10182 results were found.

Children’s Book Roundup: May 2020

For lots of us, it’s now month three (or is it 30?) of sheltering in place. If you’re quarantining with kids, you might feel especially claustrophobic right now, as this Memorial Day Weekend brings with it no travel, no opening-day trips to the pool, and no cookouts with friends. But…

Norman Mailer & Me

There are two types of writers: Norman Mailer and me. Writers (and people in general) who fall into Mailer's camp are proud owners of a confidence that knows no bounds. Their Field of Dreams, “If I write it, they will publish” mantra is in direct opposition to the chant coming…

The Good Listener

Gisèle Lewis is a woman of many talents. She is a mom of two girls; a writer of short stories, poetry, Regency romance fan fiction, and book reviews; and an advocate and volunteer for immigrants. She’s also a magician, having figured out how to get more than 24 hours from…

Grief, Grace, and Anger

Grief is a perennial subject for poets, and for good reason: In making art out of our losses, we not only memorialize our dead but can, with luck and skill, sing or speak our way into healing. Four new collections by women poets all revolve, in one way or another,…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with the Honorable Debra H. Goldstein

Retired federal judge Debra H. Goldstein transitioned from the bench to the writing desk in 2012 with the publication of her debut novel, Maze in Blue. She may be better known, however, for her Sarah Blair cozy mystery series, which launched with One Taste Too Many. Today, Goldstein discusses the…

Kissinger’s World

A beneficiary of his own theory, Harry Truman once observed that historians should wait 50 years “for the dust to settle” before making final assessments. Sounds reasonable. It’s now been over 43 years since Henry Kissinger stepped down as Gerald Ford’s secretary of state and, thus, close enough in time…

Murder, She Watched

Confession: During this pandemic, I’ve been watching a lot of “Murder, She Wrote.” Obsessively, in fact. Early on in the stay-at-home order, my husband and I discovered the show was streaming on Amazon Prime, and we took to watching an episode each night. I got hooked! The charming settings, a…

A Sisterhood of Saviors

In 1987, Jason DeParle was a young reporter interested in the life of the global poor when he rented floorspace in the shanty home of Tita Comodas, a 40-year-old mother of five who lived in a Manila slum called Leveriza. DeParle remained friends with the family for the next 30…

Picture? Perfect!

Before I was rudely interrupted by a plague, I had promised to reveal whether some of the following actually happened to me and appeared in my fiction. To recap, in abbreviated form: The Poison Pen: A man is outraged because the poison-pen letter his wife receives doesn’t accuse him of…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Michael Farris Smith

With three highly praised novels — Rivers, Desperation Road, and The Fighter — already under his belt, Mississippi author Michael Farris Smith is back with Blackwood, which Kirkus calls “unsettling, heartbreaking, and frequently astonishing…this Southern gothic never runs out of revelations…Such is the power of Smith's pitch-black poetic vision that…

Inexplicably Erased

When a movie or television series tells the story of a real-life person or an historical event, it can often leave hurt feelings in its wake. Plotlines may be simplified, important characters written out, or fictional composites written in, all because of the need to tell a compelling story in…

Stretching the Table

“A late frost has frozen out all the love songs.” –Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) Over a decade ago, I wrote a short story from a husband’s perspective, exploring whether there was space for two fully realized ambitions in a marriage as you also raise children. “How Does One Make a Woman…

A Patriotic Pick: May 2020

Whether it’s via their tone, topic, or tenor, certain works just say “America.” Here is one such title, suggested by L.M. Elliott, winner of 2018’s Grateful American™ Book Prize for Suspect Red: Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick. The fraught…

Soothing Stories

It’s week six of Staying Home and of the online book club I’ve been hosting for my 9-year-old grandniece and her friends, who live 400 miles north. Our 3 o’clock sessions are the highlight of my socially distant day. Just before the shutdown, I ran several blocks to take curbside…

Community Spread

When Alex Segura, equal parts wonderful writer and supportive voice in the crime fiction community, held the first Virtual Noir at the Bar (an evening of short readings by established writers) on behalf of Kew and Willow Books in New York, we were all only a couple of weeks into…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Alexander Weinstein

