Grit Lit and Growth January 23, 2012
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in fiction, grit lit, literary fiction, Uncategorized.Tags: Eleanor Henderson
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Some stories are just so raw and gritty they can’t be told without wincing in pain for the characters and with the author who surely bled tears while writing. These are stories and characters who linger like the scent of flowers after a funeral, neither unpleasant, nor comforting. Reflecting the times in which they occur, they are mirrors to some and to others they’re hideous portraits of life’s underbelly. This week in #litchat we’re discussing the raw and gritty literature that leads to growth and keeps you thinking.
Joining us on Friday, January 27, is Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco). Named among the Top Ten Books of 2011 by the New York Times, as well as a dozen other notable lists, Ten Thousand Saints is a solid literary debut from an author with a strong voice. There are so many themes worthy of discussion within Ten Thousand Saints, it’s hard to draw on one to the exclusion of others.
Set primarily in a fictional Vermont town and NYC’s lower east side during the mid-1980s, Henderson skillfully folds us into the lives of four teenagers escaping the dysfunctional homes of their 1960s generation hippie parents. The backbone of the story is Teddy, who early in the novel dies of an overdose, yet continues to prop up the story through the guilt each of his friends carry about the night of his death. In a milieu of drugs, sex and punk rock, we meet Jude, Teddy’s best friend; Eliza, the girl who had sex with Teddy the night he died and bears his child, and Johnny, Teddy’s older brother, a straight-edge adherent who marries Eliza in homage to Teddy. As Jude is drawn into the straight-edge punk lifestyle flourishing in the lower east side, Johnny’s marriage to Eliza conflicts and counters everything they both believe. The specter of death hangs around the three characters, as AIDS raises from the unknown and into the bloodstream of America. Hope rests on Jude in the end, leaving the reader to speculate and wonder and imagine a dozen scenarios of closure.
Eleanor Henderson was born in Greece, grew up in Florida, and attended Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in 2005. Her fiction has appeared in Agni, North American Review, Ninth Letter, Columbia, and Salon, among other publications. Her story “The Farms” was nominated for a Pushcart and selected by Alice Sebold for The Best American Short Stories 2009. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, All Things Considered, Poets & Writers (where she was a contributing editor), and The Virginia Quarterly Review (where she was the chair of the fiction board). From 2006 to 2010 she taught at James Madison University in Virginia. Now an assistant professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, Aaron, and sons Nico and Henry.
View the video trailer for Ten Thousand Saints.
Follow Eleanor Henderson on Twitter: @eleanorofithaca.
Plots With Purpose January 16, 2012
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Learning about situations, historical events and diverse cultures are among the top reasons why readers spend hours turning the pages of fiction. Lawyers, preachers, motivational speakers and the like use the power of story to give meaning and illustrate important points in their work. This week in #litchat we’re discussing novels that both inform and engage readers to action.
On Friday, January 20, #litchat welcomes Corban Addison, whose debut novel, A Walk Across the Sun (SilverOak), takes on the topic of international sex trade. The novel opens with a harrowing scene of the Boxing Day tsunami that washed through South Asia in 2004. Through this milieu, two of the lead characters, middle-class teenage sisters Ahalya and Sita are orphaned, then kidnapped and sold to a Mumbai brothel. 
The sisters are eventually separated, with the younger sister smuggled around Europe and America as a drug mule, working slave, and finally sold to a porn producer who operates a posh brothel in rural Georgia. When lead character, ambitious attorney Tom Clarke, is forced by his law firm to take a paid sabbatical working pro bono for a non-governmental organization, he heads to India to work with a firm that tracks and prosecutes human traffickers. The story takes off when Tom’s heart engages with his ambition, taking the reader on a global journey into the shadow world of the sex trades that exist within an arm’s reach of the law.
Addison holds degrees in law and engineering from the University of Virginia and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He began to experiment with writing at the age of fifteen, about the same time he developed an interest in international travel. His early works were mostly essays, reflections and travelogues, but his true love was fiction. Despite the increasing demands of career and family, Addison embarked upon an odyssey that took him to India and Europe and into the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. In immersing himself in the world of modern-day slavery, he spent time with experts and activists in the field and went undercover into the brothels of Mumbai to meet trafficking victims firsthand. Out of this journey, A Walk Across the Sun was born.
