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.
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.
Three’s A Crowd October 31, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in literary fiction, women's fiction.Tags: Gwendolen Gross
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It begins in grade school, the adage “two’s company, three’s a crowd.” The refrain follows through adolescent rivalry for best friends, into the dating arenas of high school and college, and even into the competitive cubicles and offices of the professional world. It’s a common and fertile theme for artistic exploration, the canon of literature abounding with examples. This week in #litchat we’ll discuss books which feature themes leading to “three’s a crowd.”
This Friday’s guest host in #litchat, Gwendolen Gross, has explored this theme from a fresh and intriguing angle. Her latest novel, The Orphan Sister, is the story of triplet daughters born to a mercurial father and Stepford-like mother. Two of the twins are identical, leaving the odd one out to narrate what it’s like being the third wheel in a perfectly balanced family of pairs. The identicals, Olivia and Odette, given the O names after their polished and perfect mother Octavia, share the secret language of twins and are such mirror images they each follow their father into medicine, one becomes an ob-gyn, the other a pediatrician. They marry at the right time, to the right men, become pregnant within weeks of each other, and give birth to perfect babies. Clementine, the singleton within the triplets, shares a low-voltage intuition with her womb-mates, yet is conflicted with cravings for the intimacy of twinness and the individuality of marching to her own tune.
When the triplets’ father goes missing, leaving only the number of a lawyer behind, the story reveals another thread of odd-man out that threatens to unravel the tight-knit family. Layered between the triplet’s ongoing anxiety over their father’s disappearance, is Clementine’s internal struggle with self-confidence, rivalry with her sisters, hunger for approval from her father, the death of her first true love and why she has problems with love and commitment.
Gwendolen Gross grew up in Newton, Mass. She graduated from Oberlin College, where she studied science writing and voice performance. She spent a semester in Australia with a field studies program, studying spectacled fruit bats in the rainforest remnants of Northern Queensland. After college, she moved to San Francisco, then San Diego, and worked in publishing, as well as performing with the San Diego Opera Chorus. Through the San Diego Writing Center, she was selected for the PEN West Emerging Writers Program. Gross received an M.F.A. in fiction and poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have been published in dozens of literary magazines, and won the 1999 Adrienne Lee Award.
Her first novel, Field Guide, was issued by Henry Holt in April 2001 (Harvest paperback 2002), and her second, Getting Out, in spring 2002. These two women’s adventure fiction novels received critical acclaim. She then shifted her focus to the dramas of motherhood. with her third novel, The Other Mother (Random House, 2007).
An award-winning writing instructor, Gross has led workshops at Sarah Lawrence College and the UCLA Extension online. Gross has worked as a snake and kinkajou demonstrator, naturalist, opera singer, editor, and mom. She lives in northern New Jersey with her family.
Small Press Showcase October 24, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in classics, creative non-fiction, literary fiction, memoir, narrative nonfiction, poetry, small presses.add a comment
It’s that time of year again. Once annually #litchat features a week of discussion led by publishers, editors and authors of independent presses. These are the rebels of publishing, the audacious leaders willing to produce books that the big houses won’t touch for a myriad of reasons. Independent, small presses often operate on a shoestring budget, with more vision than provision. What keeps independent presses rolling in this age of literary plenty? What types of manuscripts are they looking to publish? How do they position themselves between the big houses and the start-ups whose only authors are themselves? Will Amazon’s new publishing empire affect legitimate small presses? These questions and others will come up this week during Small Press Showcase.
Monday, October 24: Engine Books
Victoria Barrett, publisher/editor
Established in January of this year by Victoria Barrett, Engine Books is a boutique fiction press publishing novels, short story collections, collected novellas, and related volumes. Barrett is a writer, editor, and professor whose fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, You Must Be This Tall to Ride, and Confrontation. Her career as an editor began at Puerto del Sol, where editor Kevin McIlvoy called her “the most significant managing editor” in the journal’s history. Her work there trained her to read fiction submissions on their own terms, rather than see them through the lens of her own aesthetic preferences.
This work continues at Freight Stories, where she and co-editor Andrew Scott have published the work of finalists for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, bestsellers, and long-seasoned authors alongside emerging authors, some of whom saw in Freight Stories their first publication. The wide variety of styles and forms published in FS speak to Barrett’s enthusiasm for all kinds of fiction.
Engine Books seeks to publish four titles each year, ensuring full attention to the editing, production, and promotion of each title.
Follow Engine Books on Twitter: @enginebooks.
