Twelve-year-old Sarah Stein loves life in New York. Who wouldn’t, growing up in a cool TriBeCa loft with an artist dad and a chocolate-maker mom, rollerblading in Central Park, hanging out with friends? That is, until the day her parents tell her they’re divorcing. Forced to shuttle each day by bicycle between their separate residences on either side of the Brooklyn Bridge, Sarah soon discovers that the parents she thought she knew are as opposite as their new homes. She takes on a bizarrely split identity—one day she’s the daughter of the prim, social-climbing chocolatier, the next the streetwise, smart-aleck child of the downtown abstract painter. Sarah Stein becomes a stranger to herself. But that’s not the only thing that’s strange. Colliding with the cart of a homeless man one day while pedaling across the bridge, Sarah tumbles through a magical portal and into an upside-down world of double identities and second chances.

Through her friendship with the homeless Clarence Wind, a disgraced fireman missing since 9/11, and the love of her grandmother, a wise Holocaust survivor with her own hidden past, Sarah unlocks the mysteries behind the strangeness that she and Clarence share. In this witty, wonder-filled novel about broken homes and disconnected lives, with the majestic Brooklyn Bridge as backdrop and the legacies of the Holocaust and the Twin Towers as backstory, Sarah Stein’s adventures prove both heartbreaking and heartwarming, an enchantment for readers of all ages.

About Thane Rosenbaum

Thane Rosenbaum, author of the critically acclaimed novels The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke, and Elijah Visible, is also a law professor at Fordham Law School. He lives in New York City. www.thanerosenbaum.com

Book review: ‘The Stranger Within Sarah Stein’

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – March 24, 2012 (Excerpt)

Young adult novelists are increasingly tackling darker subjects: kidnappings, drugs, rape. But few have delved into so many dark subjects as novelist Thane Rosenbaum, who ventures into YA territory with his latest, “The Stranger Within Sarah Stein,” a novel revolving around divorce, Sept. 11, homelessness and the Holocaust.

What might be most odd about this combination of subjects is that the book isn’t glum at all. Told through the eyes of the perky, bike-riding 12-year-old Sarah Stein, the daughter of a candy-making mother and an artist-painter father, it works as more of a fantasy than as a dark rumination on tragedy. There is sadness between the lines, but also a bright fairy-tale aspect, a kind of “Willy Wonka” meets “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

The book opens as Sarah’s parents decide to divorce, forcing her to shuttle, on bike, between her father’s loft in TriBeCa and her mother’s new Brooklyn pad, near the chocolate factory (Carly Cocoa’s Chocolate Factory — see what I mean about fairy tale?). Upset by her wrenched-apart life, Sarah slowly becomes two separate Sarahs, one who is girly but ditzy and lives in Brooklyn, another who is biker chic and lives in Manhattan. [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 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to pass the remainder of his life in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, where he was employed as a gardener by the wealthy, Dutch-descended Verplanck family on their estate in Fishkill Landing. Two years after his escape, he began a diary that he kept until two years before his death. In Freedom’s Gardener, Myra B. Young Armstead uses seemingly small details from Brown’s diaries—entries about weather, gardening, steamboat schedules, the Verplanck’s social life, and other largely domestic matters—to construct a bigger story about the development of national citizenship in the United States in the years predating the Civil War.

Brown’s experience of upward mobility demonstrates the power of freedom as a legal state, the cultural meanings attached to free labor using horticulture as a particular example, and the effectiveness of the vibrant political and civic sphere characterizing the free, democratic practices begun in the Revolutionary period and carried into the young nation.  In this first detailed historical study of Brown’s diaries, Armstead thus utilizes Brown’s life to more deeply illuminate the concept of freedom as it developed in the United States in the early national and antebellum years.

About Myra B. Young Armstead

Myra B. Young Armstead is Professor of History at Bard College. Her books include “Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August”: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930 and Mighty Change, Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley.

Editorial Reviews

“Armstead explores the meaning of northern African American identity through her deft decoding of a ten-volume diary left by James F. Brown… Recommended for historians of antebellum America or the social aspects of horticulture and for those interested in historical diaries. Incipient researchers will learn the differences among term, life, and wage slaves and much else.” -Library Journal

“Myra Young Armstead brings to life James Brown, a self-possessed African American citizen of the pre-Civil War United States, and gives us a new understanding of the meaning of freedom in antebellum America.  As a master gardener in rural upstate New York, James Brown charted a life of complex alliances across racial lines and advocacy on behalf of fellow African Americans. Armstead’s wonderful work of recovery illuminates a path to freedom in the rural North that we have known little about.” -Leslie M. Harris,Emory University

“This is far more than a book about a gardener–though it is a fascinating story about nineteenth-century American horticulture. Freedom’s Gardener tells us about the opportunities and limits that framed the lives of African Americans in places like New York’s Hudson Valley. And a good read to boot.” -James Grossman,University of Chicago

Tending His Gardens - Myra B. Young Armstead’s ‘Freedom’s Gardener’

The New York Times Book Review – March 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

In August 1827, a 33-year-old slave named James F. Brown ran away from a plantation in Maryland. Before he escaped, he wrote a letter explaining his actions and vowed that once he had earned enough money he would reimburse his owner, Susan Williams, to prove “that I dont mean to be dishonest but wish to pay her every cent that I think my Servaces is worth.” Brown’s letter reveals much about his character. He was orderly and moderate. He hated to do something that was “criminal” but felt he had no choice. His had not been a hasty or unreasonable decision. He was only taking the freedom that had rightfully been given by his previous master, who had promised it before his death.

Refused release from bondage, Brown decided to emancipate himself. A few months after his escape, as Myra B. Young Armstead reports in “Freedom’s Gardener,” Brown was in Manhattan working as a waiter for the wealthy Verplanck family. Unfortunately, one of their dinner guests recognized him and dashed off a letter to Susan Williams, who promptly acted to reclaim her property. Letters sailed back and forth between Williams and Brown’s employer, Daniel C. Verplanck, until it was agreed that Brown would be permitted to buy his freedom with his wages, augmented by a loan from Verplanck.

Within a few years, Brown had also bought his wife’s freedom. By then he was working as the head gardener at Verplanck’s estate, Mount Gulian, in the Hudson Valley at Fishkill Landing (the present-day Beacon, N.Y.). Unlike many other free blacks, Brown had not gone from outright slavery to wage slavery; he was earning a decent salary and could even afford to buy a house. Not only was he a free man and financially independent but, as a property owner, he was allowed to vote. On Nov. 8, 1837, he proudly noted in his diary: “James F Brown voted for the first time.” [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.

A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole’s Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world.

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Teju Cole

Teju Cole was raised in Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992. He is a writer, photographer, and professional historian of early Netherlandish art. Open City is his first novel. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Possibly the only negative thing to say about Cole’s intelligent and panoramic first novel is that it is a more generous account of the recent past than the era deserves. America’s standing in the world is never far from the restless thoughts of psychiatry resident Julius, a Nigerian immigrant who wanders Manhattan, pondering everything from Goya and the novels of J.M. Coetzee to the bankruptcy of Tower Records and the rise of the bedbug epidemic. In other words, it is an ongoing reverie in the tradition of W.G. Sebald or Nicholson Baker, but with the welcome interruptions of the friends and strangers Julius meets as he wanders Penn Station, the Upper West Side, and Brussels during a short holiday, and amid discussions of Alexander Hamilton, black identity, and the far left–a truly American novel emerges. Julius pines over a recent ex, mourns the death of a friend, goes to movies, concerts, and museums, but above all he ruminates, and the picture of a mind that emerges in lieu of a plot is fascinating, as it is engaged with the world in a rare and refreshing way. – Publishers Weekly

Nigerian immigrant Julius, a young graduate student studying psychiatry in New York City, has recently broken up with his girlfriend and spends most of his time dreamily walking around Manhattan. The majority of Open City centers on Julius’ inner thoughts as he rambles throughout the city, painting scenes of both what occurs around him and past events that he can’t help but dwell on. For reasons not altogether clear, Julius’ walks turn into worldwide travel, and he flies first to Europe, where he has an unplanned one-night stand and makes some interesting friends, then to Nigeria, and finally back to New York City. Along the way, he meets many people and often has long discussions with them about philosophy and politics. Brought up in a military school, he seems to welcome these conversations. Upon returning to New York, he meets a young Nigerian woman who profoundly changes the way he sees himself. Readers who enjoy stream-of-consciousness narratives and fiction infused with politics will find this unique and pensive book a charming read. – Julie Hunt, Booklist

Teju Cole’s impressionistic ‘Open City’ and other novels arrive in paperback

The Washington Post Book Review – February 28, 2012 (Excerpt)

Teju Cole’s first novel, Open City (Random House, $15), arrives in paperback with an array of accolades as confusing as they are complimentary. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book — a lyrical novel of ideas — has been likened to the works of W.G. Sebald, Joseph O’Neill, Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, Hemingway, Orwell, T.S. Eliot, even Camus. It would be difficult for any one work to resemble such a diverse roster, but that it has been so broadly interpreted may serve only to prove that this novel defies comparison. “Open City” is an accomplished — and at times vexing — work in its own right.

Set mostly in Manhattan, the novel follows the inner life of its narrator, a half-Nigerian, half-German psychiatry resident named Julius. A wanderer, Julius is haunted by his past and drawn to the New York streetscape, where his meanderings trigger ponderous thoughts on a range of subjects such as immigration, the consequences of 9/11, New York history, bedbugs, the demise of Tower Records and ATM cards. Julius lives the kind of rarefied existence that some might say can be found only in New York or in an art-house French film. He is a font of literary references and history. His encounters and conversations are heavy with meaning: The woman next to him on an airplane turns out to be a surgeon eager to discuss modern European history; at the post office, the clerk happens to be a poet with strong opinions on race. [Read the full article...]

Simple Tweets Of Fate: Teju Cole’s Condensed News

NPR Book Review – April 9, 2012 (Excerpt)

Blaise Pascal once wrote that writing succinctly can be hard. It’s something many of us aim for, yet few of us master. But if you’re writing on Twitter, you have to keep it short.

The Nigerian writer Teju Cole recently devoted himself to the goal of writing in brief. On his Twitter account, he crafts compact stories based on small news items, things you might overlook in the metro section of a newspaper. And with brevity, his stories gain deeper meaning.

In observance of National Poetry Month, Cole recently joined NPR’s Steve Inskeep to discuss the Tweet-sized narratives he calls “Small Fates.” [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.

Former academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn’t left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away, in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career—if he can untangle himself from his family drama. The link between this unlikely pair is Kel’s mother, Charlene, a former student of Arthur’s. After nearly two decades of silence, it is Charlene’s unexpected phone call to Arthur—a plea for help—that jostles them into action. Through Arthur and Kel’s own quirky and lovable voices, Heft tells the winning story of two improbable heroes whose sudden connection transforms both their lives. Like Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House, Heft is a novel about love and family found in the most unexpected places.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Liz Moore

Liz Moore is a writer and musician. Her debut novel, The Words of Every Song, was published in 2007, and she recently released her album Backyards. She is a professor at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, where she lives.

Editorial Reviews

“Arthur Opp is heartbreaking. A 58-year old former professor of literature, he weighs 550 lbs., hasn’t left his Brooklyn apartment in years and is acutely attuned to both the painful and analgesic dimensions of his self-imposed solitude. Kel Keller, a handsome and popular high school athlete whose mother drinks too much to take care of him or even herself, faces his own wrenching struggles. The pair, apparently connected only by a slender thread, at first seem unlikely as co-narrators and protagonists of this novel, but they both become genuine heroes as their separate journeys through loneliness finally intersect. Though Moore’s narrative is often deeply sad, it is never maudlin. She writes with compassion and emotional insight but resists sentimentality , briskly moving her plot forward, building suspense and empathy. Most impressive is her ability to thoroughly inhabit the minds of Arthur and Kel; these are robust, complex characters to champion, not pity. The single word of the title is obviously a reference to Arthur’s morbid obesity, but it also alludes to the weight of true feelings and the courage needed to confront them. Heft leads to hope.” - People Magazine

Weighing in at over 500 pounds, Arthur Opp is approaching 60, alone and lonely in the Brooklyn house he hasn’t left for years. Since his only friend has died, he avoids facing the world outside his front door; all his material needs are delivered. He spends his days eating. Then he receives a letter from a former student. When Charlene Turner took Arthur’s class 20 years ago, she was intellectually out of her depth. Yet Arthur recognized a kindred spirit. After one semester she dropped out and he never saw her again; soon after, partly due to unfounded suspicions about their relationship, his own career disintegrated. Now Charlene makes a vague request that Arthur tutor her son. Anticipating her visit, Arthur hires a maid, Yolanda, a pregnant high-school dropout who brings unexpected life and energy into his home. But although the title refers to Arthur’s quirky, larger-than-life charm, readers will find his story expendable compared to the struggles faced by single mom Charlene’s son Kel. Kel’s narrative, full of male adolescent swagger and uncertainty, is heart-wrenching. Charlene’s desperate attempts to give him the chances she missed cause Kel to struggle with deeply divided loyalties as he commutes from his working-class Yonkers neighborhood to a prestigious Westchester high school where Charlene used to work as secretary. Handsome and athletic, Kel is beloved by his friends and teachers, who have bent rules to keep Kel enrolled ever since Charlene quit (or was fired) several years ago. Now a senior, Kel is tempted by a professional baseball scout, while Charlene drinks away her days to dull the pain of lupus and concocts her wild scheme, doing whatever it takes to get Kel to attend college. – Kirkus Reviews

Book World: “Heft,” by Liz Moore

The Washington Post Book Review – February 24, 2012 (Excerpt)

Upon beginning Liz Moore’s engaging, quirky novel “Heft,” it’s a relief to see that the teenager inadvertently romancing her professor is not a hip, wiser-than-her-years cliche. Charlene Turner is awkward, her bangs sprayed upright in a style that is not “in,” even in the ’80s. She doesn’t understand literature, discussing characters as if they are friends she disapproves of . Urged to consider the meaning behind a Greek tragedy, she writes a paper insisting that Medea was selfish : “She shouldn’t have killed her children. She should have killed herself.”