An associate professor at Siena Heights University in Adrian, MI, and director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Alexander Weinstein is also the author of two story collections, Children of the New World, published in 2016, and Universal Love, released this past January. Publishers Weekly calls the latter…

7 Most-Favorable Reviews in April 2020

The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren (Vintage). Reviewed by Gretchen Lida. “We might combat climate crises by leaving copies of Hope Jahren’s The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from…

It’s #GivingTuesdayNow

Whether you’re a reader or a writer, you’re part of the Independent community. So this Giving Tuesday — which arrives amid an unprecedented period of personal anxiety and financial uncertainty for us all — please help us continue publishing the quality reviews, features, and podcasts you’ve come to expect! Making…

5 Most Popular Posts: April 2020

“Apocalyptic Reads to Help You Embrace the Nightmare.” Ready to surrender? These disturbing stories go perfectly with our scary new normal! “Sobering Nonfiction to Put the Pandemic in Perspective.” Feeling overwhelmed? Let these real-life stories remind you of how much we can endure! “Rejected!” by Lawrence De Maria. “Jack London…

The Nantucket Book Festival Goes Virtual!

In light of the covid-19 crisis, the Nantucket Book Festival will transition its 2020 event to a virtual format. Our traditional multi-venue presentations in downtown Nantucket will be foregone. In their place, the Nantucket Book Foundation, producer of the festival, and its executive director, Maddie Hjulstrom, are strategizing ways to…

Reluctant Assassins

In the opening chapter of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a cyclone whirls madly toward Dorothy’s house. As it nears, her little dog, Toto, jumps from her arms and cowers beneath a bed. Dorothy goes after him without hesitation and, in so doing, loses her last chance for shelter. By…

Romance Roundup: May 2020

May has always been my favorite month. It’s not only my birthday month, it’s also that magical time when everything in the garden is in bloom. This month, like so many people, I’m spending most of my time at home — working, homeschooling, and, inexplicably, baking a lot of bread.…

All Together Now

One of the things we’ve learned during the pandemic is that social distance doesn’t have to mean isolation. We’ve found solidarity in knowing that, all around the world, we are facing the same challenges and finding new ways to connect with loved ones. During conversations with far-flung friends via email,…

A Socially Distanced Debut

As the literary community struggles in the wake of covid-19, the anthology series from DC Women Writers, “Grace and Gravity,” is powering through. The newest edition, Furious Gravity, is the collection’s ninth, and the second edited by Melissa Scholes Young, an author and American University professor. With the book set…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Andy Davidson

Andy Davidson’s debut novel, In the Valley of the Sun, was nominated for multiple awards, including the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. The author’s sophomore outing, The Boatman’s Daughter, released this February, is another hair-raising, supernatural tale that reviewer Daniel Weaver called “a frightening,…

An Interview with Laura Zam

When you write a memoir, people often tell you that you're brave — to be so vulnerable, to expose yourself (metaphorically, of course) so deeply, to appear neurotic, needy, or just plain unlikable. Laura Zam takes this fearlessness to Medal of Courage levels in her new book, The Pleasure Plan.…

Hashtag Hist-Fic

There’s something ironic about the hyper-fast, catch-this-latest-meme platform of Twitter being used to talk about the long-dead past. But bringing historical fiction to the freeform conversations on Twitter is exactly what two writers have done by creating a hashtag that’s more than just a string of words. Janna Noelle and…

Democracy Dies in Darkness

I teach students from all over the world, ages 18-21. The subject is English composition, particularly the academic essay, but the class is about organizing your thinking and socializing your ideas. Critical thinking, rhetorical analysis, proper attribution, and REASONING are the means, the tools, for individuals to discipline their minds…

The Literary Hill BookFest Goes Virtual

Will book lovers and literary types attend a “virtual” festival? That’s the question plaguing everyone involved with the annual Literary Hill BookFest. In years past, a plethora of authors who live on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, have participated in the free, daylong celebration of books at Eastern Market. They’ve…

