Plots With Purpose January 16, 2012

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

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

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 on Holiday Break December 19, 2011

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

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.

Necessary Nonfiction April 11, 2011

Holly Tucker

Truth and fact have been at odds for centuries. If humankind had never crossed the bridge from superstition to science, we would still be afraid of falling from the edge of the earth. Curiosity, that passion to understand and prove the unseen, has awarded us with air travel, microwave ovens, heart transplants and the laptop computer on which this article is written. Science paved the way for facts to capitalize the T of Truth,  but writers and journalists pared them down for ordinary people to understand. This week in #litchat we’re discussing the flashlight of truth in nonfiction.

Joining us on Friday, April 15, is historian Holly Tucker, author of Blood Work, A Tale of Murder and Medicine in the Scientific Revolution. It’s the story of blood—particularly, blood transfusion—told through the hindsight of history and the facts we now consider fundamental to medicine. Tucker writes with vivid understanding of that time in humanity’s past when the human body was sacrosanct and the blood became a battleground of religion, politics and science.

Tucker is a multi-discipline scholar with concentrations in French, political science and the history of science and medicine. She earned her Ph.D. at University of Wisconsin at Madison and is an interdisciplinary professor of  French & Italian and at at the Center for Medicine, Health & Society at Vanderbilt University.

Tucker’s recent publications include articles in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, Clinical Genetics, The Modern Language Journal, MLA Approaches to Teaching Literature, as well as books: Pregnant Fictions:  Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France (2003); SLA and the Literature Classroom:  Fostering Dialogues (2001, with V. Scott); and Reframing the Early French Tale, a special issue of Marvel & Tales for which she served as guest editor (2005).

In additional to her scholarly publications, Tucker writes on culture and medicine for the popular press.  Her articles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, The New Scientist and The Wall Street Journal.

She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, daughter and a dog named Lucky Shakespeare.

Follow Holly Tucker on Twitter: @history_geek.

Character: Earth April 4, 2011

Karen Dionne

Earth is more than just a rock spinning around a fiery orb in a cluster of stars scattered though an infinite universe. It’s a character in its own story, and we’ve only scraped the surface of the myths, legends and mysteries buried within the strata of its four billion years. This week in #litchat we’re discussing Earth as a character in literature.

On Friday, April 8, Karen Dionne joins us to wrap up this fascinating topic. Author of the bestselling Freezing Point, Dionne’s latest eco-thriller, Boiling Point, takes readers to the face of a volcano when it wakes from a 9,000-year slumber. Set within the historic reality of the 2008 Chaitén volcano eruption in Northern Patagonia, Chile, Boiling Point features strong characters in a gripping tale of man’s egotism in seeking to subdue the earth. While mysteries roll across the landscape and humans strive to understand the catastrophic effects, the volcano itself becomes a character in this finely wrought eco-thriller.

Detroit native Dionne’s first science thriller, Freezing Point, was nominated by RT Book Reviews as Best First Mystery of 2008. Freezing Point has been published in Germany and the Czech Republic. Her short story, “Calling the Shots,” appears in the anthology First Thrills edited by Lee Child.

Dionne is cofounder, along with Christopher Graham, of the online writers community Backspace, and organizes the Backspace Writers Conferences held in New York City every year. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and the International Thriller Writers, where she serves on the board of directors as Vice President, Technology.

Karen blogs at The Huffington Post, and writes about the publishing industry from an author’s perspective at DailyFinance.

Follow Karen Dionne on Twitter: @KarenDionne.

Sequels & Sagas II March 4, 2011

Frank Delaney

It’s a discussion worth revisiting. A sequel of sorts, extending both a Topic of the Week (May 3-7, 2010) and a continuing conversation with Frank Delaney, a consummate storyteller who first visited #litchat on July 16, 2010.

Delaney’s new novel, The Matchmaker of Kenmare, joins the series of novels he first introduced wiith 2008′s Ireland, a sweeping novel of history, folklore and coming of age. Through the series Delaney becomes a digital-age seanachi—the itinerant storytellers that once roamed Ireland’s countryside in search of food and lodging in exchange for telling a good yarn. Delaney visualized a series of novels to trace Ireland’s history one decade at a time, each novel layered with legend, characters both heroic and horrible, events reflected in myth and borne in reality. The series now includes Tipperary (2008), Shannon (2009), and Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show (2010).

Set during the era which the Irish called the Emergency, and the rest of the world called the Second World War, The Matchmaker of Kenmare features a returning character, the helplessly heroic Ben McCarthy, who narrated Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show. Having moved through the questions, the searching, the grief of his beloved Venetia’s disappearance, Ben takes up with a young female matchmaker on her personal quest to discover the whereabouts of her husband, the American Army officer known as Charles “Killer Miller.”

McCarthy, who makes it known in this novel that he’s writing to his children, never apologizes for what he calls his “digressions,” wherein author Delaney takes readers through mysts of folklore as in the origins of dolphins, the burdens of humpbacks, divining missing people from maps, and dozens of other tales. Delaney does this masterfully as McCarthy goes about the Irish countryside collecting stories for the Irish Folklore Commission. Layered in this tale is more than just the making of a good match, the history of Ireland’s neutral stance during the WWII, but the concept of neutrality between men and women thrown together by circumstances.

Renowned for his gift of language, Delaney’s  work often scrutinizes the very nature of the spoken word (in broadcasts such as Word of Mouth, Say the Word, Omnibus and others.) As well as being a best-selling author of more than 21 books, Delaney has interviewed more than 3,000 writers for his BBC and international television and radio shows (Bookshelf, The Book Show, The Frank Delaney Show) including the great literary names of our time.

A judge of many literary prizes including the famous Booker Prize, Delaney has also made documentaries for the BBC on characters as diverse as Joyce, Shaw, and Wilde.

Delaney was born in Tipperary, Ireland and currently resides in Litchfield County, Conn. and is married to the novelist Diane Meier.

Follow Frank Delaney on Twitter: @FDbytheWord.