure of memory–all these come into play in this outstanding novel. I highly recommend this novel to all devoted readers. It’s a bit of a challenge, following all the little clues Matilde gets, putting the truth together and tossing out the lies, but it’s worth it. Enjoy. – Elizabeth Hendry, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Today’s publishing world is divided into two principle sections. First, there is the exclusive pool of traditional publishers, and, second, the help-yourself shark tank represented by the so-called vanity publishers.

Vanity publishers have a significant edge over traditional publishers in regards to brutality, business sense, and profitability. They ruthlessly pursue the infinite supply of aspiring writers who, in turn, are rejected by traditional publishers or literary agents. Ironically, in the world of traditional publishing, authors are rejected not necessarily due to lack of talent. Vanity publishers accept everybody and everything. No questions asked. Just pay your bill, but don’t come crying to them when you can’t sell a copy of your book.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Kathleen Ann Goonan introduced Sam Dance and his wife, Bette, and their quest to alter our present reality for the better in her novel In War Times (winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel and ALA’s Best Science Fiction Novel of 2008). Now, in This Shared Dream, she tells the story of the next generation.

The three Dance kids, seemingly abandoned by both parents when they were younger, are now adults and are all disturbed by memories of a reality that existed in place of their world. The older girl, Jill, even remembers the disappearance of their mother while preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Goonan has created a new kind of utopian SF novel, in which the changes in history have created a present world that is in many ways superior to our own, while in other worlds people strive to prevent their own erasure by restoring the ills to ours. This Shared Dream is certainly the most provocative SF speculation of the year, and perhaps the decade.

Review

Though This Shared Dream can be read on its own, I read it precourser, In War Times, and loved it. loved them both for their conceptual brilliance most of all. The Dance family, parents and now grown children, have suffered because of the self-replicating, timestreaming Device. Traveling through different time zones and historic dimensions from the 1930′s through the 40′s, 50′s, 60′s and beyond, they plunge into adventures that may change human history for the better or worse…it’s a wild ride. It’s scientifically plausible and emotionally exciting. I highly recommend it as a foray into alternate histories of mindbending fun. – Elle Moss, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Michael Dirda reviews ‘This Shared Dream,’ by Kathleen Ann Goonan

The Washington Post Book Review – August 10, 2011 (Excerpt)

Many people are convinced that Washingtonians — or at least those who work for the federal government — don’t actually live on the same planet as the rest of the country.Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “This Shared Dream” suggests that this view is almost right. This excellent science fiction novel is part “Inception,” part “Back to the Future,” part “Jumanji” — and it takes place almost entirely in Washington and Northern Virginia.

When the novel opens in 1991, Sam Dance, an engineer, and his wife, Bette, a Montessori teacher, have been missing for a long time. First, Bette simply vanished in 1963; then, more than a decade later, Sam did the same. No one knows why they disappeared or whether they are alive. The couple did leave behind a rambling old house, with a perennial trust set up for its maintenance and care. They also left behind three now grown children, Jill, Brian and Megan, who have been more or less scarred by the mysteries surrounding their parents’ lives and their own childhoods.

Rumor has it, for instance, that Bette may have been an elite OSS spy in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. Sam definitely served in World War II with his friend Wink, and the two seem to have been involved with research into a force more powerful than atomic fission. A device harnessing this mysterious energy has even been envisioned by the enigmatic Eliani Hadntz, a brilliant physicist (and physician) who believes that the world could be made more humane through the right kind of early childhood imprinting and the reinforcement of empathy in people’s brain chemistries.

In the first chapter of “This Shared Dream,” the 41-year-old Jill Dance is just finishing her last class as a PhD candidate in political science at Georgetown University. Though generally a superb student, she occasionally makes strange errors, once hurriedly writing in a paper that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Which, of course, isn’t true. “Kennedy had not been assassinated,” she recalls, when confronted about it. “Nothere. He was an international statesman, a celebrity, the father of the space program, as well as the father of several children born to women not married to him.” [Read the full article...]

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Today’s publishing world is divided into two principle sections. First, there is the exclusive pool of traditional publishers, and, second, the help-yourself shark tank represented by the so-called vanity publishers.

Vanity publishers have a significant edge over traditional publishers in regards to brutality, business sense, and profitability. They ruthlessly pursue the infinite supply of aspiring writers who, in turn, are rejected by traditional publishers or literary agents. Ironically, in the world of traditional publishing, authors are rejected not necessarily due to lack of talent. Vanity publishers accept everybody and everything. No questions asked. Just pay your bill, but don’t come crying to them when you can’t sell a copy of your book.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Stewart O’Nan’s ninth novel, The Good Wife, begins with that classic harbinger of bad news: A phone call in the middle of the night. Small-town housewife Patty Dickerson, pregnant with her first child, has been waiting in bed for her husband Tommy to get home. When the call comes, it’s from jail. Tommy has been arrested for murder after a robbery gone awry. He doesn’t make it home for 28 years.