A Delicious Distraction

James Harden’s step-back three-pointer is his bread-and-butter shot, and it’s made him the NBA’s number-one scorer. He shoots it often and, most of the time, good things happen when he does. He has other talents on the court — drawing fouls, sinking over 85 percent of his free throws, finding…

Odd Couples

One of my favorite things to do during quarantine is to imagine different fictional media going on “dates” with each other. If an animated show and literary novel both swiped right, what sort of bond would they form? What gossip would they share? Would it be a one-night stand or…

Bedtime Stories: April 2020

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai: The Vietnamese poet Phùng Quán once wrote, “Có những phút ngã lòng/ Tôi vịn câu thơ và đứng dậy” (“During the moments of despair, I hold the poetry verse to pull myself up”). During this traumatic time of the coronavirus pandemic, books — both poetry and…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Sonia Purnell

London-based journalist and author Sonia Purnell has written several books, including Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill and Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition. Her latest work is A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, which reviewer…

Exquisitely Evocative

A prevalent theme in Marjorie Agosín’s work is memory and oblivion. Many of her poems celebrate fast-disappearing Jewish customs or Jewish communities decimated by exile or war. In Braided Memories/Memorias Trenzadas, she memorializes her great-grandmother Helena by retracing Helena’s steps from a vibrant European capital suddenly turned hostile to a…

You Liked THAT Book?

In the 1980s and early 1990s, I read two book reviews in New York magazine that were so vicious, so cruel, so entirely eviscerating of the novels they were assessing that I remember them to this day with a sympathetic wince for the authors. One was Heartburn by Nora Ephron.…

An Interview with Sue Eisenfeld

Before setting out to explore the small towns where Jewish people once lived and thrived, Sue Eisenfeld never really thought about her tribesmen from the South. A Northern Virginian (by way of Philadelphia) and a Civil War buff, she was nonetheless surprised to discover a Confederate soldier section in a…

Sobering Nonfiction to Put the Pandemic in Perspective

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “In case this pandemic thing has skewed your perspective, the good people of the United States also have another fight on their hands — to see totalitarianism for what it is, and then galvanize, like Solzhenitsyn, with righteous anger against governmental abuse of power.”…

Electric Company

One of the reasons I joined Instagram almost five years ago was the lack of people in my life willing to discuss — or listen to me rant on and on about — books. I’d already exhausted friends and family with overbearing, detective-like questions about the books they may or…

Binge-Reading for a Lockdown

The coronavirus lockdown has brought a cornucopia of lists for binge-watching on TV and a fair number of lists for books to read. Many of the book lists are worthy — perhaps too worthy for the distracted state we find ourselves in. My own solution is binge-reading mystery series set…

The Famous Book She Never Wrote

“She was the patron saint of all outsiders.” – André Gide Simone Weil (1909-1943): the name has drawn worldwide attention. Her words and works prompt everything from reverence to reflection to refutation. The voluminous writings of this controversial French philosopher, nonconformist teacher, activist, factory and farm worker, onetime pacifist, Resistance…

Capturing the Lateness of the World

During this global pandemic, many have noticed that the air seems clearer, the birdsong louder, the colors more vibrant. It’s as if nature is saying it will thrive in spite of our darkest struggles. It’s an apt metaphor, I think, for the poetry of Carolyn Forché. The title of her…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Ted Widmer

Professor and historian Ted Widmer has multiple books to his name, including Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City, Brown: The History of an Idea, and Martin Van Buren. His latest work is Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, which Douglas Brinkley calls “an impressively…

Mend the Gap

There’s a dirty secret about writing history: Most of history is silence, which can make the job of writing nonfiction history pretty challenging. That silence, however, also paves the road to historical fiction. At least, it did for me. I was researching a book on the impeachment of President Andrew…

9 Middle-Grade Books to Brighten Your Quarantined Spirit

From the outside of our small brick house, it looks like our family is confined to our cramped berths. But from the inside? Children’s books are taking us across known and unknown worlds. Most mornings, our elementary-school-aged daughter scampers down to the living room to curl up with a book…