Addison is a supporter of international justice causes, including the abolition of modern slavery, and he is committed to broadening this support through the publication of A Walk Across the Sun.
View the video trailer for A Walk Across the Sun.
Follow Corban Addision on Twitter: @CorbanAddision.
The Power of Nuance January 9, 2012
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Uncategorized.add a comment
Nuance in fiction is one of the most difficult storytelling techniques to master. Rather than telegraph the direction of the story, a nuanced story uses subtle hints and finely crafted metaphors and similes to build tension, express character motivation, and evoke emotion. Nuanced fiction is often called, “quiet,” “wondrous,” “thoughtful” and always referred to with reverence. On Wednesday, we’ll discuss the power of nuance in great storytelling.
Joining us as guest host on Friday is Jessica Keener, whose debut novel, Night Swim (Fiction Studio Books), is an artfully nuanced novel with broad appeal. Every sentence of Night Swim sings with lyrical eloquence, while delivering a fully-realized story that will haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page. With grace and compassion, Keener takes us back to Boston during the early 1970s. When maternal love is silenced at the untimely death of her mother, 16-year-old Sarah Kunitz finds her own voice through choices both sweet and sorrowful. Keener’s lyrical prose sweeps you into the story and onto a stage where Sarah’s here and now meet her yesterday for a flawless finish.
Keener wrote her first “book” when she was eight years old, stitching construction paper together with yarn, a holiday gift to her parents. As a child, she read and reread Andersen’s and Grimm’s fairy tales, biographies of famous people, mysteries, and animal stories such as Charlotte’s Web and The Yearling, which caused her to sob with bodily abandonment. She wrote poetry in high school and college. After getting a Master’s degree in creative writing from Brown University, she began publishing short stories in literary magazines.
Keener’s fiction has been listed in The Pushcart Prize under “Outstanding Writers.” Writing awards include a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant Program, a Joan Jakobson Scholarship from Wesleyan Writers Conference; a Chekhov Prize for Excellence in Fiction by the editors of Wilderness House Literary Review; and second prize in Redbook magazine’s fiction contest. For more than a dozen years she’s also been a features writer for The Boston Globe, Design New England, O, the Oprah Magazine and other national magazines. In 2001, she published a business memoir, Time to Make the Donuts, with the founder of Dunkin’ Donuts.
Follow Jessica Keener on Twitter: @JessicaKeener1.
Favorite Books of 2011 January 4, 2012
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Uncategorized.3 comments
We ran a new element in our BOOKS ARE GREAT GIFTS (#bagg) campaign this year–#litchatpicks2011. Throughout the month of December we asked followers to post their favorite books released during 2011. We had several hundred posts, with nearly as many different books suggested as favorites. After scrolling through all of the #litchatpicks, we gleaned the top five picks from our followers:
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach (Little, Brown & Company)
The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht (Random House)
The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday)
Divergent, by Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books)
So Much Pretty, by Cara Hoffman (Simon & Schuster)
We promised a free #bagg of books to someone posting in the feed. After careful deliberation, we’ve selected @KatDuncanPhoto as the winner of the free bag of books. Here is the post she made that turned our heads:
Kat Duncan picked three of the top five #litchatpicks2011. Congratulations, Kat. We’ll have your #bagg of books to you as soon as we receive your mailing address.
As for tradition, here are my favorite ten novels released in 2011:
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan (Anchor)
Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, Wesley Stace (Picador)
Hustle, by Jason Skipper (Press 53)
Irma Voth, by Miriam Toews (Harper)
The Coffins of Little Hope, by Timothy Schaffert (Unbridled Books)
The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson (Ecco)
The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday)
The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht (Random House)
The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortise, by Julia Stuart (Doubleday)
LitChat’s 3rd Anniversary January 2, 2012
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in weekly topics.add a comment
Welcome to a new year on the calendar and a new year of #litchat. We are excited to enter our fourth year of literary discussion through Twitter and are anxious to introduce you to new authors, fascinating topics and trending conversations. This week in #litchat watch for special guest visits from many of the authors we’ve hosted through the years in #litchat.