That moment is recalled 20 years later by her professor, Arthur Opp , who remains charmed and more than a little in love with Charlene despite how briefly they were friends. He now weighs some 550 pounds, never leaves his house in Brooklyn and sees no one but the delivery people from Amazon or, more frequently, the upscale food purveyors Harry and David. I wouldn’t recommend reading “Heft” while you’re on a diet. The book, while depicting Arthur’s shame, is not afraid to convey his joy of food: “People, when they eat, are very dear,” Arthur says. “I remember watching people in restaurants. People who ate alone, lost in the pleasure of it, O the pleasure of it.” [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.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) not only put American art on the map with his famous “drip paintings,” he also served as an inspiration for the character of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire—the role that made Marlon Brando famous. Like Brando, Pollock became an icon of rebellion in 1950s America, and the brooding, defiant persona captured in photographs of the artist contributed to his celebrity almost as much as his notorious paintings did. In the years since his death in a drunken car crash, Pollock’s hold on the public imagination has only increased. He has become an enduring symbol of the tormented artist—our American van Gogh.

In this highly engaging book, Evelyn Toynton examines Pollock’s itinerant and poverty-stricken childhood in the West, his encounters with contemporary art in Depression-era New York, and his years in the run-down Long Island fishing village that, ironically, was transformed into a fashionable resort by his presence. Placing the artist in the context of his time, Toynton also illuminates the fierce controversies that swirled around his work and that continue to do so. Pollock’s paintings captured the sense of freedom and infinite possibility unique to the American experience, and his life was both an American rags-to-riches story and a darker tale of the price paid for celebrity, American style.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Evelyn Toynton

Evelyn Toynton’s work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, and The American Scholar. Her novel Modern Art, loosely based on the story of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Oriental Wife, has just been published. She lives in Norfolk, England.

Editorial Review

“This is a Vasari-like narrative of Jackson Pollock, and a case study of his depression, his propensity to get into fist fights when drunk, to be taciturn when sober, and to let himself be taken care of by the women in his life. But it is also a story of how he “broke the ice,” in de Kooning”s words, enabling American painters to take world leadership in a fresh style of painting—huge, abstract, emotional, and direct. It is the book to read to find out what he was and was about.”—Arthur Danto, author of Andy Warhol

“Jackson Pollock” by Evelyn Toynton

The Washington Post Book Review – February 24, 2012 (Excerpt)

“There is something particularly thrilling about watching an artist destroy himself,” Evelyn Toynton writes in her trim biography, “Jackson Pollock.” “The buttoned-down can watch the unbuttoned act out their own aggressive and nihilistic urges, while the cachet of the other’s fame lends the spectacle a special excitement.”

There was no shortage of aggression and nihilism in Pollock’s short life, captured by Toynton, who has also published a novel based on the painter’s doomed marriage to fellow artist Lee Krassner. A taciturn, sometimes violent alcoholic who depended on his wife to sell his paintings and trim his fingernails, Pollock emerged from obscurity to become the king of abstract expressionism. He earned sneers from Time magazine, which called one of his works a “snarl of tar and confetti,” although its sister publication, Life, wondered whether he was “the greatest living painter in the United States.” The praise seemed not to have helped; five years after a 1949 article in Life made him famous, the 44-year-old artist drove his car off of a rural Long Island road in a drunken rage, killing himself and a friend of his mistress’s. Instead of destroying his reputation, however, his death secured it. [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.

A sophisticated page-turner about a wealthy New York family embroiled in a financial scandal with cataclysmic consequences.

Now that he’s married to Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to New York society and all of its luxuries: a Park Avenue apartment, weekends in the Hamptons, bespoke suits. When Paul loses his job, Carter offers him the chance to head the legal team at his hedge fund. Thrilled with his good fortune in the midst of the worst financial downturn since the Great Depression, Paul accepts the position.

But Paul’s luck is about to shift: a tragic event catapults the Darling family into the media spotlight, a regulatory investigation, and a red-hot scandal with enormous implications for everyone involved. Suddenly, Paul must decide where his loyalties lie-will he save himself while betraying his wife and in-laws or protect the family business at all costs?

Cristina Alger’s glittering debut novel interweaves the narratives of the Darling family, two eager SEC attorneys, and a team of journalists all racing to uncover-or cover up-the truth. With echoes of a fictional Too Big to Fail and the novels of Dominick Dunne, The Darlings offers an irresistible glimpse into the highest echelons of New York society-a world seldom seen by outsiders-and a fast-paced thriller of epic proportions.

About Cristina Alger

Cristina Alger received her B.A. from Harvard College and her J.D. from NYU Law School. She has worked as an analyst at Goldman, Sachs, & Co. and as an attorney at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale, & Dorr. She was born and raised in New York City, where she currently resides. This is her first novel.

Editorial Review

Carter Darling and his Brazilian wife Ines, a stereotypically shallow Upper East Side matron, are doyens of Manhattan society with two Spence educated daughters, pretty Lily and smart Merrill. Carter employs both his sons-in-law, preppy dullard Adrian and self-made lawyer Paul—Merrill’s husband and the novel’s more or less central character—at his hedge fund Delphic. The Darlings, including daughters and sons-in-law, live inside a tightly controlled bubble in which family is supposedly everything until Delphic’s dealings come under the scrutiny of the New York office of the SEC. But the Darlings are not the Madoffs. They are aristocratic and “waspy” (an adjective Alger uses a lot). The Madoff stand-in is Morty Reis, a nouveau riche Jew who apparently commits suicide just before the SEC exposes that his management firm, a big part of Delphic’s portfolio, has been running a massive ponzi scheme. Did anyone at Delphic know? Is someone going to have to take the fall? Is there other, more personal misconduct in danger of being exposed? Where do the fault lines of loyalty lie within this family? And how much does the family’s concierge/lawyer, another nouveau riche Jew, know? While Alger builds suspense by tracking the family’s disintegration in short scenes day by day by exact hour, from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving until the Monday after, she dissipates tension with a surfeit of financial chatter; the temperature never rises above tepid, even during sex scenes, and neither does the satiric heat. Merrill and Paul are portrayed as the innocent victim-heroes throughout, but it is hard to work up much sympathy—Paul has dropped his North Carolina family for no understandable reason except social climbing, and Merrill is a “waspy” snob and a possessive wife. – Kirkus Reviews

A Young Novelist Uses Life Lessons

The New York Times – February 17, 2012 (Excerpt)

THE ladies who pre-lunch at the Regency Hotel had no idea there was a spy in their midst. Cristina Alger always fits incontestably into Park Avenue’s epicenter of corporate power breakfasts, the evening cocktail hours for young socialites in training. She likes to go there because “it’s just up from my apartment,” she said.

Check the Goyard schlepping bag, the Cartier watch and Hermès bracelets wrapping her wrist. There’s nothing to reveal that Ms. Alger, 31, has now stepped outside the hush-hush circle of her upbringing — Chapin, white-gown debut, four social years at Harvard — to drop a dime on the whole shebang. Her first novel, “The Darlings,” comes out Monday. It’s about one of those bright and shining New York families (the Darlings) who have it all. Until they don’t.

An estimable fortune is brought low, and along with it the racquet club morale and ethical code by which Carter Darling, the founding billionaire of a seemingly unassailable hedge fund, has led his life and steered his family: his lovely, frosty wife; his two unevenly accomplished daughters, and the highly presentable young men — one smarter and not to the WASP manner born — who have married them. The ostensible tripwire of the disaster is the discovery that a trusted firm member has been running a far-reaching Ponzi scheme.

“The Madoff situation was just starting to unfold as I began the book,” Ms. Alger said, “but he wasn’t the only Ponzi schemer out there. I had read and heard about plenty of them. What interested me more was what makes other characters turn a blind eye, and what happens as a result.” [Read the full article...]

Advertisement

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 Collaborate or Perish! former Los Angeles police chief and New York police commissioner William Bratton and Harvard Kennedy School’s Zachary Tumin lay out a field-tested playbook for collaborating across the boundaries of our networked world. Today, when everyone is connected, collaboration is the game changer. Agencies and firms, citizens and groups who can collaborate, Bratton and Tumin argue, will thrive in the networked world; those who can’t are doomed to perish.

No one today is better known around the world for his ability to get citizens, governments, and industries working together to improve the safety of cities than William Bratton. At Harvard, Zachary Tumin has led senior executives from government and industry in executive sessions and classrooms for over a decade, burnishing a global reputation for insight and leadership. Together, Bratton and Tumin draw on in-depth accounts from Fortune 100 giants such as Alcoa, Wells Fargo, and Toyota; from masters of collaboration in education, social work, and the military; and from Bratton’s own storied career. Among the specific strategies they reveal:

• Start collaboration with a broad vision that supporters can add to and make their own
• Rightsize problems, and get value in the hands of users fast
• Get the right people involved—from sponsors to grass roots
• Make collaboration pay in the right currency—whether recognition, rewards, or revenue

Today companies and managers face unique challenges—and opportunities—in reaching out to others, thanks to the incredibly connected world in which we live. Bratton and Tumin provide practical strategies anyone can use, from the cubicle to the boardroom. This is the ultimate guide to getting things done in today’s networked world.

About William Bratton And Zachary Tumin

WILLIAM J. BRATTON is chairman of Kroll, one of Altegrity, Inc.’s three core businesses. Mr. Bratton joined Altegrity in November 2009 after serving as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department for seven years. Prior, he served as chief of the New York City Transit Police and commissioner of the Boston Police Department and the New York City Police Department. A frequent lecturer, writer, and commentator, Bill Bratton is known as one of the world’s premier police chiefs. Mr. Bratton also serves on the Motorola Solutions board of directors. In 2009 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II recognized Bratton with the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE).

ZACHARY TUMIN is special assistant to the director and faculty chair of Harvard Kennedy School’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, the most recent of a number of key posts that Mr. Tumin has held at the school. In addition to leading research programs and executive teaching at Harvard, Mr. Tumin served in senior executive roles for industry and government, including as head of public safety for the New York City public schools, on the executive staffs of the Brooklyn District Attorney and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, and as director of the Financial Services Technology Consortium. A frequent lecturer, Mr. Tumin is also author of numerous teaching cases, working papers, reports, and essays.

Editorial Review

It would be hard to argue that collaboration was ever an entirely alien concept in government, business or private spheres. What former Boston, New York City and Los Angeles police chief Bratton (The Turnaround, 1998) and co-author Tumin assert is that technologically up-to-the-moment collaboration is now virtually a matter of survival. Either learn to create shared-goal cyber platforms linking all the players or, as they exclaim in their title, perish! With Bratton drawing on his front-line policing experiences, the authors present a series of highly informative, wide-ranging and frequently unsettling examples showing the rapidly expanding impact of collaboration-enhancing technology. They also suggest techniques for effective collaboration, ranging from right-sizing problems to coercing participation, if it comes to that. Their purpose, they write, is to share the wisdom they have gathered over their 40-year careers from government leaders, top executives, managers, researchers and others. “It is a book that will help you collaborate better,” they write, “and get on with the business of transforming the world as it is into the world that should be”—though they never get around to explaining the exact nature of that world. That it might be repressive, given the immense new powers of top-down control that come with collaboration as the book defines it, never arises as a topic. – Kirkus Reviews

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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.

Lamont Williams is a paroled felon looking to turn his life around, working as a street sweeper at a large city hospital and searching for his estranged daughter. Adam Zignelik is a struggling, nontenured professor, paralyzed by looming failure, his life falling apart around him. He discovers a cache of recordings of previously unheard voices reaching out from a horrific past, voices that can both save his career and bring him back to the woman he loves. At the same time, Lamont forges an unlikely friendship with a dying man, who, having lived through those horrors, has a crucially important story to tell and to preserve. The worlds surrounding these two men, their families, their pasts, their potential futures, swirl in and out of history as the forces of the Holocaust, the American civil rights movement, Chicago unions, and New York City racial politics combine in a thrilling cross- generational literary symphony.

The acclaimed author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Elliot Perlman weaves the narratives of Lamont and Adam-and their myriad connected friends, lovers, and families-into an ambitious, masterful depiction of the power that memory has over our lives.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Elliot Perlman

Elliot Perlman is the author of The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming and Seven Types of Ambiguity. He also cowrote the award-winning screenplay for a film version of Three Dollars, his first novel. He lives in Australia.