The Silent Justice’s Deafening Opinions

Clarence Thomas, the longest-sitting justice on the current Supreme Court, is referred to as the silent one because he hardly speaks during oral arguments. Instead, he sits quietly in his black robe and listens to his colleagues joust with the lawyers presenting their cases to the high court. Rarely, if…

An Indie Endures: Bards Alley

At Bards Alley in Vienna, VA, we’re offering curbside pickup for phone and online orders. We are also promoting Libro.fm and Bookshop. We have a very active social-media coordinator, Leah Grover, who has been keeping up virtual interaction with customers with conversation starters about favorite books and getting people to…

Culture, Canceled.

In our new “virus time,” when every day contains a week, March 6th feels as though it was a decade ago, instead of just a month. It’s hard to even remember back that far. I remember it because, although the window for anxiety-free interstate travel was already starting to close,…

Pieces of the Whole

I’ve always had a particular taste for poems in extended sequences. Maybe it’s the combination of ambition and imaginative energy they require of the writer; perhaps it is memories of my late father reciting tantalizing bits of Eliot’s Four Quartets from memory. I do know that whether narrative or discursive,…

Alone. Together.

Nothing is immune from covid-19. Every aspect of our lives has been turned upside down. Bookselling is no exception. Indie bookstores have canceled events, laid off staff, and shuttered their doors. The owners are willing to be draped in protective garb and stand on the curb to hand books to…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Candacy Taylor

Already the author of Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress and Route 66 Road Trip, documentarian Candacy Taylor is back with Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America. Her new work is the companion publication to “The Negro Motorists' Green Book and American…

Noir at the Bar Goes Virtual

This Friday, April 10th, at 8 p.m., we're offering readers a chance to connect with the writers and work they love during a free virtual Noir at the Bar. Eight writers will read from their work — via Crowdcast — all to benefit beloved Northern Virginia institution One More Page…

A President’s Pivotal Journey

As the coronavirus drives the country toward a combined health and economic breaking point, those reviewing American history in search of an equally devastating time can look back eight score years and find it. Upon Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in November 1860, the nation moved so far past its…

6 Memoirs to Watch For

Whether they’re about family, loss, social justice, politics, or even rock ‘n’ roll, memoirs appeal to a lot of us. Here are some soon-to-be-released noteworthy ones written by a diverse group of authors sharing equally diverse experiences. Betsey: A Memoir by Betsey Johnson (Viking, April 7th). Fans know Johnson as…

Sharing Stories

Before the covid-19 hammer came down on eating out, my husband, Karl, son, Leo, and I were having dinner at a local burger joint. When Karl got up to order for us, I noticed a woman a few tables over, looking like the saddest person I had ever seen. As…

7 Most-Favorable Reviews in March 2020

The Night Watchman: A Novel by Louise Erdrich (Harper). Reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell. “Through the eyes of diverse members of the community at this critical moment — a moment which illustrates and threatens to exacerbate past exploitation — Erdrich crafts another volume in her chronicle of the extended family…

Romance Roundup: April 2020

A lot has changed in a month, hasn’t it? The world is experiencing a pandemic, and everything feels a little surreal and scary right now. I’ve always felt like reading is an essential part of maintaining my mental health, and now more than ever, I need books to see me…

Care to Speak, Authors?

Can you spare 10 minutes to inspire teen authors? You won’t even have to leave your cozy writing nook to do it! Writers Bloc is looking for published authors to (virtually) share their thoughts on creative writing with a group of up to 15 young people. “We’ve been meeting every-other…

Mystery and Misogyny

In A Trace of Deceit, author Karen Odden paints a vivid picture of 19th-century England, the world of art auction houses, and a woman refusing the constraints of society. Annabel Rowe is one of the few female painters studying at the Slade School. Her talent is evident but not as…

5 Most Popular Posts: March 2020

“Conversations with Myself” by Leeya Mehta. “So many images come to mind these days. For me, the ones that repeat are of leaders building social movements while in almost complete isolation. On June 12, 1964, Nelson Mandela and seven others accused of conspiring to overthrow the South African apartheid state…

