This month’s online issue of the British magazine Easy Living features Culture Editor Beatrice Hodgkin’s round-up of “brilliant summer books.” The list includes The Whole Wide Beauty, by Emily Woof, The Day the Falls Stood Still, by Cathy Marie Buchanan, Tell it to the Bees, by Fiona Shaw, The Vice Society, by James McCreet, Love Verb, by Jeams Green, Ties that Bind, by Catherine Deveney, April and Oliver, by Tess Callahan, and The Year of Fog. Thanks, Ms. Hodgkin! The Year of Fog, Michelle Richmond (Orion, £6.99) Dive into this novel with trepidation, for its story is deeply harrowing;...
Monthly Archives: July 2010
You need a chiller
Holy smokes, The Year of Fog headlines The Daily Mail’s list of sizzling summer reads. I’m in swelteringly good company with Ian McEwan’s Solar, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, and Harlan Coben’s Caught. The British edition just came out last week. (In England, No One You Know came first.) It’s fun to see The Year of Fog having a second life in the English language. (Plus, I love the cool blues and startling red of the English cover.)
This one goes out to Sally in Minnesota
Over at Pause, Sally Howell Johnson writes beautifully about her reaction to the boxes of photographs in antique stores, the false sense of beauty or perfection created by digital photography, and a quirky family tradition. But the one thing I cannot bring myself to look at in these stores are the boxes of old photographs. These images of the people’s lives placed in cardboard boxes for total strangers to rifle through disturbs me. I want to buy them all, take them home, fill albums with them. I love coming across blog posts in which a reader has quoted a...
Making it True
E.B. Davis on “Writers Who Kill” weaves two of his recent reading experiences, along with the story of his first published fiction, into an interesting mini-essay about what it means to be an authentic writer. Congratulations to Davis on the publication, and thanks for the nod! I’ve written for years. At first, I hesitated to call myself a writer for fear that my story would be false when I never was published, risking my integrity…I started called myself a writer because believing provides a catalyst to the writing process even though it doesn’t increase publishing probability… Last week I...
A Sister’s Mission
You write a book, it goes out into the world. You have no idea whom it will reach, and when, and how they will react to it. You hope it finds its way into the hands of someone who finds it useful–as entertainment, of course, and, occasionally, as something more substantial than that. It is a matter of luck that a book sometimes finds its way to someone who, due to her own personal circumstances, is able to find some kind of comfort or familiarity in it. So I was humbled and moved to come across a blog post...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