Editorial Reviews

“An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America—and of the terrible events left behind in the old country.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement…. A moving and literate page-turner.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.”
—Booklist (starred review)

A rich, engaging story of New York in Elliot Perlman’s ‘The Street Sweeper’

The Washington Post Book Review – January 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Netherland” and “Let the Great World Spin,” two of the best novels about New York and Sept. 11, were written by the Irish authors Joseph O’Neill and Colum McCann, respectively. So it seems somehow fitting that the author of “The Street Sweeper,” a wonderfully rich, engaging and multilayered new novel about blacks and Jews in Chicago and New York, would hail from Australia.

I’ve been a fan of Elliot Perlman’s work since his 1998 novel “Three Dollars.” That book and his massive “Seven Types of Ambiguity” (2004) revealed him to be an author of rare erudition and compassion. But “The Street Sweeper” is his boldest work yet and, quite probably, the one that will win him a greater following.

“The Street Sweeper” relates the stories of two men whose lives would at first glance seem to have little to do with each other. Lamont Williams is an African American recently released from prison after having served six years for an armed robbery in which he was only tangentially involved. Adam Zignelik, son of a legendary Jewish civil rights lawyer, teaches history at Columbia University, where his professional and personal lives have stalled. [Read the full article...]

Connecting the Lowly and Mighty in New York

The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

Any beginning writer could find both instruction and inspiration in Elliot Perlman’s new novel, “The Street Sweeper.” If it were tricked out with commentary in the margins — in fact, now that I’ve finished marking it up, anyone’s welcome to take my copy — it could serve as a textbook on how not to write fiction. At the same time, it gives the lie to those killjoy teachers who tell you that no reputable publisher will touch your work if you don’t learn your craft. This 600-plus-page epic turns out to have only a novella’s worth of story and substance: the rest is repetition, over and over, of basic information about who the characters are, where they are and what’s going on, long expository and hortatory speeches that no real person would ever deliver and the padded, ping-ponging dialogue beloved of amateur writers. “ ‘And your family?’ ‘My family?’ ” “ ‘I’ve always felt kind of . . . fraudulent.’ ‘Fraudulent?’ ”

The laudatory reviews of Perlman’s previous novel, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” compared him to the great Victorian novelists, and the title of his current book may remind old-school readers of Jo, the down-and-out, never-had-a-chance crossing sweeper in “Bleak House.” Perlman shares Dickens’s sympathy for the put-­upon and the disenfranchised, and his fondness for intricate multiplotting — as well as his tendentious planting of improbable hidden connections among his people, giving us to understand that the lowly and the high and mighty are inextricably interdependent. “How tantalizingly small the world was,” Perlman makes one of his characters reflect, as if we needed a reminder of the web of coincidence he’s contrived. His street sweeper is a black ex-con, who’s taken a job with the John Doe Fund (“Ready, Willing and Able”) after being unjustly discharged from his janitorial position at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; he was fired by Sloan-Kettering’s head of human resources, who just happens to have been a childhood friend. Ah, but the sweeper’s cousin (follow me closely here) just happens to be married to the head of the history department at Columbia, where Perlman’s other main character, a Jewish academic about to be denied tenure, just happens to work. [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.

Fug You is Ed Sanders’s unapologetic and often hilarious account of eight key years of “total assault on the culture,” to quote his novelist friend William S. Burroughs.

Fug You traces the flowering years of New York’s downtown bohemia in the sixties, starting with the marketing problems presented by publishing Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, as it faced the aboveground’s scrutiny, and leading to Sanders’s arrest after a raid on his Peace Eye Bookstore. The memoir also traces the career of the Fugs–formed in 1964 by Sanders and his neighbor, the legendary Tuli Kupferberg (called “the world’s oldest living hippie” by Allen Ginsberg)–as Sanders strives to find a home for this famous postmodern, innovative anarcho-folk-rock band in the world of record labels.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Ed Sanders

Ed Sanders co-founded the Fugs, opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, and appeared on the cover of Life magazine. He is the author of The Family and lives in Woodstock, New York.

Editorial Review

A memoir about the 1960s that reflects the slapdash spirit of that decade’s underground press.

Sanders is a writer of renown and accomplishment—a published poet, author of prize-winning short stories and a controversial account of the Manson Family murders (The Family, 1971)—yet this hodge-podge shows little evidence of such craft. Instead it functions more like an annotated diary, with entries by topic or date rarely longer than a couple of paragraphs, padded with illustrations that function more as historical artifacts than art. Sanders had his fingers in many of lower Manhattan’s counter-cultural pies: He published a mimeographed arts journal with an obscene name, ran an alternative bookstore, helped to found the notorious Yippie anti-party and “levitate” the Pentagon and proselytized for legalized marijuana and mass fornication in the streets. But he remains best known for fronting the Fugs, a notorious rock band of politically minded poets who landed a major-label contract and (amazingly enough) earned Sanders the cover of Life magazine and spots on national TV. The most extended and hilariously engaging part of the book is a transcript from William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, with Sanders joining the conservative host, a clueless academic, and Jack Kerouac, who had become an alcoholic reactionary, in a discussion that Buckley introduced with, “Our topic tonight is the Hippies, the understanding of which we must, I guess, acquire or die painfully.” The entire program was a joke that only Sanders and occasionally Kerouac seemed to get. The matter-of-fact tone through much of the narrative makes it difficult to distinguish satire from delusion. Of the Fugs, he writes, “Some of the songs on our second album are not what is currently known as PC, or politically correct, and we might not now write them in quite the same way, but they were true to the testosterone-crazed era in which they were created.” One might say the same about the book, except that it was written now, about then.

A collection of solid archival material for a better book. – Kirkus Reviews

Present at the Counterculture’s Creation

The New York Times Book Review – January 11, 2012 (Excerpt)

Testifying at the Chicago Seven trial in 1970, Ed Sanders identified himself to Judge Julius Hoffman as a “poet, songwriter, leader of a rock-and-roll band, publisher, editor, recording artist, peace-creep.” He lived in the East Village, which, as he writes in his great-souled memoir of the 1960s, was a “Do-It-Now zone.” The book portrays him doing many things.  Which was the most interesting?

Was it singing with the Fugs, a scabrous, joyous, poetic-satiric, sort-of rock band whose second album — including the songs “Kill for Peace” and “Group Grope” — actually made the Cashbox charts in mid-1966? Was it his poetry, influenced by Charles Olson and Sappho?

Was it his passionate work as a mimeograph publisher and free-speech activist: 13 issues of a hand-printed, hand-stapled, gleefully profane literary magazine published between 1962 and 1965, including the work of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and Norman Mailer, which gained national renown despite its unprintable title? Was it his advocacy to change marijuana laws, his proprietorship of the Peace Eye bookstore (first on East 10th Street, then on Avenue A), his peaceful and creative methods of political protest, his formal studies in classics and Egyptology, his dodging of F.B.I. and police surveillance? [Read the full article...]

‘Fug You’: The Wild Life Of Ed Sanders

NPR Book Review – May 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

Ed Sanders likes to refer to himself as the only beatnik who can yodel. A countercultural icon, he co-founded the raunchy, avant-garde rock band The Fugs and was instrumental in the Youth International Party — commonly called the Yippies.

The 72-year-old is also a classical scholar who wrote a best-selling book about the Manson family. His latest book is a memoir, Fug You, about life on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1960s — a slum, back when Sanders lived there.

“It didn’t take much money to live,” Claudia Dreifus recalls. “You could live poor, you could have a lot of fun. People didn’t need a lot of stuff. And when rents were cheap, all kinds of creative forces ended up here.”

Dreifus is now a science writer for The New York Times, but she cut her teeth at a counterculture newspaper called The East Village Other. She calls Sanders, who was a neighborhood fixture and fellow writer at The Other, a hero. [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.

The Plot Against Hip Hop is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard and security expert D Hunter, suspects there are larger forces at work.

D Hunter’s investigation into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hardcore fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Nelson George

Nelson George is one of the first writers to document hip hop culture, seeing Kool Herc in a Bronx schoolyard in the late ’70s. He would go on to write several award winning books on the subject, including ‘Hip Hop America’ and Russell Simmons’ autobiography ‘Life and Def.’ He directed Queen Latifah in the award winning HBO film, ’Life Support,’ and executive produces VH1′s long running ‘Hip Hop Honors’ broadcast. He can be contacted at www.nelsondgeorge.net.

Editorial Reviews

“George’s prose sparkles with an effortless humanity, bringing his characters to life in a way that seems true and beautiful. The story — and the conspiracy behind it — is one we all need to hear as consumers and creators in the post-hardcore hip-hop world.”
–Shelf Awareness

“Part procedural murder mystery, part conspiracy-theory manifesto, Nelson George’s The Plot Against Hip Hop reads like the PTSD fever dream of a renegade who’s done several tours of duty in the trenches . . . Plot’s combination of record-biz knowledge and ghetto fabulosity could have been written only by venerable music journalist Nelson George, who knows his hip-hop history . . . The writing is as New York as ‘Empire State of Mind,’ and D is a detective compelling enough to anchor a series.”
–Time Out New York

“The Plot Against Hip Hop is a quick-moving murder mystery that educates its audience on Hip Hop’s pioneer generation along the way . . . it is a nostalgic look at a magical and manic moment in time.”
–New York Journal of Books

‘The Plot Against Hip Hop: A Novel’ by Nelson George

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – December 28, 2011 (Excerpt)

Music critic and author Dwayne Robinson, a middle-aged black man, has been murdered with a box cutter, and his friend, D, wants to know whodunit.

When Dwayne shows up at the front door of D Security, D’s office, wearing a bloody beige trench coat and a blue Yankees cap, clutching a cassette tape and mumbling the Biggie lyrics “It was all a dream,” D doesn’t know what to make of it.

To police officers, it looks like a gang initiation. Witnesses, who describe the killers as two slim, tall young men, wearing red doo rags and tracksuits, serve to strengthen the cops’ belief that the Bloods are at fault.

But D isn’t so sure, and the rest of the book follows his journey to find the truth. And it’s an arduous journey complete with a wealthy hip-hop mogul, a “hip-hop cop,” a hip-hop conspiracy theory website, a contentious book manuscript and more deaths.

Author Nelson George definitely knows his hip-hop history. There were plenty of real hip-hop artists’ names used as D’s fictional clients. Hip-hop songs, lyrics, pioneers and pondering about the deaths of rappers Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. were scattered throughout the book. The problem is the book spent too much time reminiscing on old school hip-hop and not enough time making readers care about Dwayne’s death. [Read the full article...]

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High fashion and homeland security clash in a masterful debut.

Boyet Hernandez is a small man with a big American dream when he arrives in New York in 2002, fresh out of design school in Manila. With dubious financing and visions of Fashion Week runways, he sets up shop in a Brooklyn toothpick factory, pursuing his goals with monkish devotion (distractions of a voluptuous undergrad not withstanding). But mere weeks after a high-end retail order promises to catapult his (B)oy label to the big time, there’s a knock on the door in the middle of the night: the flamboyant ex-Catholic Boyet is brought to Gitmo, handed a Koran, and locked away indefinitely on suspicion of being linked to a terrorist plot. Now, from his 6′ x 8′ cell, Boy prepares for the trial of his life with this intimate confession, even as his belief in American justice begins to erode.

With a nod to Junot Diaz and a wink to Gary Shteyngart, Alex Gilvarry’s first novel explores some of the most serious issues of our time with dark eviscerating wit.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Alex Gilvarry

A native of Staten Island, Alex Gilvarry has traveled extensively in the Philippines, where his family is from. He’s the editor of the Web site Tottenville Review, he has been named a Norman Mailer Fellow, and his writing has appeared in The Paris Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editorial Review

A would-be fashion mogul comes to America to pursue the American Dream, only to wind up wearing an orange Gitmo jumpsuit.

Gilvarry’s debut novel aspires to be an allegory about how immigrant ambition has become stifled in the wake of post-9/11 paranoia. The narrator, Boyet Hernandez, arrives in New York City from the Philippines in 2002, eager to pursue a career in haute couture. But the reader knows immediately that his dreams were dashed: The novel is written in the form of a prison memoir, composed at the suggestion of his jailers as he awaits judgment from a military tribunal for allegedly consorting with terrorists. Chapters begin with observations about the camp’s cramped quarters and barely humane regulations, but the story mostly focuses on Boyet (nicknamed Boy) as he makes his slow rise in the fashion world, consorting with models, begging for favors from established designers and hustling for financing. That last effort is what gets him in trouble, because his main patron is a sketchy landlord who possesses a questionable amount of weaponize-able fertilizer. Gilvarry keeps the tone of the story lightly satirical without diminishing the seriousness of Boy’s predicament, and he skillfully captures the frenetic world of striving designers and Brooklyn hipsters. The novel’s chief flaws have more to do with structure than tone. Characters in the story besides Boy rarely become more than strictly functional (a publicist with the unfortunate name of Ben Laden is a thin signifier of law-enforcement ineptitude), and shifting between Boy’s incarceration and Manhattan memories grows repetitive and undramatic until the closing pages. A fashion writer’s faux annotations add little, and his afterword closes the book on a melodramatic note that clashes with Boy’s character.