As we celebrate #litchat’s third anniversary, we’re beginning a new format for discussion.
On Mondays at 4 p.m. ET, we will discuss literature in the news. Look for topics drawn from big media interviews with top tier authors, publishing trends affecting readers, and special author surprises.
Wednesdays will continue the format #litchat introduced with our first topical chat in January 2009. The Wednesday topic will be drawn from the book recently published by our Friday guest host.
Friday continues as guest host day in #litchat. We have some fabulous authors already lined up for 2012 (see them here). We’re eager to introduce you to new authors with extraordinary debuts, as well as familiar authors with new titles releasing in the coming year.
As always, if you are an author with a book releasing through established (not self-pub’d) channels, we’d love to consider you and your book in #litchat. Email us at twitchat@gmail.com with your contact info and media materials.
LitChat on Holiday Break December 19, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Uncategorized.2 comments
There will be no scheduled or moderated #litchat discussions this week and next week as we take time off to enjoy the winter holidays with family and friends.
We’ll return January 2 with a week of celebrating #litchat’s three-year anniversary. The early 2012 guest host line-up is bringing in some fantastic authors, including Jessica Keener (Night Swim/Fiction Studio), Corban Addison (A Walk Across the Sun/Sterling), Eleanor Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints/Ecco), Duncan Jepson (All the Flowers in Shanghai/William Morrow) and Myfanwy Collins (Echolocation/Engine Books). Watch for more interesting and tweet-worthy authors and books as the 2012 #litchat schedule continues to develop.
If you have a book coming out in 2012 or wish to recommend a book that you believe would inspire interesting discussion in #litchat, please let us know at twitchat@gmail.com.
Books Are Great Gifts (#bagg) Revisited December 12, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Uncategorized.add a comment
Last Friday’s BOOKS ARE GREAT GIFTS #bagg auction netted $725 in donations to our adopted beneficiary, Reader To Reader. We are grateful to the Twitter community for showing support for this annual campaign designed to boost book sales and raise funds for children’s literacy programs.
Special thanks go to all of the authors who donated books and showed up during auction hours to support the auction. Extra special thanks to author Keith Cronin who became the unofficial auction entertainer whose promos for his book Me Again made the #bagg feed worth following just to see what he’d say next. You can read the entire #bagg auction transcript here.
We hope you’ll support Reader To Reader with your year-end charitable donations. If you donate any amount to Reader To Reader through the month of December, just email your donation to receipt to twitchat@gmail.com and we’ll send you a free book. Donate here.
Saints Alive December 12, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in historical fiction, Latino literature, literary fiction, multi-cultural fiction.Tags: Luis Alberto Urrea
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Some characters are simply to good to be true. The Pollyannas of literature. Melanie Wilkes. Pip. Forrest Gump. Sweet, kind, generous. We think of these characters as literary saints. They believe in the inherent goodness of people and can’t understand why others don’t. There’s another kind of literary saint, the ones with flaws. Ivanhoe, Atticus Finch, Jo March. There are the saints whose deep convictions are met with adversity and yet the remain true to their calling. These and others of similar cut are the literary saints we’ll be discussing this week in #litchat.
Joining us on Friday, December 16th, for his second visit to #litchat , is Luis Alberto Urrea, whose sequel to his award-winning novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter was published this month. Queen of America follows Teresita, the young Mexican woman called the Saint of Cabora, whose ability to heal the sick spread throughout Mexico near the turn of the 20th century and whose passion for freedom inspired the native peoples of Mexico to fight against the corrupt government. Queen of America opens where the The Hummingbird’s Daughter ends. Teresita and her father have fled Mexico with government assassins on their tail. It doesn’t take long for word to spread to the sick, wounded, and hopeless around their new situation in Arizona that Teresita, the Saint of Cabora, has not lost her gifts.
