Media Monday discussion today follows this piece by author Robin Black in Beyond the Margins: To “To MFA Or Not To MFA, That Is The Question.“

It’s romance week in #litchat. This week’s guest host for our annual romance genre chat is Gayle Callen, who writing as Julia Latham and Emma Cane, has written 18 historical, 6 Medieval, and now a contemporary romance. Her latest novel, A Town Called Valentine, is the first in a new series of small town love stories. Callen grew up reading and soon discovered that she liked to write passionate stories of teenagers in space. Her love of passionate stories has never gone away, contributing to the impressive collection of books she’s published under her three pen names. Now that her three children are grown, Gayle loves spending time crocheting and singing (although not necessarily at the same time), and hiking and snowshoeing alongside her husband Jim and two rambunctious dogs Apollo and Uma. Gayle will participate in the #litchat discussion using her pen name Emma Cane (@EmmaCane).

In A Town Called Valentine, Emily Murphy never thought she’d return to her mom’s rustic hometown in the Colorado Mountains. But after her marriage in San Francisco falls apart, leaving her penniless and heartsick, she returns to her old family home to find a new direction for her life. On her first night back, though, a steamy encounter with handsome rancher Nate Thalberg is not the fresh start she had in mind. Nate has good reason not to trust Emily—he’s no stranger to betrayal. Besides, she’s only there to sell her family’s old property and move back out. But as Nate and Emily begin working side-by-side to restore her time-worn building and old family secrets change Emily’s perception of herself, both are about to learn how difficult it is to hide from love in a place known far and wide for romance, family ties, and happily-ever-afters: a town called Valentine.

Follow Gayle Callen as Emma Cane on Twitter: @EmmaCane.

Joining us on Friday, February 3, is Duncan Jepson, author of All the Flowers of Shanghai. Within this saga of family pride, female empowerment, and sweeping political change, you’ll meet Feng, a meek Chinese girl who transforms into a bitter woman during her arranged marriage into a powerful Shanghai family. Ignorant and voiceless in the household ruled by the authoritarian father and his array of sniping, jealous wives, Feng strikes back against the family in ways unimaginable, which come back to haunt her in later years. Primarily set in the glory days of Shanghai just prior to World War II, the novel barely touches on the war or the Japanese occupation and atrocities, but it does take Feng out of the controlled, yet pampered Shanghai household and into the rough, revolutionary countryside where she experiences control of another kind.

Monday Media discussion in #litchat: The Bookstore’s Last Stand, by @JulieBosman, published in  in @NYTimes.

Duncan Jepson is an award winning filmmaker who has directed and produced two documentary features and is currently finishing his third, A Devil’s Gift. He is a founder and managing editor of the Asia Literary Review and was previously editor of the award winning WestEast Magazine. He has written for the Daily Telegraph, International Herald Tribune and his articles on the Chinese literary scene have been published in the SCMP and Publishing Perspectives.

Jepson is Eurasian, Chinese/English, a corporate lawyer, and has travelled extensively in Asia since the 1980s, studying Mandarin in Beijing in 1987 and returning through the late eighties and early nineties to run a manufacturing business. In 2005, after visiting Kabul, Duncan established a charity, the Society for Children’s Education in Asia, to support the Aschiana Accelerated Girls Learning Centre. He was a director of the Child Welfare Scheme, a charity supporting street kids and young mothers in Nepal. Most recently he established Share, a charity focused on providing opportunities to reduce social inequality among Hong Kong youth.

View the video book trailers of All the Flowers of Shanghai.

Follow Duncan Jepson on Twitter: @DuncanJepson.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.