Gilvarry is a talented writer and observer, but the satirical elements could have been better tailored. – Kirkus Reviews

The Tale of a ‘Fashion Terrorist’

The New York Times Book Review – December 30, 2011 (Excerpt)

THE novelist Alex Gilvarry was in the midst of a fashion emergency. Perusing the racks of Oak, a trendy boutique in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he looked for a sweater to cover up a mustard stain on his plaid shirt. In a few hours, he would speak to M.F.A. students at Hunter College, his alma mater, and he didn’t want to look like a slob.

Unfolding a black sweater by Oak, Mr. Gilvarry, 30, was dismayed to find it cropped above the navel, a style that would not work on his 6-foot-3 frame. Nor would it cover up the mustard. “Oh well, it wasn’t on sale anyway,” he said.

Mr. Gilvarry hasn’t always shopped in boutiques — or worried about stains. A native of Staten Island who grew up shopping at malls, he didn’t much care about his wardrobe until he began writing his first novel, “From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant,” a satire of the fashion world and, improbably, Guantánamo Bay prison that will be published by Viking this month.

“My initial idea was to write about an artist from a superficial world thrown into a political world,” Mr. Gilvarry said. “That’s how I came up with Boy.”

Boy is Boyet Hernandez, the flamboyant Filipino “fashion terrorist” whom Mr. Gilvarry invented and who, he later learned, bears a striking resemblance to the real-life Bryan Boy, a flamboyant Filipino fashion blogger. A rising young designer, the fictitious Boy is mistaken for a terrorist and sent to Guantánamo, where he pens a memoir about the Williamsburg fashion scene, from 2002 to 2006, as well as the Philippines. [Read the full article...]

Prisoner of Fashion - Alex Gilvarry’s Debut Novel

The New York Times Book Review – March 23, 2012 (Excerpt)

The humor in this first novel is nothing to laugh at. Though you’re not really supposed to get that until you’re nearly done.

That’s because in the meantime you’ll be too busy snickering. “From the Memoirs of a Non-­Enemy Combatant,” by Alex Gilvarry, tells the story of Boyet Hernandez, a Filipino-­born fashion designer wending his way through the flamboyantly fatuous world of Brooklyn couture. The narrative crackles with satire, even before Boyet innocently lands himself at Guantánamo as the first detainee captured on United States soil and decides to bring the place a little flair by removing the sleeves from his orange jumpsuit. The disjunction between Gitmo and Prada is too delicious not to put a sideways smile on your face.

You’ll also be twisting a lip upward at the Bellowesque brio of Gilvarry’s language. Consider the colloquial oomph of these opening lines: “I would not, could not, nor did I ever raise a hand in anger against Ameri­ca. I love America, the golden bastard. It’s where I was born again: propelled through the duct of J.F.K. International, out the rotating doors, push, push, dripping a post-U.S. Customs sweat down my back, and slithering out on my feet to a curb in Queens, breathe. Then into a yellow cab, thrown to the masses. Van Wyck, B.Q.E., Brooklyn Bridge, SoHo, West Side Highway, Riverside Drive — these are a few of my favorite things!” [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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

As famous for his popular cooking segment on Wake Up America! as for his swank Manhattan bistro, Billy Blessing can add prime murder suspect to his impressive list of accomplishments. Because when one of the network’s top honchos ends up dead, it’s a poisoned serving of Blessing’s coq au vin that’s to blame. Billy knows he’s being framed, but proving it won’t be easy—not with his perky cohost involved in a brass-knuckles contract negotiation, a Mossad agent about to tell all on the air, and a ruthless international assassin arriving in the Big Apple. Now Billy isn’t so much concerned about staying alive in the ratings . . . as just staying alive. For the closer Billy comes to uncovering an international conspiracy, the closer he comes to being canceled—permanently.

About Al Roker and Dick Lochte

Al Roker is known to over thirty million viewers for his work on NBC’s Today show, a role that has earned him ten Emmy awards. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Make Me Stop This Car!: Adventures in Fatherhood. An accomplished cook, Roker also has two bestselling cookbooks to his credit. Al Roker lives in Manhattan with his wife, ABC News and 20/20 correspondent Deborah Roberts, and has two daughters and a son.

Dick Lochte is the author of many popular crime novels including the award-winning Sleeping Dog, named one of “the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century” by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. His crime fiction column ran for nearly a decade in the Los Angeles Times and earned him the 2003 Ellen Nehr Award for Excellence in Mystery Reviewing. He lives in Southern California.

Editorial Reviews

Roker (Al Roker’s Big Bad Book of Barbecue) teams with Lochte (Sleeping Dog) on a solid, exciting crime novel that revolves around a fictional TV program much like NBC’s The Today Show. Billy Blessing, a New York City celebrity chef who owns a restaurant and does a variety of segments on Wake Up, America!, has just begun filming a reality food show when he becomes a suspect in a murder case after Rudy Gallagher, Blessing’s executive producer on the show with whom he has clashed, dies after eating some poisoned coq au vin from Blessing’s restaurant. When the Manhattan DA shut downs the restaurant and Gallagher’s replacement suspends him from his main television gig, Blessing turns sleuth. The gold standard for investigating network TV skullduggery is still the late William DeAndrea’s Matt Cobb series (Killed in the Ratings, etc.), but snappy prose and well-developed characters will leave readers wanting to see more of Blessing. – Publishers Weekly

Weatherman Roker is the latest celebrity to pen a mystery thriller, and it is a surprisingly engaging one (thanks, in part, to the work of coauthor and genre veteran Lochte). The hero is Chef Billy Blessing, food anchor for the fictional morning show Wake Up America! and owner of a very successful Manhattan bistro. After the mysterious death of one of the network’s executives, Billy’s life takes a dangerous turn. Not only is he suspected of murdering the exec with a poisoned coq au vin but it quickly becomes clear that an international assassin has his sights set on Billy, prompting the chef to do his own investigating. Roker, with the help of Lochte, writes engagingly and, of course, knowledgeably about network television. But his other interests (in food and cartooning, for example) are also seamlessly integrated into the plot. Roker’s trademark humor is in ample evidence, but there is plenty of action, too: a car-chase scene through the Lincoln Tunnel is remarkably vivid and true to life. Good fun for Roker’s followers and cozy fans. - Judy Coon, Booklist

Billy Blessing (The Midnight Show Murders, 2010, etc.), star of Wake Up, America!’s cooking spot, hasn’t entirely made a secret of his former life as William Blanchard, who went to jail for helping his foster father, con man Paul Lamont. But he doesn’t exactly flaunt it either. So when he guest stars on Midday with Gemma along with former Chicago cop Pat Patton, the last thing he wants is for Patton to show up in his hotel room threatening to expose his past. Paul is long deceased, killed on orders from mobster Gio Polvere. Polvere is dead too, killed in a fire. When Patton buys it as well, Billy goes on alert, but what puts him over the top is the death of Larry Kelsto, a comic who was supposed to appear on Gemma with him and Patton until he got bumped because starlet Carrie Sands went on too long about her latest project, an American remake of Gerard Parnelle’s The Thief Who Stole the Eiffel Tower. Now strangers in a van are taking pot shots at Billy and Carrie. Mantata, an art gallery owner with likely ties to Lamont, steps out of the shadows, sending three oddball henchmen to protect him. But can Philippine fashion plate Hiho, jiving Jamaican Trejean and good-old-boy-gone-wrong Dal save Chef Billy from a threat whose source is as mysterious as Mantata himself?

Despite its over-the-top finale, Roker and Lochte’s third is as well-paced and thoughtfully prepared as an Alice Waters tasting menu. – Kirkus Review

Advertisement

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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

At a pre-wedding party for his daughter Sarah, Moe Prager is approached by his ex-wife and former PI partner Carmella Melendez. It seems Carmella’s estranged sister Alta has been murdered, but no one in New York City seems to care. Why? Alta, a FDNY EMT, and her partner had months earlier refused to give assistance to a dying man at a fancy downtown eatery. Moe decides to help Carmella as a means to distract himself from his own life-and-death struggle. Making headway on the case is no mean feat as no one, including Alta’s partner Maya Watson, wants to cooperate. Moe chips away until he discovers a cancer roiling just below the surface, a cancer whose symptoms include bureaucratic greed, sexual harassment, and blackmail. But is any of it connected to Alta’s brutal murder?

About Reed Farrel Coleman

Called a hard-boiled poet by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan, Reed Farrel Coleman is the former executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America. He has published twelve novels in three series, and one stand-alone with award-winning Irish author Ken Bruen. His books have been translated into seven languages, and the Moe Prager character in his current series is one of the most engaging in crime fiction. “His bone-deep world weariness and mordant sense of humor should enthrall lovers of old-school, tough-talking, loner private eyes,” says Booklist.

Reed is a three-time winner of the Shamus Award for Best Detective Novel of the Year. He has also received the Barry and Anthony Awards, and has been twice nominated for the Edgar® Award. He was the editor of the anthology Hard Boiled Brooklyn, and his short fiction and essays have appeared in Wall Street Noir, The Darker Mask, These Guns For Hire, Brooklyn Noir 3, Damn Near Dead, and other publications.

Reed is an adjunct professor at Hofstra University, teaching writing classes in mystery fiction and the novel.

His standalone novel, GUN CHURCH, is exclusive to Audible.com, and his seventh Moe Prager novel (HURT MACHINE) has been winning accolades from the likes of Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and others.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

The Moe Prager Mystery series stands on two fundemental building blocks. One of those blocks comes courtesy of the great William Faulkner who said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” The other comes from Joseph Wambaugh, the man who, in the 1970s, changed crime fiction forever and for better. He said, “It’s not how the detective works on the case, but how the case works on the detective.”

In each book in the series, these are the two forces supplying the fuel to power the engine of the story. This is never more evident than in Hurt Machine, the seventh installment in the series. Moe, now in his mid-sixties, is faced with the best and worst life has to offer. His daughter Sarah, Moe’s only child with his late wife Katy, is on the verge of marriage. Yet two weeks before the wedding, he discovers that there’s a cancer growing in his stomach that will probably kill him. Add to this the arrival–after a painful divorce and a ten-year absence–of Moe’s second wife and former PI partner, Carmella Melendez, asking him to take on a controversial and wildly unpopular case. If ever there was a setup to explore the past and to see how a case works on the detective, this is it.

Moe is forced to battle two antagonists in Hurt Machine: the person or persons trying to prevent him from discovering the truth about the case and the cancer. All the time, Moe can hear the clock ticking away the remaining minutes of his life. When the end is near, the past comes alive in a way it never has before. So it is for Moe. – Amazon.Com Review

Last Exits in Brooklyn

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

Nobody knows a man better than his ex-wife. So Moe Prager’s ex-wife, Carmella, is wise to this veteran private eye, accepting the fact that no matter how many times he marries, his first love will always be Brooklyn. “When you die, they should just bury you right here, under the boardwalk,” she tells him in HURT MACHINE (Tyrus, $24.95; paper, $15.95), Reed Farrel Coleman’s latest book in a series heavily saturated with local color. Since Prager has recently been told he has stomach cancer, that day may come sooner than Carmella thinks. But this stubborn old shamus is determined to do two things before his ashes are consigned to the sands of Coney Island: Attend his daughter’s wedding, and find the person who murdered Carmella’s older sister, Alta.

Alta Conseco and Maya Watson, emergency medical technicians with the New York Fire Department, became pariahs after walking away from a dying man who was stricken at a trendy Manhattan bistro. Although Alta’s death was clearly a retribution killing, her fellow E.M.T. (surely the murderer’s next target) refuses to offer any explanation for their behavior. This silent treatment forces Prager to do exactly what we want him to do: Travel the length and breadth of the city talking to cops, firemen, gangsters and restaurateurs in their picturesque natural habitats. [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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

A decade after her death, Pauline Kael remains the most important figure in film criticism today, in part due to her own inimitable style and power within the film community and in part due to the enormous influence she has exerted over an entire subsequent generation of film critics. During her tenure at the New Yorker from 1967 to 1991 she was a tastemaker, a career maker, and a career breaker. Her brash, vernacular writing style often made for an odd fit at the stately New Yorker.

Brian Kellow gives us a richly detailed look at one of the most astonishing bursts of creativity in film history and a rounded portrait of this remarkable (and often relentlessly driven) woman. Pauline Kael is a book that will be welcomed by the same audience that made Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution and Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls bestsellers, and by anyone who is curious about the power of criticism in the arts.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Brian Kellow

Brian Kellow is the features editor of Opera News, where his column “On the Beat” appears monthly. He is the author of Ethel Merman: A Life and The Bennetts: An Acting Family and coauthor of Can’t Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell. He has also written for Opera, Playbill, and Travel & Leisure among others. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

“Kael was a master at interpretation, and this book is a highly successful interpretation of the storied critic….A must-read for any devotee of film; compellingly written and recommended for all libraries.” — Library Journal

“Kellow performs biographical magic, telling her story mostly through her most famous (and notorious) reviews of some of the landmark films of the ’60s and ’70s.” —Kirkus

“For a biography to do justice to a complex personality and a great mind such as Kael’s, extensive research must be matched by acute perception. That requirement is fully, even joyously, met here….Kellow fleshes out these major stages as well as formative minor ones in a greatly revelatory portrait that will stand as the definitive one.” — Booklist

“Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark,” by Brian Kellow

The Washington Post Book Review – December 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

When we were in high school, my friend Carl and I used to await her dispatches the way the Hebrews awaited tablets from Sinai. Every other week, we rushed to People’s Drug and grabbed a New Yorker off the newsstand and read her latest review on the spot — savoring the smart, profane, feisty music of her sentences. We loved Pauline Kael because she made us feel smarter and saner — more alive.