Wednesday, October 26: Press 53
Valerie Nieman, author
Kevin Watson, editor/publisher
Press 53 is an independent publisher of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that was founded in October 2005 by Kevin Morgan Watson, who serves as Fiction & Poetry Editor; Tom Lombardo is Poetry Series Editor (Tom Lombardo Poetry Selections); Robin Miura is Novel/Memoir Editor (Robin Miura Novel and Memoir Selections); and Sarah Elizabeth Younger, who serves as eBook editor.
Press 53 is located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the Community Arts Cafe building at Fourth & Spruce. They publish full-length books by established writers. In addition to finding and showcasing new writers in our Press 53 Open Awards Anthology, and established writers in our short story and poetry collections, novels, and creative nonfiction books, we also have a fondness for bringing back great books that are out of print, which we re-issue under our Press 53 Classics imprint.
Follow Press 53 on Twitter: @Press53.
Kevin Morgan Watson is founder of Press 53 and serves as editor in chief with a special focus on short stories and poetry. As a publisher, he has worked with writers ranging from first-time published authors to winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. As a writer, his short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the 2002 TallGrass Writers Guild/Outrider Press anthology Take Two—They’re Small, where his short story “Sunny Side Up” won first prize. Kevin also serves as an advisor for student adaptation of short stories to screenplays with the screenwriting faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking in Winston-Salem, NC.
Follow Kevin Watson on Twitter: @Press53.
Valerie Nieman, author of Blood Clay has also published a collection of short stories, Fidelities, from West Virginia University Press, and a poetry collection, Wake Wake Wake. She has received an NEA creative writing fellowship, two Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes in fiction, and the Greg Grummer Prize in poetry. A native of Western New York State, she graduated from West Virginia University and the M.F.A. program at Queens University of Charlotte. She teaches writing at N.C. A&T State University and is the poetry editor for Prime Number Magazine.
Follow Valerie Nieman on Twitter: @ValNieman.
Friday, October 28: The Overlook Press
Frances Hill, author
The Overlook Press is an independent general-interest publisher, founded in 1971. The publishing program consists of nearly 100 new books per year, evenly divided between hardcovers and trade paperbacks. The list is eclectic, but areas of strength include interesting fiction, history, biography, drama, and design.
The house was launched by owner Peter Mayer as a home for distinguished books that had been ”overlooked” by larger houses. At the time Mayer was at the helm of one of them, Avon, and would go on to a twenty-year tenure at Penguin, which he eventually headed as well. He joined with his father Alfred, a retired glove manufacturer, to nurture Overlook Press, supervising business from Manhattan in his off hours, while Fredy ran the upstate operation, picturesquely housed in an old apple shed on Overlook Mountain in Woodstock.
Another cherished mission is to revive and bring to new audiences classic books and authors. We are renowned for our stylish editions of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, as well as bringing back the beloved Freddy the Pig series by Walter R. Brooks. In addition, they have just completed new paperback editions of fiction by Joseph Roth, one of literature’s modern masters. In 2002 the Overlook Press acquired Ardis, the premier publisher of Russian literature in English. More recently the Overlook elephant has spread its wings across the Atlantic to take under new ownership the 106-year-old company Duckworth.
Follow the Overlook Press on Twitter: @overlookpress.
Author of Outlook Press’s recently published novel Deliverance from Evil, Frances Hill was born in London in 1943 and went to Keele University, Staffordshire, where she obtained a BA Honours degree in English Literature and Philosophy. For many years she was the radio critic for the TES as well as a fiction reviewer and obituary writer for The Times and feature writer for many other publications including The Times Higher Education Supplement, The Guardian and The Spectator. Her first novel, Out of Bounds, was published by John Murray in 1985 and was followed by a second novel, A Fatal Delusion (John Murray), in 1989. In 1992 she began work on her acclaimed account of the Salem witch trials, A Delusion of Satan, which was published by Doubleday in New York in 1995 and Hamish Hamilton in London in 1996. A new edition with a new preface appeared in 2002. Her second book on the Salem witch trials, The Salem Witch Trials Reader, was published by da Capo in 2000 and her third book on the same subject, Hunting for Witches, A Visitor’s Guide to the Salem Witch Trials, was published by Commonwealth Editions in 2002. Such Men Are Dangerous, The Fanatics of 1692 and 2004 was published by Upper Access in March 2004. Frances Hill lives in London but visits the U.S. regularly, spending every summer in Connecticut.
Addiction in Fiction October 3, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in African-American literature, bestsellers, literary fiction.Tags: Martha Southgate
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Addition is enslavement to something that exerts such power over a person, he/she loses the ability to resist. Alcohol and narcotics—whether legal or not—ensnare a person physiologically, yet addiction to habits, practices or even people can also smite a person to the point of despair, depression, death. This week in #litchat we’re discussing novels featuring the diverse forms of addition.