With his usual practicality, O’Nan kills the hope off quickly in The Good Wife. This isn/t a novel of beating the odds but of enduring them. We follow Patty through her husband’s long incarceration as she moves in with family, gets a series of low-paying jobs, remains faithful to Tommy, and raises their son Casey alone. These aren’t unique circumstances–although they rarely form the stuff of fiction–and these aren’t unique, unforgettable characters. Patty Dickerson could be anyone, and that’s the point. This is a story of ordinary lives and small graces. O’Nan’s refusal to dress things up (or down) is part of the charm of this clear-sighted, uncompromising novel. –Regina Marler, Amazon.Com Review

Patty Dickerson, the resilient heroine of O’Nan’s forceful, oddly moving ninth novel, is pregnant with her first child and waiting for her husband, Tommy, on a snowy night in the mid-1970s, when the phone rings. It’s Tommy, and he’s in jail after a robbery. He’s been a thief for some time, a fact Patty has refused to acknowledge. Unfortunately, Tommy’s latest escapade involves arson and death. Convicted of murder in the second degree, he receives a sentence of 25 years to life. The main story is Patty’s, told in the present tense in quietly lyrical and observant prose: the struggle to make ends meet in an economically depressed upstate New York community, the shame of her son’s father being in prison, the frustrating and humiliating treatment the penal system inflicts on prisoners and family alike. In a sense, Patty’s life is on semipermanent hold over the 28 years Tommy spends in a correctional facility, but of course it isn’t really: her son grows up, she visits her husband as often as she can, she works, mostly at dead-end jobs, and eventually she creates a career for herself. In other words, she makes a life that’s both with and without her love. O’Nan (The Night Country) has completely captured Patty Dickerson and her dogged determination to endure in this sad but strangely hopeful story. – Publishers Weekly

Patty, the title character in Stuart O’Nan’s novel The Good Wife, is 27 and pregnant when she gets a call in the middle of the night that will change her life forever: Her husband Tommy, it seems, has been burgling empty houses at night with a friend. Except that on this particular night the house wasn’t empty, and now an old woman is dead. When the friend takes a plea deal, Tommy heads off to prison for 28 years. But Patty is not about to abandon the father of her child. Instead, she resolutely commits to Tommy, spending the better part of the next three decades navigating the indignities of prison pat downs and conjugal visits — never once asking her husband about his role in the murder. O’Nan’s portrait of the aging Patty — world-weary, but forever hopeful for the next appeal — is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. – NPR Book Review

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Review

This haunting novel describes in spare prose the long span of time that passes between the commission of a crime by Patty’s husband, Tommy, and his release from prison many years later. Throughout it, Patty is the “good wife” indeed, nearly unwavering in her support for Tommy in the face of truly difficult circumstances. The graceful writing and moral dilemmas in this novel will stay with you long after finishing it.

O’Nan provides a totally convincing portrayal of a segment of society–the spouses, usually wives, of convicts–that goes almost completely ignored and neglected. This book is searing reminder that crimes harm not only the victims of the crime, who naturally deserve the bulk of our sympathy, but also the criminal’s loved ones. Tommy’s apparent lack of recognition of, and remorse for, the harm he has done to his wife and the child he was not around to raise is one of the most disturbing aspects of the novel. Patty WAS a good wife, and she deserved more gratitude from Tommy than she received.

What makes this novel deserving of 5 stars is not merely its story but the writing itself. In beautiful, spare prose O’Nan writes simply of the day to day complications of trying to get by as a single mother whose only hope for the future is at the far end of a 25-year sentence. Parts of Patty’s life are described in detail, but in other parts of the book, entire years go by summarized in a phrase or a sentence. The tragedy of Patty’s life is that entire years COULD be summarized in a sentence, and through his prose O’Nan communicates vividly the bleakness of a life placed far too long on hold.

Should Patty have stuck by Tommy? That’s a hard question. You have to admire her perseverance and willingness to stand by her marriage vows and her love her for husband, although the subplot involving her attraction for another man suggests that, once again, Patty let her life be determined by the actions (or inactions) of others. Given slightly different chance encounters, her story very easily could have ended differently. In a way, I see her story not being one of loyalty but rather passivity…to Tommy, to a penal system that transferred her husband to a facility a day’s drive away, to a fate that treated her badly. Patty may have been a good wife, but in the final analysis, the only person that benefited was Tommy. And you finish the novel feeling utterly sad about all the wasted lives involved. – Monica J. Kern, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE

How I (Almost) Got A Book Deal Through Sex, Lies, And Deceit

Today’s publishing world is divided into two principle sections. First, there is the exclusive pool of traditional publishers, and, second, the help-yourself shark tank represented by the so-called vanity publishers.

Vanity publishers have a significant edge over traditional publishers in regards to brutality, business sense, and profitability. They ruthlessly pursue the infinite supply of aspiring writers who, in turn, are rejected by traditional publishers or literary agents. Ironically, in the world of traditional publishing, authors are rejected not necessarily due to lack of talent. Vanity publishers accept everybody and everything. No questions asked. Just pay your bill, but don’t come crying to them when you can’t sell a copy of your book.