And in a weird way, I think, sexier. The titles of her collections were no accident: “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “I Lost It at the Movies,” “Reeling.” Kael practiced an erotics of criticism. You could disagree with her — you had no choice at times — but you couldn’t love or want or need movies more than she did.

I’ve already used more dashes than usual. That’s her doing, too.

Her fellow critic David Thomson once theorized that she would have given up everything to play one great scene in a movie. But what casting director would have taken the chance? She was diminutive, unglamorous, quick to argue. An unorthodox Jewish childhood (some of it spent on a chicken ranch in Petaluma, Calif.) led to philosophy studies at the University of California at Berkeley and then a long period of struggle that only in retrospect looks like apprenticeship: dead-end jobs, a daughter born out of wedlock, a bad marriage, doomed attachments to gay men. [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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Short-listed three times for the Booker Prize, Anita Desai explores time and transformation in these artful novellas

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai’s characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.

Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense hope and opportunity. Like so many flies in a spider’s web, however, they cannot escape their surroundings—as none of us can. An impeccable craftsman, Desai elegantly reveals our human frailties and the power of place.

About Anita Desai

ANITA DESAI is the author of Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Clear Light of Day, and Diamond Dust, among other works. Three of her books have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Desai was born and educated in India and now lives in the New York City area.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“In three ensnaring novellas of consummate artistry and profoundly disquieting perceptions, master storyteller Desai reflects on the transforming power and devastating limitations of art… Desai’s provocative and mysterious tales of displacement trace the reverberations when the dream of art collides with crushing reality.” - -Booklist

“…poignant and wry…a deft exploration of the limits people place on themselves by trying to cling to the past.” -Kirkus Reviews

“This collection leaves an indelible impression of the conflicts and ambitions found in a region riddled with conflict.” –Publishers Weekly

Anita Desai on Longing and Striving

The New York Times Book Review – December 9, 2011 (Excerpt)

Sometimes a mango is just a mango. This is rarely the case in Indian novels, where mangoes tend to be luminescent orbs dangling in steamy air, glistening with sweetness, sex and Being itself, waiting to be plucked, caressed, birthed. Either that or they’re muddy and rotten and piled high on a dirty road, surrounded by rancid garbage, rank cooking fires, beggar children and grinning, greasy swindlers. In other words, mangoes in India’s literary fiction are much like India in literary fiction: distinguished by pleasing aromas or permanent anarchy, if not some chutneyed combination.

For almost five decades, Anita Desai’s writing has avoided this easy trafficking in the delicious and malicious. She has instead created a body of work distinguished by its sober, often bracing prose, its patient eye for all-telling detail and its humane but penetrating intelligence about middling people faced with middling prospects. Whether in India, Mexico or America, Desai’s characters tend to be easy marks for new possibilities — for something, anything, other than life as it is. This vulnerability leads to promising experiences, which often become fresh disappointments. For a writer so taken with such arrangements, the best results are minor-key masterpieces; the lesser efforts are melancholy suffocations. Both outcomes are evident in the three novellas that make up her new collection, “The Artist of Disappearance.” [Read the full article...]

Desai’s ‘Disappearance’: Three Tales Of Art And Time

NPR Book Review – December 10, 2011 (Excerpt)

Anita Desai’s new collection of stories, The Artist of Disappearance, reads a bit like three symphonic movements in a minor key. They’re three novellas, set in modern India, where the past is giving way. In one story, a government official inspects the forgotten treasures left behind in a fated mansion. In another story, a translator becomes a little too creative; and in the third, a man living in solitude finds his world upset by roving visitors.

There are no car chases or explosions — just the drama of people confronting themselves. Desai, has written more than a dozen novels and collections, and has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. She talks with NPR’s Scott Simon about the origins of her three stories.

In “Museum of Final Journeys,” a civil servant is called in to appraise an old collection of antiquities. They are not works of art per se — there are globes and travel posters, stuffed birds and lizards, masks, daggers, scrolls, bells and clocks long broken. The civil servant calls it a “gloomy storehouse of abandoned, disused, decaying objects”; he says he wishes to “break free and flee.” [Read the full article...]

Solitary Lives, Abruptly Interrupted

The New York Times Book Review – January 10, 2012 (Excerpt)

The crumbling, all but abandoned manor house as symbol of a social order in distress: the English may have invented that notion, but their former colonial subjects in India have also proved adept at employing it as a literary device. In the three novellas that make up “The Artist of Disappearance,” Anita Desai uses it twice, in differing circumstances and locations, but to the same convincing and plaintive effect.

Ms. Desai’s main themes in her new book are decay and disappointment, retreat and regret, so that choice seems highly appropriate. Since the publication of her first novel, “Cry, the Peacock,” nearly 50 years ago, she has often offered portraits of a certain kind of Anglicized urban bourgeoisie or rural landed gentry struggling for meaning against illusions, and “The Artist of Disappearance,” though barely 150 pages, fits neatly into that distinguished body of work.

In “The Museum of Final Journeys,” which opens the book, we’re in the lush, green east of plantations left idle by the emergence of plastic as a substitute for jute. Ms. Desai’s unnamed narrator, “a mere subdivisional officer in the august government service,” is not unlike the protagonist of George Orwell’s “Burmese Days”: a callow bureaucrat charged with administering a rural district whose people and customs he does not understand, and unhappy with the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him. [Read the full article...]

The Ayurvedic Healer

by Joy J. Kaimaparamban

Set in the intriguing atmosphere of India in the early 20th century, full of mysticism, love, compassion, and political drama, The Ayurvedic Healer tells the story of Madhavan Namboodiri, a physician practicing an ancient medical science, and his enduring love for Rosilie. By healing the underprivileged, regardless of their civilian and religious status, touching the untouchables, he follows his beliefs and disobeys the rules of his society. His life story is set in the background of India’s struggle for freedom, the communist revolt in the Southern State of Kerala, social advancement, and the emergence of new societies. The Ayurvedic Healer sweeps the reader into an exotic place and time, rendering an intimate experience through sharing Madhavan Namboodiri’s life and love.

Joy J. Kaimaparamban is not only a passionate story teller. He envisions people and events, past or present, in his native India as material for unwritten works. These visions and the ability to transform them into fascinating stories about his country is a trademark of his novels. [More information...]

The Ayurvedic Healer ia available through Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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In this deluxe commemorative edition, LIFE’s editors focus on the publication’s achievements more tightly than they ever have before: This is truly the best of everything LIFE has accomplished. In these pages are the best war photos ever taken for LIFE; the best photo essays ever to grace our pages (including the works of Capa and Parks and Smith); the loveliest pictures from Hollywood (in fact, the best pictures of Marilyn Monroe ever taken by such as Halsmann, Eisenstaedt and her dear friend Milton Greene), the best sports pictures, the funniest pictures we ever ran. The best pictures from the space race, and the most significant pictures to the human race, including Lennart Nilsson’s “Life Before Birth.”

This is a premium volume of LIFE, and beyond its 200-plus pages, which include a review of every LIFE cover ever published, there is, included here, the ultimate premium: The first-ever LIFE issue, with the Margaret Bourke-White photograph of the Fort Peck Dam on the cover, reprinted in its entirety, at actual size (which was really big 10 1/2″ x 14″) and able to be detached.

We’ve come a long way: We, you, those places, LIFE itself. This book tells, and celebrates, that voyage.

About the Editors of Life

The editors at LIFE vigorously carry on the traditions of excellence in photography, in journalism, and in telling the story of our country and our world which began with LIFE magazine in 1936 by founding editor and publisher, Henry R. Luce. They have published books on a broad range of subjects, including New York Times bestsellers One Nation, LIFE Picture Puzzle and The American Journey of Barack Obama.

The Look of Life

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

The frenzy that usually erupts when a new iPhone hits stores — wild anticipation, long lines, jacked-up resale prices — was more than matched 75 years ago in the exuberant public reaction to the launching of an innovative (how quaint it sounds today) print magazine. When the first issue of Life appeared on Nov. 23, 1936, the 200,000 newsstand copies sold out within 24 hours, leaving disappointed customers and vendors clamoring for more. Defying expectations in the midst of the Depression, the magazine’s circulation rapidly soared to nearly two million readers.

In his definitive biography, “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,” Alan Brinkley vividly describes how Luce was inspired to create this glossy photography publication. (The idea and title had been suggested by his future wife, Clare Boothe, among others.) Life depicted an upbeat can-do vision of America, so much so that Brinkley says the magazine’s sensibility of “amiable positiveness” was reflected in idyllic and picturesque photos of even the poor and downtrodden. With a mandate to educate and entertain a mass audience, the magazine subsequently became renowned for its influential war coverage, chronicling the horrors of World War II and the heartbreak of Vietnam, and glamorous shots of movie stars at work and play.

Now comes “75 Years: The Very Best of Life,” a coffee-table behemoth weighing nearly seven pounds, featuring unforgettable photo­graphs (Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous kiss, “V-J Day, Times Square, New York City, 1945”) as well as never-before-published photos from the archives. Thanks to the magazine’s legacy as a high-paying photographers’ showcase (the contributors include Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Burrows, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks and Mary Ellen Mark), the book is a visual treat, offering up stunningly beautiful images that evoke smiles (a mischievous shot of a snow monkey) and haunting photojournalism that provokes tears (the gaunt visages of Holocaust survivors, the corpses of American soldiers on a New Guinea beach in 1943). [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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

More than 120 contact sheets selected by some seventy Magnum photographers or their estates: a definitive book on how the best photographs are created and edited.

Contact sheets unveil the story of what went into a photograph. Was it the outcome of what a photographer had in mind from the outset? Did it emerge from a diligently worked sequence? Was the right shot a matter of being in the right place at the right time? Here, for the first time, are the best contact sheets created by Magnum photographers. They reveal the creative methods, strategies, and editing processes used by some of the acknowledged greats of photography, from legends such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt to Magnum’s latest generation, including Jonas Bendiksen, Trent Parke, and Alec Soth.

Events, places, and people from over seventy years of history are contained in Magnum’s contact sheets, including the Normandy landings by Robert Capa, Che Guevara by René Burri, the Paris riots of 1968 by Bruno Barbey, Malcolm X by Eve Arnold, and New York street scenes by Bruce Gilden.

With supporting texts by the photographers or by those selected by the estates of deceased Magnum members, and ancillary material such as press cards, notebooks, and filed captions, this landmark publication provides a depth of understanding and a critical analysis of the backstory to a photograph.

About Kristen Lubben

Kristen Lubben is the Associate Curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her books include Susan Meiselas: In History, Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, and Magnum Contact Sheets.

The Magic of Magnum

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

It’s not often that a lavish coffee-table book comes trailing equally lavish doubts about the wisdom of its existence. “It’s generally rather depressing to look at my contacts,” Elliott Erwitt tells Kristen Lubben, the editor of MAGNUM CONTACT SHEETS (Thames & Hudson, $150), a magnificent compendium of raw images from the photography cooperative. “One always has great expectations, and they’re not always fulfilled.” Henri Cartier-­Bresson, a Magnum founder, so hated the idea of someone pawing through his outtakes that he once bragged about throwing out his negatives “in the same way as one cuts one’s nails.” Contact sheets “are mostly a waste of money,” the photographer Leonard Freed once declared, though he added: “Because it is a waste of money, I love them.”

Lubben’s book, which reproduces over 120 contact sheets from some 70 photographers, provides plenty for the technically minded to ponder. For more casual readers paging through without a loupe in hand, it brims with fascinating context. Eve Arnold’s meeting with Joan Crawford for a Life magazine portrait session in the 1950s began with an intoxicated Crawford stripping naked and ordering Arnold to start shooting. (“Love and eternal trust always,” the actress said later, after Arnold handed over the transparencies.) In an only slightly more hair-raising encounter, Carl de Keyzer recalls being set on by Klansmen at a Texas cross-burning in 1991, only to realize they just wanted him to take souvenir shots with their cameras. [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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Bradford Morrow’s stories have garnered him awards such as the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes and have given him a devoted following. Now gathered here for the first time is a collection of his finest, gothic tales.

A young man whose childhood hobby of collecting sea shells and birds’ nests takes a sinister turn when he becomes obsessed with acquiring his brother’s girlfriend, in “The Hoarder” (selected as one of the Best American Noir Stories of the Century). An archeologist summoned to attend his beloved sister’s funeral is astonished to discover it is not she who has died, but someone much closer to him, in “Gardener of Heart.” A blind motivational speaker has a crisis of faith when he suddenly regains his sight, only to discover life was better lived in the dark, in “Amazing Grace.”