Joining us on Friday, October 7, is novelist Martha Southgate, whose fourth novel, The Taste of Salt, was released by Algonquin on September 13. Josie Henderson is an anomaly to everyone around her, even to herself. 
From her earliest memories, Josie is drawn to the ocean and marine life. When she becomes a marine biologist, she’s among a small number of females in the profession. Add that she’s black, and the numbers descend to one. Through Josie’s eyes we meet her parents, her mother from the educated middle class, and her father, an autoworker who reads widely and tinkers at novel-writing. Alcohol rears its scaly head in the life of the father, whose novel-writing aspirations turn to vapor in the grip of the beast. A younger brother, Tick, endears and then tears the hearts out of each character as the novel progresses through the cycles of addiction. With visits back and forth in Josie’s past, we see her as the strong one determined to make her own way in a white, male-dominated profession, while addiction of another kind ripples the placid surface of the life she’s worked so hard to maintain.
Martha Southgate is the author of four novels. Her previous novel, Third Girl from the Left, won the Best Novel of the Year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was shortlisted for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy award. Her novel The Fall of Rome received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her July 2007 essay from the New York Times Book Review, “Writers Like Me” received considerable notice and appears in the anthology Best African-American Essays 2009. Previous non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine,O, Premiere, and Essence.
Follow Martha Southgate on Twitter: @mesouthgate.
Breaking Away July 4, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in bestsellers, Latino literature, literary fiction.Tags: bestsellers, Latino literature, literary fiction, multi-cultural fiction
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Jon Michaud
“Going separate ways isn’t a sign that two people didn’t understand one another, but an indication that they had begun to.” This anonymous quote says more about break-ups and divorces in one sentence than many books do in all of the pages between their covers. People come together and drift apart. They burn like meteors for a time, only to fizzle out when their passion hits the atmosphere of reality. Real life often gets in the way of love. If it was ever love at all. This week in #litchat we’re discussing books that feature break-ups and the questions, consequences and casualties that follow.
Joining us on Friday, July 8, is Jon Michaud, whose debut novel, When Tito Loved Clara, was named among this year’s Tantalizing Summer Reads from O magazine. When Tito Loved Clara is about breaking up, breaking away, and breaking through everything from first love, expectations of family and the cultural ceilings of immigrant life in America. Clara and Tito were raised blocks apart in northern Manhattan’s Inwood, a neighborhood known for its large Dominican population. Tito and Clara live a Romeo and Juliet existence as high school lovers whose warring families were once like blood. The comparison ends here. Abused and neglected as a child, Clara uses education to break away from the dysfunction she sees everywhere she looks. Tito is a boyish dreamer too content with his cushy existence in the bosom of family to see a reason for achievement. Where Shakespeare’s young lovers choose death over separation, the couple that is Michaud’s Tito and Clara dissolves when the consequences of young love threaten Clara’s plan of escape. Years later, Tito still carries a torch for Clara and fantasizes about life with her, while Clara carries the burden of guilt from her hard decisions. A cast of mostly endearing, yet quirky characters, absorb some of the angst from Tito and Clara with secrets and consequences of their own.
Jon Michaud was born in Washington, D.C. in 1967. The son of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, he grew up in Tehran, Iran, Bombay, India, Bethesda, Maryland, and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Jon was educated at the Methodist College, Belfast and at the University of East Anglia. He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Michaud is the head librarian at The New Yorker magazine. Before becoming a librarian, Michaud worked as a passport courier, a bookseller, and a bakery assistant. As a librarian, he has also been employed by Time Inc. and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. His writing has been published in Iron, North American Review, South Dakota Review, Denver Quarterly, Fawlt, and other periodicals. He writes regularly for the Back Issues and Book Bench blogs on newyorker.com. Michaud lives in Maplewood, New Jersey with his wife and their two sons. He is at work on his next novel.
Follow Jon Michaud on Twitter: @JonMichaud.
Note: There will not be a moderated #litchat on Monday, July 4th, as we take the day off to celebrate American Independence Day.
Taking the E-Road: Publishing Direct to E-Book June 20, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in commercial fiction, e-books, fantasy, fiction, literary fiction, self-published authors, self-publishing.Tags: e-books, fantasy, literary fiction
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Last March bestselling author Barry Eisler made publishing headlines when he announced his new novel would circumvent traditional publishing and go direct to market as an e-book. The writing was on the wall long before Eisler came public with his choice. Nearly two years earlier author J.A. Konrath had already cleared obstacles barring the successful promotion and sales of fiction through self-publishing to e-book. Shortly after Eisler’s announcement, Huffington Post published this insightful conversation between the two authors, which went on to become a live discussion continuing today through Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog. How will such defections of bestselling authors affect the publishing industry at large? Last week PBS Media Shift addressed this issue with this report on literary agents acting as self-publishing consultants. The publishing paradigm is shifting so quickly now, the image is blurred.