Urrea writes with Dickensian humor and a scope for history like Tolstoy, bringing the late 1800s to life from the border towns of the Southwest and the Indian uprisings on both sides of the border; to a San Francisco still rushed with gold, and into the parlors of New York society. Everywhere she goes, Teresita is followed by pilgrims seeking her touch, a phenomenon that both nourishes and depletes her. Among the powerful threads running throughout Queen of America is Teresita’s conflicted passion for romance and beauty against her calling as a healer. These flaws bring pain as Urrea takes readers through Teresita’s brief marriage to a violent psychopath and her later association with people bent on exploiting her gifts. Urrea paints all of this with the brush of a poet, combining the facts of Teresita’s life with the essence of her life’s work.
Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. Born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres. The critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 13 books, Urrea has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. The Devil’s Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize.
Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and 
fiction workshops at Harvard. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College and the University of Colorado and he was the writer in residence at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Follow Luis Alberto Urrea on Twitter: @urrealism.
Special Guest Host: Adam Mansbach December 8, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Books Are Great Gifts, non-fiction.Tags: Adam Mansbach
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We’re thrilled to have Adam Mansbach join us in the #litchat virtual salon on Friday, December 9, 4-5 p.m. ET, to complete this week’s topical discussion of gift and holiday books. Mansbach’s most recent book, Go the F**k to Sleep, is a #1 New York Times bestseller, and one of the most talked-about books of the decade. A viral sensation that shot to #1 on Amazon.com months before the book was even available, it has been published in more than thirty languages, and is forthcoming as a feature film from Fox 2000.
Mansbach’s last novel, The End of the Jews, won the 2008 California Book Award and was long-listed for the IMPAC-Dublin Prize. His previous novel, Angry Black White Boy, was a San Francisco ChronicleBest Book of 2005; it is taught at more than eighty universities and has been adapted into a prize-winning stage play.
He is also the author of the novel Shackling Water, the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights, and A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing, an anthology of original short stories which he co-edited with T Cooper.
An inaugural recipient of the Ford Foundation’s Future Aesthetics Artist Grant, Mansbach is the 2009-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. The founding editor of the pioneering 1990s hip hop journal Elementary, his fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review,New York Times Sunday Magazine, Esquire, GQ, The Times of London, The Believer, N+1, The Los Angeles Times, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Mansbach’s forthcoming projects include a graphic novel, Nature of the Beast, and two novels, Rage is Back (Viking, 2013) and The Dead Run (Morrow, 2013). He lives in Berkeley, California, and is a frequent lecturer on college campuses across the country.
Follow Adam Mansbach on Twitter: @adammansbach
Books Are Great Gifts – 2011 December 5, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in Books Are Great Gifts.add a comment
We’re well into December and everywhere you go you’re barraged with messages about merchandise and services to buy during the holidays. While the commercial aspects of the holidays can wear a person down, there’s a reason behind the message: Giving.
Books make great gifts. Since we began in 2009, LitChat has devoted the month of December to promoting the cause of supporting the literary community–authors, publishers, bookstores–and delighting our friends and relatives with the gift of books.
Each year we have held an auction of books signed and donated by authors. This is a unique book auction, as it takes place entirely through Twitter. All funds go directly to a children’s literacy charity, this year’s beneficiary is Reader to Reader. You can learn more about previous year’s auction here. We are delighted this year to place the books of 17 authors on the Twitter auction block, beginning this Friday, December 9, from 6-11 p.m. ET. You may download a copy of the 2011 BAGG Auction Catalog.
We’ll be talking about holiday books and favorite gift books this week during our moderated chats through #litchat on Twitter on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 4 p.m.
You can show your support for giving books as gifts by adding a Twibbon to your Twitter and/or Facebook profile.
New this year is #litchatpicks2011, a hashtag we’ve generated for you to post your favorite books released in 2011. These don’t have to be the big books, the highbrow award winners, the critically acclaimed books, but your favorite books. The ones you tell all of your friends about. The ones you’ll read again. The ones you’ll give as gifts.
We’ll archive the #litchatpicks2011 feed, but we’ll also glean the top 10 #litchat picks and post the list in January.
Wishing you a festive holiday season.