In all of these stories, readers will find themselves enthralled and captivated by one of the most potent voices in contemporary American fiction.

About Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow‘s novels include The Diviner’s Tale, Giovanni’s Gift, and Trinity Fields, and co-edited with David Shields The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death. The recipient of numerous awards, he founded and edits the literary journal Conjunctions and is a professor of literature at Bard College. He lives in New York City.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

Conjunctions founding editor Morrow (The Diviner’s Tale), creates beautifully dark and soulfully intimate stories in his first collection, featuring characters who, though hardly citizens of virtue, reveal their true colors with little remorse. Each tale is told close at hand, with first-person narrators drawing the reader into their confidence, making readers complicit in shadowy inner workings that they don’t completely understand. A man who enjoys collecting trinkets sets his sights dangerously on his brother’s girlfriend in “The Hoarder.” A blind man, in “Amazing Grace,” regains his sight only to realize that the enlightened life he had imagined for himself is actually shrouded in darkness. After misplacing his mind, a man finds that, “whereas before he was dependable (had been with the same accounting firm for fifteen years, was the star shortstop on their interleague softball team), he now became not just unreliable, but entirely unpredictable,” in “Mis(Laid).” In the sinister “Tsunami,” a wife and mother relays the details of her unraveled marriage, remaining matter-of-fact: “This story doesn’t get any better, so if you wanted to stop here I certainly wouldn’t blame you. I can even tell you what happens so you won’t have to bother.” Morrow’s stories are hauntingly honest and linger in the consciousness. – Publishers Weekly

A teenage boy obsessively (and surreptitiously) photographs his older brother’s girlfriend. An electrical worker who turns motivational speaker after he’s blinded in an accident miraculously regains his sight and discovers that life was better when he couldn’t see. A young wife prone to fugue states is at the center of a series of murders that involve her husband, her children, and her husband’s lover. A teenage boy murders his grandmother’s male friend, whom he believes to be a Martian landed on Earth as part of the invasion that captivated the country in Orson Welles’s broadcast of War of the Worlds—and no trace of the body can be found. What links all these dark tales from Morrow (The Diviner’s Tale) is that the main characters live in the shadowland where normalcy and mania and at times even depravity meet. VERDICT Hanging on the voices of their narrators—at once fascinating in their fixations and repelling in their twisted logic—and mixing elements of Southern gothic and noir, these powerful tales will linger in the reader’s mind. —­Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA for Library Journal

Grim Tales of Clarity and Chaos

The New York Times Book Review – December 9, 2011 (Excerpt)

Bradford Morrow’s work has won him acclaim, but this inescapably grim collection of stories may not bolster that reputation. Here’s a taste of what his readers will encounter.

The 15-year-old narrator of “The Hoarder” — quick to call himself “a weird little bastard” — collects things in order, partly, to mitigate the lack of love and stability in his childhood. Each time the family moves, he takes an equal pleasure in dismantling and destroying his hoard of shells, birds’ nests or butterflies. Soon this impulse to control and demolish extends to humans. The scene in which he murders his hated older brother is no less shocking because you’ve seen it coming. Acquiring his brother’s girlfriend as a trophy, he drives her off into the sunset — and you find yourself remembering the fate of all his previous collections.

In the book’s title story, two children, haunted by the brother their mother miscarried one Christmas long ago, are driven by signs from beyond the grave to torture and kill a dog, then a young boy. So their obsession with this “blackened holiday fetus” becomes the impetus for an increasingly unnerving tale whose power lies in the half-suggested and the deliberately unsaid. “We hurt things that didn’t deserve hurt,” the narrator insists in his spookily numb monotone. [Read the full article...]

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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.

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From Leonardo’s drawings of grotesque heads to contemporary prints lampooning American politicians, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a vast but largely unknown collection of caricatures and other satirical works. This handsome book offers 165 examples, dating from about 1500 to the present, that reflect the age-old tradition of using exaggeration and humor to convey personal, social, or political meaning. The selection of images is notably broad, ranging from the elevated to the rudely humorous: renowned writers and decidedly unhygienic cooks; elegantly dressed noblemen and victims of outrageous fashion fads; Napoleon as a tidy Lilliputian and Boss Tweed as a bloated Roman emperor.

Stressing the continuity of certain artistic approaches, Infinite Jest examines the development of the genre across centuries and cultures. The essential visual components of caricature are discussed and illustrated, as are recurring motifs, including exaggerated faces and bodies, people depicted as animals or objects, and processions of bizarre figures. One section is devoted to social satire (eating and drinking, gambling, fashion, several of the Seven Deadly Sins), another to various aspects of political life (British, French, Mexican, and American). Artists as diverse as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya, Thomas Rowlandson, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, and Al Hirschfeld contribute their distinctive talents to this fascinating, informative, and very amusing volume.

About Constance C. McPhee and Nadine M. Orenstein

Constance C. McPhee is an Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nadine M. Orenstein is a Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The History of Caricature

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

Nobody’s sure who invented the caricature. It might have been Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of “bizarre heads” led his admirers to the realization that distorted aspects of physiognomy could serve a satirical purpose more directly than strict representation, or soINFINITE JEST: Caricature and Satire From Leonardo to Levine (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University, $45), by the Met curators Constance C. McPhee and Nadine M. Orenstein, suggests. “Scholars still puzzle over the function of these drawings, which appear to have had a comic intent,” Orenstein deadpans in her commentary on an etching of a pair of grotesque heads copied from Leonardo. Or it might have been some kid who noticed that if you draw somebody’s nose and chin bigger it looks pretty funny.

This book — whose title seems inspired by the kind of logic that would call a collection of morning landscapes “The Sun Also Rises” — serves as the catalog to an exhibition at the Met that runs through March 4. It surveys caricature from the 15th century onward, although it tapers off with the years when printing technology began opening up the field. It includes only half a dozen images from the past 60 years or so, including a dead-on 2008 piece by the Dutch artist Siegfried Woldhek that constructs George W. Bush’s frowning face out of six downward-trending arrows on graph paper.

McPhee’s introduction proposes that the artwork collected here has nothing to do with contemporary cartooning and caricature since it was “usually conceived with greater seriousness of purpose.” That’s arguable at best — and, in any case, there’s not much formal distance from Louis-Léopold Boilly’s realistically textured lithographs of grimacing, slightly-more-grotesque-than-life faces to the contemporary caricaturist Drew Friedman’s work, or from the woozy 17th-century “Satire on an Artist’s Studio” scribbled by somebody in Guercino’s circle to an Ed Koren cartoon in The New Yorker. [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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Playing with the form he created in his trailblazing debut novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick once again sails into uncharted territory and takes readers on an awe-inspiring journey.

Ben and Rose secretly wish their lives were different. Ben longs for the father he has never known. Rose dreams of a mysterious actress whose life she chronicles in a scrapbook. When Ben discovers a puzzling clue in his mother’s room and Rose reads an enticing headline in the newspaper, both children set out alone on desperate quests to find what they are missing.

Set fifty years apart, these two independent stories–Ben’s told in words, Rose’s in pictures–weave back and forth with mesmerizing symmetry. How they unfold and ultimately intertwine will surprise you, challenge you, and leave you breathless with wonder. Rich, complex, affecting, and beautiful–with over 460 pages of original artwork–Wonderstruck is a stunning achievement from a uniquely gifted artist and visionary.

About Brian Selznick

In addition to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick is the illustrator of the Caldecott Honor winner, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, and the New York Times Best Illustrated Walt Whitman: Words for America, both by Barbara Kerley, as well as the Sibert Honor Winner When Marian Sang, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, and numerous other celebrated picture books and novels. Brian has also worked as a set designer and a puppeteer. When he isn’t traveling to research and talk about his work all over the world, he lives in San Diego, California, and Brooklyn, New York.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

In a return to the eye-popping style of his Caldecott-award winner, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick’s latest masterpiece, Wonderstruck, is a vision of imagination and storytelling . In the first of two alternating stories, Ben is struck deaf moments after discovering a clue to his father’s identity, but undaunted, he follows the clue’s trail to the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. Flash to Rose’s story, told simultaneously through pictures, who has also followed the trail of a loved one to the museum–only 50 years before Ben. Selnick’s beautifully detailed illustrations draw the reader inside the museum’s myriad curiosities and wonders, following Ben and Rose in their search for connection. Ultimately, their lives collide in a surprising and inspired twist that is breathtaking and life-affirming. –Seira Wilson, Amazon.Com Review

In ‘Wonderstruck,’ A Child’s-Eye View Of New York

NPR Book Review – September 8, 2011 (Excerpt)

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by author and artist Brian Selznick, was an odd hybrid: a picture book for older children; the first YA novel to win the Caldecott Medal for children’s book illustration; a kind of proto-graphic novel for kids interested in the intersection of text and image.

It was also fabulously successful at conjuring up a world of wonder inside the walls of the Montparnasse railway station in 1931; with its combination of a propulsive written story and big, beautiful, full-page illustrations, it was best experienced in a rush, like some forgotten film from the early days of cinema. Indeed, movies were at the heart of the book, and so it’s not surprising that movie lover Martin Scorsese has directed an adaptation, Hugo, which comes out in November.

Selznick’s follow-up, Wonderstruck, is a slower, more ruminative book, less intricately constructed than Hugo Cabret but gentler in spirit. Once again, Selznick alternates text with pencil illustrations; this time the text tells one story while the pictures tell another, though at the end the stories intersect nicely.

In the illustrations, we see a lonely girl, Rose, who sets off on an adventure in New York City in 1927. In words, we read about an orphan boy, Ben, who travels from Minnesota to New York 50 years later in search of his father, and winds up hiding inside the American Museum of Natural History. [Read the full article...]

‘Wonderstruck’: A Novel Approach To Picture Books

NPR Book Review – September 13, 2011 (Excerpt)

It’s not often that a writer can illustrate his own books, but Brian Selznick is that rare find. He began his career as an artist collaborating with authors on children’s books. But he gradually realized that he wanted to tell his own stories in both words and pictures — and to do that, Selznick invented a unique narrative device.

Wonderstruck is both a novel and a picture book, a form Selznick first experimented with in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, when he had the idea of telling a story in much the same way that film does.

“I thought: Is there a way of combining what the cinema can do with panning, and zooming in and out, and edits, and what a picture book can do with page turns, and what a novel does?” Selznick says.

Selznick’s illustrations work like a camera, zooming in on details and following his characters around as they move through the world. In the beginning of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the reader follows a boy through a grate in the wall, down a hallway, to an old man in a toy booth who sees a clock, and behind the number 5 in the clock, there’s the boy … (Click here to see that opening sequence of drawings.)

In Wonderstruck, Selznick wanted to take this narrative experiment a step further. “I had this idea to try to tell two different stories,” he says. “What if I told one story just with pictures, and then told a completely different story that was set 50 years later with words? And then had these two separate stories weave back and forth until they came together at the end?”

Wonderstruck is the story of Rose and Ben, a young boy and girl who live years and worlds apart. By the end of the book, the reader learns they have a special connection. But from early on, they have one thing in common: She is deaf, and he loses his hearing when he is struck by lightning. [Read the full article...]

A Deaf Boy’s New York Quest

The New York Times Book Review – September 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

Sequels and seconds-in-a-series are as often as not better than the starter volume, and yet it seems incumbent upon us all to doubt them anyway. “Through the Looking Glass” is an incomparably better book than its predecessor — its chess-problem structure more ingenious; its nonsense poems far more inspired — but we still say “Alice in Wonderland” and always shall when we refer to Carroll’s world. Freshness of vision is in all departments of life an aesthetic category not to be sneezed at.

All of which is a necessarily elaborate way of saying that Brian Selznick’s new book, “Wonderstruck” — engrossing, intelligent, beautifully engineered and expertly told both in word and image — cannot entirely escape the force field or expectations set up by his 2008 Caldecott winner, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” “Hugo Cabret” was one of those rare books — Chris Van Allsburg’s tale “The Polar Express” is the last that comes to mind — that strike imaginations small and large with a force, like, well, thunder. Neither graphic novel nor illustrated book, its composite of storytelling forms seemed derived from the storyboards of some lost Czech genius of the silent film era rather than anything evident in other books. (Martin Scorsese has adapted it into a film to be released this fall.)

Though not a sequel of matter, “Wonderstruck” is very much a sequel of method, and a test of it. Can Selznick’s black-and-white chiaroscuro spell-making be transported or extended beyond the European fin de siècle setting that seemed essential in its first appearance? [Read the full article...]

‘Hugo’ author Brian Selznick in a ‘Wonderstruck’ mind-set

The Chicago Tribune Book Review – November 24, 2011 (Excerpt)

So here’s Brian Selznick, on a Friday afternoon in Culver City, standing in the vestibule of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a grin of anticipation on his face. It was, after all, this storefront museum — “the museum as performance art,” Selznick calls it — that inspired “Wonderstruck,” his most recent novel for middle readers, which takes place, in part, at New York’s Museum of Natural History and plays with the idea of the museum as what was once known as a wonder cabinet: a collection meant “to fill you, literally, with wonder, in the old-fashioned sense of amazement and awe.”

That’s the ethos of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which walks a line between fact and fiction, displaying both invented and authentic artifacts, challenging our sense of believability, asking how far we are willing to go.