This week in #litchat we’ll discuss the trend of authors–both known and unknown–to go direct to e-book. We’ll feature three authors who have taken their careers into their own hands and boldly gone where Konrath and Eisler have already been. These authors, however, aren’t bestellers. Yet. Each of them have already achieved success within e-pub rankings and are forging new paths for other yet-unpublished authors to follow.
Monday: Georganna Hancock
Georganna Hancock shares the inside tips on how to whip a manuscript into shape for successful e-book formatting, promotion and sales. Hancock’s rich experience as an editor is the focal point for this discussion, as she emphasizes the importance of professional editing for content, grammar and style that is often skipped by self-publishing authors. She’ll also share insights on how to set-up an Amazon account for direct-to-Kindle publishing, how to format your manuscript for the best e-book results, as well as promotional and marketing tips for sales. Hancock holds a Master’s Degree from Northwestern University and now works as an independent editor and publishing consultant.
Follow Georganna Hancock on Twitter: @GLHancock.
Wednesday: Eileen Cruz Coleman
Eileen Cruz Coleman has published two novels direct to e-book. Her first novel, Sweetwater American, was released on Kindle in February 2010. Excerpts from Sweetwater American have been published in short story form in The Saint Ann’s Review, Bathtub Gin, Thought Magazine, Rosebud Magazine, Sundry: A Journal of the Arts, In Posse Review, Small Spiral Notebook, and Slow Trains Magazine. Excerpts from Sweetwater American have also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won third place in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. At this writing, her latest novel, Rumpel, is holding the number 2 position at Amazon Kindle’s Horror/Ghosts category. Rumpel is a literary retelling of the Brothers Grimm classic, Rumpelstiltskin, peopled with sinister spooks and textured with dark swaths of chicanery. Cruz Coleman was born in Washington, D.C. and is a graduate of the University of Maryland with a degree in European History. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two children.
Follow Eileen Cruz Coleman on Twitter: @EileenCruzColeman.
Friday: Billie Hinton
Billie Hinton began her own publishing company, November Hill Press, in the summer of 2010, launching her first title, Claire-Obscure, a literary fiction masterpiece. In the year that has followed, she has published two more literary fiction titles, The Meaning of Isolated Objects (December 2010) and Signs That May Be Omens (March 2011, continuation in the Claire Quartet). In February 2011, she published the first in her middle grade Magical Pony School series, Jane’s Transformation. These titles have been shaped through the years by Hinton’s magical literary touch and now come to readers through Kindle and Smashwords. Her writing has been praised by bestselling authors, critics and other publishing pundits, both in traditional and transitional fields. Hinton, a psychotherapist by vocation, also leads writing retreats designed to unleash the creativity and empower writers to project completion. She lives on a small horse farm in North Carolina with her husband, two teenagers, three horses, a painted pony, five felines, and two Corgis.
Follow Billie Hinton on Twitter: @billiehinton.
Literary Gems May 30, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in literary fiction.Tags: literary gems, small presses
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Michael Kimball
Some novels you read feverishly, intending to go back and read the skimmed parts after you’ve reached the climax. Then you read the last page and realize, the book was all about the climax and now that you know what happens, there’s nothing in the previous words worth going back for. You’ve read the book, you know the outcome, and you’ll never read the book again. That’s fiction.
Literature is another matter. The story may be engrossing, the characters intriguing, but the manner in which the story is told seduces your senses. Each word is a caress, each sentence follows the other in a foreplay of revelation that must not be rushed. When you get to the end, you close the book and place it on your shelf of favorites to be savored again. That’s literature.
This week in #litchat we’re discussing Literary Gems—those books often overlooked by large publishers and marketing machines, yet praised by literary critics and loved by discerning readers. Joining us on Friday, June 3, is Michael Kimball, author of several critically acclaimed novels. Kimball’s most recent novel, Us, takes readers into the last days of a care-worn marriage nuanced with the unfashionable love of a bygone era. The brutal honesty of an elderly man coming to grip with the sickness and then death of a beloved wife reads like a voyeuristic documentary and yet each scene captures the profound sense of loss this man faces with each breath he endures. Interlaced into this fictional account of the author’s grandparent’s last days is Kimball’s personal revelations about death and dying and what it means to be the remaining boot in a pair that once walked side by side with strength and dignity.