The question remains, what does it take these days to get a book deal with a traditional publisher? What do you do when, hypothetically, you are running out of time and mere talent is not the be-all and end-all?

Stuart Martin Berry has found the answer: If you can’t impress them with your talent, baffle them with your bull-shit. [Read more, including an excerpt]

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

With the world undergoing an industrial transformation, and with England on the cusp of revolution, Lucy is drawn into a dangerous conspiracy in which her life, and her country’s future, are in the balance. Inexplicably finding herself at the center of cataclysmic events, Lucy is awakened to a world once unknown to her: where magic and mortals collide, and the forces of ancient nature and modern progress are at war for the soul of England . . . and the world. The key to victory may be connected to a cryptic volume whose powers of enchantment are unbounded. Now, challenged by ruthless enemies with ancient powers at their command, Lucy must harness newfound mystical skills to prevent catastrophe and preserve humanity’s future. And enthralled by two exceptional men with designs on her heart, she must master her own desires to claim the destiny she deserves.

The Twelfth Enchantment is the most captivating work to date of a master literary conjurer.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

“David Liss takes readers on a light-hearted romp through Regency England in The Twelfth Enchantment. With an adroit mix of fact and fantasy, Liss casts heroine Lucy Derrick into a world of industrializing mill towns, mysterious enchantments, ghostly dogs, undead fairies, Luddites, and even Lord Byron and his legions of lovesick women. Charged with gathering the scattered pages of an alchemical manuscript, Lucy’s adventures teach her that appearances can be deceptive—and delightfully so. Liss’s deft touch with historical subject matter and his ability to craft tremendously appealing characters makes this a thoroughly enjoyable, satisfying read.”
–Deborah Harkness, author of A Discovery of Witches

About the Author

David Liss is the author of The Whiskey Rebels ,The Ethical Assassin, A Spectacle of Corruption, The Coffee Trader,and, A Conspiracy of Paperwinner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. He lives in San Antonio with his wife and children.

Review

“The Twelfth Enchantment,” by David Liss, starts off promisingly. It is 1812 and our heroine, Lucy Derrick, is a twenty-year-old orphan who is living unhappily in Nottingham, England, with her cruel uncle and an abusive woman named Mrs. Quince. Although she was well-educated by her late father, Lucy was left almost destitute when he died. She is at the mercy of her vicious uncle, Richard Lowell, who cannot wait to be rid of her. In fact, her uncle plans to give her hand in marriage to a thirty-five year old, dried up prune of a man named Olson, the owner of a local hosiery mill.

Although the Industrial Revolution has brought prosperity to some, this newfound wealth and efficiency comes at a price. Smokestacks belch thick and toxic fumes that pollute the areas bordering the factories. In addition, manual laborers have been replaced by machinery, leading to high unemployment and abject poverty for those who can no longer feed their families. Furthermore, conditions in the factories are vile and unsafe; even the children who work the looms are beaten when they do not meet their overseer’s expectations.

Lucy’s existence is upended by a series of strange events involving Lord Byron (he shows up often in historical fiction these days), a roué named Mr. Morrison who tarnished Lucy’s reputation when she was just sixteen, William Blake, and a mysterious and beautiful stranger, Mary Crawford, who introduces Lucy to a world of spells. It seems that Lucy has uncanny abilities that, if harnessed properly, would give her enormous power. She will need to master a great deal of arcane knowledge and show great courage, for she will find herself pitted against evil beings bent on mass destruction. Lucy has a great deal on her plate: Whom can she really trust? Does she have the knowledge and determination to use her unique talent to defeat her enemies? Will she ever meet the great love of her life who will take her away from all this? Meanwhile, Lucy must decide whether to fend off Lord Byron’s not entirely unwelcome attentions (she admits that he is gorgeous to look at but a thorough reprobate).

By now, you may have deduced that Liss has overstuffed his narrative. There is a derivative quality to this novel which brings to mind such familiar works as: “Jane Eyre,” who was cast off without a penny but stood up for herself as a proud, moral, and independent woman; “Hard Times,” in which Charles Dickens decries the forced labor of children and excoriates those who would enrich themselves on the backs of the poor; and the “Harry Potter” series, in which J. K. Rowling breathes life into magic and wizardry, while also dealing with feelings, relationships, and social issues. You may also add any nineteenth century romance in which a young lady who is lovely but not well-connected seeks to marry a man she can cherish and who will cherish her in return.

Liss writes lush sentences, is a skilled descriptive writer, and he imbues Lucy with warmth and spirit. It is really too bad that, as the book progresses, the author resorts to clichés, contrivances, and silly twists and turns. The finale is flat and anticlimactic, when it should have been exciting and exhilarating. Much of “The Twelfth Enchantment” is captivating, but the weak conclusion may leave readers less than spellbound. – E. Bukowsky, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

A Love Story of Almost Shakespearean Dimension!

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.