“What’s thrilling,” Selznick says, as he begins to walk through the museum, stopping at exhibit after exhibit, “is that what’s true and what isn’t true, it’s all the same. They’re all fascinating stories, and they all move you in some way. It makes you think about that term, cabinet of wonders, and what wonder means. If a museum’s job is to inspire you, this place does that job.”

There’s a metaphor in this, for Selznick is very much in the business of wonder himself, creating books that challenge our notions of how fiction (for young readers or otherwise) is supposed to work. His 2007 novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” which won a Caldecott Medal and was a National Book Award finalist, introduced an innovative strategy for blending words and images, interweaving narrative and picture sequences to tell two sides of a single story, in which an orphan, living in a Paris train station at the dawn of the 1930s, forges an unlikely friendship with the pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès. [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...]

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

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“Bond’s fabulosity is matched by a trenchant wit, and [V's] over-the-top stories are smartly edged with politics, sexual or otherwise.”—The New York Times

Recently hailed as “the greatest cabaret artist of [V's] generation” in The New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this staggeringly candid and hilarious novella-length memoir.

With a recent diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and news that his first lover from childhood has been imprisoned for impersonating an undercover police officer, Bond recalls in vivid detail coming of age as a trans kid. Always haunted by the knowledge of being “different,” Bond was further confused when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly. Their trysts went on for years, and made Bond acutely aware of sexual power and vulnerability. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, homophobia, parenting, and sexuality, while being utterly entertaining.

Singer, songwriter, and Tony-nominated performance artist Mx. Justin Vivian Bond is an Obie, Bessie, and Ethyl Eichelberger Award winner. As one half of the performance duo Kiki and Herb, Bond has toured the world, headlining at Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and starring in a Tony nominated run on Broadway, Kiki and Herb Alive on Broadway. His film credits include a role in John Cameron Mitchell’s featureShortbus. Bond is currently releasing a record, Dendrophile, and is writing a play with Sandra Bernhard.

Editorial Reviews

“Reading Tango is like listening to your favorite eccentric cousin or auntie tell you hair-raising tales of innocence lost and found, friendships forged of adversity, and bullies bewildered by their own perversity. Justin spins a one-of-a-kind story that you won’t be able to put down.”
—Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw

“Tango should be in the hands of every child who can read, and of every adult who cares about that child.”
—Michael Warner, author of The Trouble with Normal

“When I say Justin Vivian Bond is a true original, what I mean is, Justin doesn’t resemble anyone else on the face of the planet. When I say Justin Bond is touched by genius, I mean exactly that.”
—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

Review

Largely stripped of any sense of celebrity (Mx. Bond is, after all, an award-winning singer, songwriter, and performer), Tango focuses on the experiences of Justin’s childhood, inviting us into a world of innocence, awkwardness, and confusion to which any reader can relate. Told in a casual, almost conversational style, this is a memoir that truly hits home – even if it sometimes hits harder and deeper than we may always be comfortable with.

Powerful and motivating, even (or, perhaps, especially) when uncomfortable, Tango is the story of the kind of childhood that I suspect is more common than most people would like to think. The sexual experimentation between adolescents may be too much for some readers, and the violence between them too much for others, but you can’t truly appreciate the “luxury of normality” that Mx. Bond has achieved without first understanding where v came from.

My only complaint about the book is that it’s too short, and ends rather abruptly, but it is the tale of a childhood, not a life, and not a career. Hopefully, the lovely Mx. Bond has another story inside vself, one that we’ll get to share. Until then, however, Tango serves not just as an entry in the “It Gets Better” theme of literature, but of a welcome glimpse into vs origins. – Sally, Amazon.Com Customer Review

A Schoolboy Wearing Lipstick

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

Hilton Als, a writer for The New Yorker, probably did Justin Vivian Bond a disservice by contributing the preface to Bond’s novella-length childhood memoir, “Tango.” That’s not to say that the preface is bad — quite the opposite. It is poetic and affecting, and it features revealing descriptions of Bond, a transgender singer-songwriter and performance artist with a fervent following among New York City’s avant-garde. “Justin Vivian has learned to dance with V’s self,” Als writes, “to wear the heels and the suit that fit V’s being, all cut and formed to suit V’s soul, having earned it as so many of us earn it, through being brutalized and suppressed and sometimes through love, too.” (“V” is Bond’s preferred, gender-free pronoun.)

The preface falters only when Als claims that Bond’s memoir “hardly needs an introduction.” “Tango” is a promising but uneven book in dire need of an introduction, a narrative structure and an editor. Als’s beautifully written preface serves only to make the memoir’s shortcomings, from its inconsistent writing to its skim-the-surface introspection, all the more blatant by comparison.

The book’s faults are a shame, because the 48-year-old Bond can at times be a funny and thoughtful narrator, guiding us through his childhood in Hagerstown, Md., where he fell asleep every night “imagining that I would wake up the next morning with a closet full of 1940s evening gowns.” Bond fans will probably find much to like in this memoir, including a dozen or so laugh-out-loud passages and some touching descriptions of growing up as a “trans child.” (He was fond of wearing his mother’s frosted pink lipstick to school. When she put a stop to that, Bond says that he went to school “defeated, disappointed and bland.”) [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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Within days after September 11, 2001, William Langewiesche had secured unique, unrestricted, round-the-clock access to the World Trade Center site. American Groundis a tour of this intense, ephemeral world and those who improvised the recovery effort day by day, and in the process reinvented themselves, discovering unknown strengths and weaknesses.

In all of its aspects–emotionalism, impulsiveness, opportunism, territoriality, resourcefulness, and fundamental, cacophonous democracy–Langewiesche reveals the unbuilding to be uniquely American and oddly inspiring, a portrait of resilience and ingenuity in the face of disaster.

Editorial Reviews

Langewiesche had unrestricted access to Manhattan’s Ground Zero during the post-September 11 cleanup, and his triptych of articles (originally published in the Atlantic Monthly) takes readers through what became known to its denizens as the Pile, from the moment of destruction to the departure of the last truckload of rubble from the ruins a little less than nine months later. He gives a calm, precise account of the air traffic controllers trying to understand what was happening to the hijacked planes and explains precisely how the towers collapsed. The stars of the rest of this story are people one doesn’t usually read about: administrators, engineers and construction workers in charge of the cleanup-a process in which, as Langewiesche describes it, order emerged from chaos by the sheer force of will of those in charge. One such outsize personality is David Griffin, a demolition expert who drove up from North Carolina, bluffed his way onto the restricted site, and quickly wound up in a position of authority. There’s also a frank account of the tensions between police and firefighters at Ground Zero. Most fascinating, though, Langewiesche takes readers right inside the smoking Pile, as he joins workers on dangerous underground expeditions to see whether the slurry walls that keep out the Hudson will hold, or whether freon might be leaking from underground refrigerators. This is a genuinely monumental story, told without melodrama, an intimate depiction of ordinary Americans reacting to grand-scale tragedy at their best-and sometimes their worst. – Publishers Weekly

Originally serialized in the Atlantic, Langewiesche’s inside account of the dismantling of the Trade Center site is a masterpiece of compression, a sober look at an emotionally loaded operation and a subtle rendering of the territorial battles between police, fire fighters and construction crews that were only heightened by the tragedy. Langewiesche was on the rubble from the beginning, and his observations — understated, reflective and insightful — remind us of the power of work to root us amid horror, as well as the courage involved in doing what needs to be done. – Chicago Tribune

Review

William Langewiesche is a superb writer. I had read one of the three articles on the Trade Towers he had written for the Atlantic Monthly and was stunned by the insight and honesty of what he had observed and been a part of while at ground zero. I could not wait to get my hands on this book to read his entire account.
Mr.Langewiwsche brings us the story of what happens in the days after the Trade Towers collapsed. He has made it clear that there is a distinction between what happened on September 11th, and during the rescue and recovery phase. I have heard him in an interview on NPR radio saying that all the people on September 11th were heros. Absolutely. Many died trying to save others. The true focus of his book is what happened to the people left in the aftermath, left to do the clean up of such a horrendous tragedy, left to deal with the wave of emotional devastation and loss. Some rode the wave admirably, and some did not.
What makes this work so special is the very way the author lets us see the humaness of the people working in the disaster site. We are all a mixture of good and bad, hero and coward, recognition seeker and recluse. Langewiesche brings those characteristics to the front of his story. He took me into a world that I fear we will see more of. Great, unthinkable tragedy, and our response to staggering loss.
Human beings still have to deal with their strengths and weaknesses, even when the world turns upside down. We all hope that our better sides will come shining through in the event of a catastrophe. This book is a blue print to make sure that happens. It focuses on the ways we are great– taking risks to save others, working tirelessly day and night, and on ways we are not–petty turf wars, insensitive pride and self rightousness.
I have noticed that friends I have given this book to have very strong reactions to it. They either love the book, or find the writers’ story offensive. They were bothered by the image of a fire truck filled with stolen Gap blue jeans, of firefighters searching for lost brothers ignoring the civilian dead, and of battles over which group got to dig for bodies in different areas. One friend thought that any bad bahavior reported about the Trade Tower clean up was anti-American. I disagree. I think the writing shows how resiliant and strong Americans are and I think it shows us how human we are. In war, there are all kinds of reactions and responses, some admirable and some not. In this work, I found a guide to decide what kind of person I want to be should another tragedy fall on us. One of the finest pieces of writing I have read. Could not recommend highly enough. – Margaret E. Chung, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Here is New York was founded in response to the events of September 11, and to the flood of images that resulted from it. The idea was simple: to present images of the event by as many different people and from as many different perspectives as possible. In the days following September 11, the organizers asked for pictures and were inundated with slides, negatives, prints, and digital files from photographers of every description, not only top photojournalists and other professionals, but rescue workers, firemen, police officers, school children, and amateurs of every kind. In order to underline that it was the images themselves that mattered, rather than their makers, the photographs were all digitally scanned, printed out in exactly the same format, and hung from wires without attribution or frames in a Soho storefront in downtown Manhattan.

The book Here is New York will be the most comprehensive and authentic document of what occurred. It will bear witness to what seemed unimaginable, memorialize the people who perished and the rescue workers who served so heroically. Most of all, the book will be a testimony of people speaking directly to each other about their fears, their emotions, and their desire for community. This desire is one of the strongest by-products of the horrible events of September 11. It is also what distinguishes Here is New York from any and all other books about the event.

Proceeds from the sale of the images and the book benefit The Children’s Aid Society’s WTC Relief Fund. To date, Here Is New York has donated over $600,000.00 to the Society. The democratic nature of the exhibiton has allowed it to expand to simultaneous exhibitions including shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago; and The Daytona Beach Community College’s Southeast Museum of Photography. To continue to express the magnitude of this event and expound upon the democratic message of this project, exhibitions will be mounted simultaneously throughout the world this summer and fall to memorialize September 11th. The exhibitions will open in London, Tokyo, Zurich, Arles, as well as several other American locations including Washington, D.C. The pictures communicate where words are insufficient, each tells one part of this tragic story.

The Here Is New York exhibition has been featured in all of the major New York newspapers and by many local and national television networks, including CBS, PBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and National Geographic, Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O’Donnell, Dateline, and 60 Minutes . International press from the following countries have covered the exhibition: the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, and Japan. The book Here is New York will receive extensive press coverage as well.

Editorial Reviews

On September 25, 2001, an exhibition opened in a previously vacant storefront in SoHo, perhaps 20 blocks from Ground Zero. Photographer Peress, who had been photographing the city for the New Yorker, Michael Shulan (who owned the building where the exhibit started) and two friends decided to hang pictures of the city by anybody and everybody who submitted them. The exhibition attracted thousands of submissions, and many thousands more visitors, and has toured in the U.S. and Europe, including stops at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. The slip-cased, 12″ 8 1/4″ book presents 720 color and 160 duotone (and mostly full-page) portraits of the city in crisis, with crisp printing and no captions. While many of the images may resemble those seen repeatedly over the past year, this assemblage feels direct without being voyeuristic. If it is heavy on the flags, it is because the city was festooned at the time, and the pictures convey an array of different responses, personal and political, to the tragedy. This book really does, in Whitman’s words, contain multitudes. – Publishers Weekly

This book grew out of an exhibit and sale of photographs of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center disaster. The exhibit began when Michael Shulan taped a photograph of the towers in a vacant Soho shop window. A friend encouraged him to post more photos and on September 25 the gallery opened for a supposed three-week run. Months and thousands of pictures later, the project included a Web site and the publication of this book. Like the show itself, this book contains pages of uncaptioned photographs, almost 1000 of the more than 5000 photos submitted by some 3000 photographers. “Anybody and everybody” brought photos; those chosen for publication were selected “to give the most coherent sense of the whole.” The book opens with approximately 170 black-and-white photos; the hundreds that follow are in color. The pictures vary in composition, in viewpoint, and both in camera angle and type of equipment used. Some are macabre, some eerie, some border on the tasteless, and a few are beautiful. The book concludes with the most breathtaking and evocative piece in the entire collection-a two-page color photo of the upper reaches of the Twin Towers thrusting upward through a sea of clouds.
Dori DeSpain, Fairfax County Public Library, VA for School Library Journal

Review

This is it. At this writing (August 26 2002),
“Here is New York” is the book that best
captures the 9/11 attack on the U.S. at
the World Trade Center and the immediate
and ongoing effects on those of us in New York City.