At once fiction and memoir, Us blends the two devices seamlessly. An author unafraid of experimentation, Kimball is the author of four books, including Dear Everybody (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”). His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, and New York Tyrant. His books have been translated into a dozen languages—including Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Greek. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), a couple of documentaries, the 510 Readings, and the conceptual pseudonym Andy Devine.
Follow Michael Kimball on Twitter: @michaelkimball.
Lit Kids: Memorable Children in Mainstream Fiction May 22, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in bestsellers, commercial fiction, literary fiction.add a comment
Caroline Leavitt
Charles Dickens was a master of reflecting both the light and dark sides of culture, yet his books featuring children as characters are among the most beloved novels of all time. Mark Twain made life on the Mississippi in a bygone era believable through two precocious boys. To Kill a Mockingbird wouldn’t have the same brilliance had it been written from the perspective of Scout’s father, rather than through the eyes of a feisty grade-school girl. These, along with many other contemporary novels, feature memorable children as protagonists in stories larger than life. This is our topic of the week for May 23-27.
Joining us to talk about writing memorable children on Friday, May 27, is Caroline Leavitt, author of nine notable novels, including the recent NY Times Bestseller, Pictures of You. In Pictures of You, two runaway women collide on a foggy Cape Cod highway; one of them lives, the other one perishes. Nothing bound the two women before the accident, yet afterwards they become entwined in the life of one little boy, the precious Sam who loses his mother in the tragedy. This beguiling story is wrought with restraint, the story unfolding through a fog of realism that resists predictability, lifting to a bittersweet ending. Pictures of You, features a child so perfect and yet so damaged, you want to reach through the pages and pull him to your heart.
In addition to writing fiction, Leavitt is a book critic for The Boston Globe and People. She won a 2005 honorable mention, Goldenberg Prize for Fiction from the Bellevue Literary Review, for “Breathe,” a portion of Pictures of You. Leavitt has been a judge in both the Writers’ Voice Fiction Awards in New York City and the Midatlantic Arts Grants in Fiction. She is an award-winning senior instructor at UCLA Writers Program online, where she teaches “Writing The Novel” online, and she also mentors privately.
Leavitt’s essays, stories and articles have appeared in Salon, Psychology Today, New York Magazine, Parenting, The Chicago Tribune, Parents, Redbook, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and numerous anthologies. She has appeared on The Today Show, Diane Rehm, German and Canadian TV, and more, and she has been featured on The View From The Bay. Leavitt lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, New York City’s unofficial sixth borough, with her husband, the writer Jeff Tamarkin, and their teenage son Max.
Follow Caroline Leavitt on Twitter: @leavittnovelist.
Cult Classics April 25, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in commercial fiction, literary fiction.Tags: metafiction
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Timothy Schaffert
Some classics are like precocious children not appreciated within the culture of their birth. Other classics are instantaneous sensations lauded by critics, applauded by masses and forever assigned by academics. And then there are the others. Novels seared by the hot tines of satire, pop commentary, or political machination. Novels that peel down the skin of humanity and fry it on the griddle of public opinion. Novels that wag warning fingers or stick metaphorical tongues out at the very readers who turn pages in literary arousal. These latter novels become the cult classics that we’ll discuss this week in #litchat.
Guest host on Friday, April 29 is Timothy Schaffert, author of The Coffins of Little Hope (Unbridled Books). Stroked with ambitious swaths of color in character, setting and story, The Coffins of Little Hope pokes fun at everything our jaded society finds most compelling, beginning with the disappearance of a child; the over-analytical, microscopic scrutiny into the lives of authors and the books they produce; the fascination with dysfunction of the gritty kind; and the all-consuming desire to know the ending. Schaffert accomplishes all of this within a story told from the perspective of a small-town octogenarian, who shapes the story from her experience as the local paper’s obituary writer. 
With characters endearing in the faults that shape their mystery and set within a contemporary calendar, the story contrasts the honorable rural america of a bygone era with the media-frenzied public fueled by pop culture and the extreme. Add to this slim volume a book within a book, authors within the author, and you have a cult classic in the making with The Coffins of Little Hope. (You can read the insightful NY Times review, or visit the meta-fictional “Rothgutt’s Asylum for Misguided Girls,” where the “Miranda and Desiree” books within the book are set.)
Timothy Schaffert grew up on a farm in Nebraska and currently lives in Omaha. His short fiction has been published in several literary journals and he’s won numerous awards, including the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award and the Nebraska Book Award. He is the author of four critically-acclaimed novels: The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God, Devils in the Sugar Shop, and most recently The Coffins of Little Hope.
Follow Timothy on Twitter: @timschaffert.