This book is not a souvenir.
It is not an editorial summary.
It is not an exploitation.

It is shattered glimpses of the reality
that we New Yorkers lived, simply presented.
This is what was and is.

Except for an introduction describing how
the photographs were collected, the entire
book is just photographs. Just photographs.
And the book is as thick as a Manhattan phone
book.

Each photograph is given an entire page or
double page spread. Each is meticulously
reproduced so that you can study the details
of what is going on. You can read the faces
of people in them. There are no captions.
The photos speak for themselves. Virtually
every one of them is profound.

After all, there really are no words for this.

Look at the details. There are no ordinary
photographs here. If you think a photograph
is ordinary,you are missing something important;
look again.

There are nearly a thousand photographs, most
never before published. They communicate an
intimacy of meaning that I have seen no where
else. The whole project is stunning; the order
and format of the photographs in this book
offer a depth of experience that cannot be
duplicated in other media.

Please know: the wreckage photographs are the
best I’ve seen, yet even at the size of a full
page they cannot convey the scale and depth and
constant danger of “Ground Zero.”

There was far more going on than even this city
full of cameras could capture. Some still goes on.
And much is still going on inside ourselves.
No book, no media, can bring it all together.
But this book is more than a sum of its parts
and delivers more than I thought possible.

I offer my highest praise.

Indeed, here is New York, U.S.A.

- A Customer, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Stan Green is a New York City Homicide Detective who has seen better days. As his family life threatens to disintegrate and his work partner disappears, he is assigned to the most shocking case of his career-a strange and remarkably violent murder. Stan must look into the crime alone. He finds just one witness, a neurologically disabled recluse who sees through the souls of others as demonic hallucinations. As more murders occur, and he drifts further from his family and friends, Stan’s suspicion and rage escalate. Soon he realizes that the deaths fall into the pattern of a serial killer–and starts to believe that his witness is not at all insane, but terrifyingly perceptive . . .

Editorial Review

“Last night I finished the best crime novel I have read in the last year — an advance reading copy of Dave Zeltserman’s book A Killer’s Essence, which will be published by Overlook Press in September. The story line was superb as well as the characters . . . [Zeltserman] nailed the atmosphere of New York City and Brooklyn. There is no question that our customers will love this book. And there is no question that I want a copy for my collection, when this comes out.” –Dave Kanell, co-owner Kingdom Books in Vermont

About the Author

Dave Zeltserman was born in Boston and educated at the University of Colorado. A former software engineer, he is the author of nine horror and crime novels including The Caretaker of Lorne Field and A Killer’s Essence. He and his wife live in the Boston area. Visit davezeltserman.com.

In ‘A Killer’s Essence,’ a writer at top of his game

Boston.Com Book Review – September 1, 2011 (Excerpt)

Dave Zeltserman has had to put himself in the shoes of any number of disreputable types in his estimable noir novels – hit men, out-of-control cops, old coots who think they’re saving the world by weeding a field. Now, in “A Killer’s Essence,’’ comes the ultimate in empathizing with the dark side. Zeltserman, who lives and dies with the Red Sox, creates a protagonist who – the horror – is a Yankees fan.

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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.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

We The Animals, Justin Torres’s sparse debut novel–at just 125 pages–is brimming with delicate stories of family, of growing up, of facing reality, and of delaying it. Narrated by the youngest son of a Puerto Rican father and white mother from Brooklyn raising their three young sons in upstate New York, the novel is comprised of vignettes detailing moments spent in the eye of the ferocious bubble of home. Torres paints a large picture through diminutive strokes, evoking envy for the couple’s passion and fear for just how easily that passion turns to rage. The brothers wrestle, fight, cry, and laugh as their family is torn and repaired over and over again. Torres’s prose is fierce, grabbing hold of the reader and allowing him inside the wrenching, whirlwind of a life lived intensely. –Alexandra Foster, Amazon.Com Review

Editorial Reviews

“The best book you’ll read this fall…WE THE ANIMALS, a slim novel – just 144 pages — about three brothers, half white, half Puerto Rican, scrambling their way through a dysfunctional childhood, is the kind of book that makes a career….Torres’s sentences are gymnastic, leaping and twirling, but never fancy for the sake of fancy, always justified by the ferocity and heartbreak and hunger and slap-happy euphoria of these three boys. It’s a coming-of-age novel set in upstate New York that rumbles with lyric dynamite. It’s a knock to the head that will leave your mouth agape. Torres is a savage new talent.” – Esquire

“a novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt. Written in the voice of the youngest of three boys, this partly autobiographical tale evokes the cacophony of a messy childhood – flying trash-bag kites, ransacking vegetable gardens, and smashing tomatoes until pulp runs down the kitchen walls. But despite the din the brothers create, the novel belongs to their mother, who alternates between gruff and matter-of-fact – ‘loving big boys is different from loving little boys – you’ve got to meet tough with tough.’ In stark prose, Torres shows us how one family grapples with a dangerous and chaotic love for each other, as well as what it means to become a man.” – O, the Oprah Magazine

“In language brilliant, poised and pure, We the Animals tells about family love as it is felt when it is frustrated or betrayed or made to stand in the place of too many other needed things, about how precious it becomes in these extremes, about the terrible sense of loss when it fails under duress, and the joy and dread of realizing that there really is no end to it.” —Marilynne Robinson

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Reader Review

Reading Justin Torres’s WE THE ANIMALS, I couldn’t help but think of Sandra Cisneros’s THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET. In fact, my hunch is that this is Torres’s version of that book moved to Brooklyn and written from the point of view of a boy. From vignette to vignette, you piece together the picture, until finally, at 125 slim pages, your editors consider it enough to be coined a “novel.” No, Torres does not surpass his mentor, but he has his poetic moments. Sometimes these moments fail and become “workshop” moments, wherein you sense the lineage (in this case, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, among others) of the author and how it makes the words smell of the writing workshop copying machine, but other times the writing actually comes alive.

In the beginning we are introduced to a dysfunctional family (de rigueur these days) consisting of a wife-beating Puerto Rican dad (“Paps”), an unpredictable white mother (“Ma”) and the Three Musketeers (the boys — at the book’s beginning, ages 7 to 10). The ages are not insignificant. As the tone and voice of this book is often wise and clever, one begins to wonder how the young narrators manage it. I realize that authors often claim it is the “voice of wisdom looking back,” but the dialogue portions were a bit advanced, too, and — in the “narrative dream” — what was said then was said then.

Early on, Torres utilizes the third person “we” point of view, accenting just how close these brothers are and how they behave (well, mostly misbehave) almost as a single entity. They witness their parents engaging in activities and violence that most of us do not, then show the effects in their own behaviors, all as you’d expect. This is Torres’s slant and what gives the book its charm.

Later in the book, however, the author shifts to a first-person point of view, written from the voice of the youngest son. This boy, in the last few vignettes, undergoes a dramatic change that really turns the whole novel upside down. Now instead of a garden variety, coming-of-age-in-a-violent family, we have another type of coming of age tale which, I guess, would be a spoiler to reveal. Suffice it to say that Torres waited too late into the book to spring it on us and should have written maybe 50 additional pages allowing for a more logical transition. As it is, it seems out of the blue, dumped on the reader, and the behavior of the family seems even more bizarre than its admittedly low standards would lead us to expect. Meaning? I didn’t buy it. It was too much and too abrupt, jolting me out of the narrative dream as efficiently as a pothole.

That said, you can emphasize the book’s efforts along the way and enjoy it for those moments where the narration sings. Torres is adept at anaphora (repeated beginnings of sentences) and cascading participial phrases, making his well-punctuated sentences dance in creative ways at times (much like Paps who, in one vignette, tries to teach the boys how to mambo like a real Puerto Rican). All in all, a mixed bag and, in the end, a missed opportunity. Still, one could do worse than to have Sandra Cisneros as a role model. In this case, the student shows that work remains to be done — in future books. – Ken C., Amazon.Com Customer Review

Grasping the Secrets of Being an Adult

The New York Times Book Review – September 1, 2011 (Excerpt)

Dusk seems to be descending forever on the boys at the center of “We the Animals,” a slender but affecting debut novel by Justin Torres. As porch lights go on, and the other kids shamble home to chores and homework, the unnamed narrator and his brothers prowl the blighted streets of their rural hometown in upstate New York like stray dogs sniffing out their next meal or a new bit of trouble. At home the rising of the moon brings a mother’s absence — she works the night shift at the brewery — and a father’s frustration, which is relieved only by violence inflicted on whomever is at hand.

“We the Animals,” the kind of sensitive, carefully wrought autobiographical first novel that may soon be extinct from the mainstream publishing world, is mostly written in the first person plural, a tricky gambit that calls attention to itself immediately (as it did in Joshua Ferris’s best-selling novel of cubicled anomie, “Then We Came to the End”). But the device doesn’t impede our engagement with Mr. Torres’s spare, haunting story of a boy scrabbling toward wisdom about the adult world and his place in it.

“We” are the three sons of a mixed-race couple, Ma and Paps, who met in Brooklyn in their youth before moving upstate, presumably in search of economic opportunity that hasn’t materialized. He is Puerto Rican; she is white. She was just 14, he 16 when she became pregnant; they had to take a bus to Texas so they could marry legally. (One of Mr. Torres’s few literary tics is a slight overuse of the semicolon in the early chapters; perhaps it’s catching?) [Read the full article...]

‘We The Animals’ Delivers A Fiery Ode To Boyhood

NPR Book Review – September 3, 2011 (Excerpt)

Justin Torres’ debut novel is a welterweight champ of a book. It’s short but it’s also taut, elegant, lean — and it delivers a knockout.

It’s called We the Animals and it tells the story of three boys growing up in upstate New York. Their parents started having babies as teenagers in Brooklyn and they work hard to support their family — Ma on a brewery’s night shift while Paps drives a truck and does odd jobs. They’re poor, and the boys always seem to be scrambling: for more food, more attention and a little more joy.

Both the boys and their parents smack each other brutally — and rely on each other utterly. Their story is told in a series of scenes that burst open like exploding stars, full of violence and light.

Torres, who also grew up in upstate New York, tells NPR’s Scott Simon that the book is very loosely based on his own childhood experience.

“I have two brothers; my mother worked in a brewery; my parents were teenagers when they started having kids,” he says. “But the incidents are fiction. I wanted to make myth out of family; I wanted to get to an emotional truth that I think fiction can really deliver.”

And We the Animals definitely delivers. The brilliantly compressed novel reads as though Torres has been writing it his whole life, or at least his whole writing life. [Read the full article...]

Justin Torres’s ‘We the Animals’ marks a new literary voice

The Washington Post Book Review – September 12, 2011 (Excerpt)

It’s rare to come across a young writer with a voice whose uniqueness, power and resonance are evident from the very first page, or even the very first paragraph. It does happen every once in a while, though. And it’s happened again, just now, with the publication of “We the Animals,” a slender, tightly wound debut novel by a remarkable young talent named Justin Torres.

From the first of its 128 pages — all of which can be read in one sitting, as they undoubtedly will be in many instances — readers, even those who don’t go on to love everything about the book, will have little choice but to conclude that they are hearing something new, something strong and something very self-assured.

The unnamed narrator of “We the Animals” is the youngest of three brothers who, while spaced a few years apart, are each beginning to navigate the mine-laden pathway out of childhood and into pre-adolescence. To say that this trio is “tight-knit” is insufficient: They are in almost every sense a collective, eating together, sleeping together, bathing together, and together absorbing their father’s abuse and their mother’s manic-depressive outbursts. What binds them is the natural talent for mayhem that is the birthright of bored and largely unattended young brothers — that and their shared bewilderment at their station as the half-white, half-Latino children of hot-tempered Brooklynites trans­planted to semi-rural Upstate New York. [Read the full article...]

‘We the Animals’ by Justin Torres

The Boston Globe Book Review – September 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

Vulnerability within a family can be tricky business. Parents must fail only just enough for their children to know they’re real. So many of us can remember when we first saw our fathers cry or when our mothers turned unreachably private, if only for that moment. When they fought, we saw them as individuals with discernable motives and separate desires; and even when they made up, they retained traces of their discrete identities. Faultless parenting, in the end, doesn’t make for much emotional transparency.

Justin Torres’s debut novel, “We the Animals,’’ is a svelte little book, but in it is proof after proof that domestic distress can inspire compassion in its young witnesses, a worthier goal than a false sense of familial infallibility. “We wanted more’’ opens the first chapter. “We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry.’’ The novel’s unnamed 6-year-old narrator speaks for himself and his two older brothers: “We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight.’’ The voracity – material but also emotional – is what animates most of the book’s prose. “We the Animals’’ is rich in tactile detail and sensory recollection. Crumbs are licked up; torsos are tickled; ditches are dug in the pouring rain. Torres has done here what all good novelists who exploit memory do: He has surveyed his entire childhood and extracted its most pigmented impressions. [Read the full article...]

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AMERICAN MALE PROSTITUTE
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss 

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.