An Indie Endures: Curious Iguana

Curious Iguana in Frederick, MD, offers local delivery (within 10 miles of our store) and shipping. Books purchased from Bookshop and audiobooks purchased from libro.fm benefit Curious Iguana, too. Newly released books for adults and kids are being added to their website daily. Their latest creation is Curious Care Packages,…

Apocalyptic Reads to Help You Embrace the Nightmare

The Plague by Albert Camus. “All pandemic and plague literature begins and ends with this one. When rats start to die in the streets of Oran, few seem to take note. But then people start to get sick, and all the populace can do is watch and wait. Camus captures…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Maria Kuznetsova

A writing instructor at Auburn University in Alabama, Ukrainian-born Maria Kuznetsova is also author of the novel Oksana, Behave! Says Publishers Weekly, “Kuznetsova’s standout debut offers a fresh and funny look into the life of a bold young immigrant woman…This accomplished and frank work is a new take on an…

The Indie Advocate

Nearly 10 years ago, working as a bookseller at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, Anna Thorn became persuaded that she needed to prepare herself for “a real job.” So she acquired a graduate degree in public health, reasoning that it would allow her to help people while indulging her…

Scenes from #QuarantineLife

In 2016, as part of a New Year’s resolution, I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace at the rate of one chapter a day. Some of those chapters I read aloud at bedtime to our son, Dash, who was 4 at the time — a clever plan, I thought, to lull…

A Patriotic Pick: March 2020

Whether it’s via their tone, topic, or tenor, certain works just say “America.” Here is one such title, suggested by Chris Stevenson, winner of 2016’s Grateful American™ Book Prize for The Drum of Destiny: 1776 by David McCullough. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian McCullough so skillfully captures the drama, chaos, and uncertainty…

An Indie Endures: One More Page Books

One More Page Books is taking orders online and via phone for curbside pickup, local delivery, and mail shipment. Delivery is free for orders over $30, and is $5 for orders under that minimum. They are delivering to many parts of N. Arlington, Falls Church, and McLean, Virginia. Their website…

Journals from Our Plague Year

Wow. It’s amazing how events can overtake us. I promised in my last column to continue my “truth is stranger than fiction” ruminations, detailing scenes in some of my thrillers and asking you to guess which I imagined out of whole cloth, and which actually happened. Seems a bit of…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Michael Zapata

A founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine, former Chicago schoolteacher Michael Zapata is also author of the debut novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, which Salon calls an “elegant and sweeping multigenerational, international story of lives marked by political violence and bound by the shared condition of exile.” Zapata…

Happy, Fun Books to Take Your Mind Off the News

Seasons in Hell by Mike Shropshire. “For those lamenting the delay of Opening Day, try this book — the laugh-out-loud-til-tears-run-down-your-cheeks funniest book ever written about a Major League Baseball team.” ~Talmage Boston The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John Le Carré. “As I read other supposedly wonderful books,…

An Interview with Michael Landweber

Author Michael Landweber, an associate editor at Potomac Review, already has two traditional books — Thursday, 1:17 p.m. and We — under his belt. His latest release, though, is different. Although The In Between is also a novel, it exists solely as an Audible Original. Here, Landweber talks about the…

Children’s Book Roundup: March 2020

These are scary times, and we all need to be gentle with ourselves right now. This month’s stories aren’t sweeping epics. Rather, they’re sweet, simple picture books to bring preschoolers and younger school-age kids (and the grownups who care for them) a bit of calming comfort. Welcome to Your World…

Conversations with Myself

So many images come to mind these days. For me, the ones that repeat are of leaders building social movements while in almost complete isolation. On June 12, 1964, Nelson Mandela and seven others accused of conspiring to overthrow the South African apartheid state were sentenced to life imprisonment. Mandela…

Cut to the Chase!

Lately, my literary world has been all about short stories. This is more coincidence than any intentional response to the crisis dominating our news, but it’s a welcome coincidence. As much as I’d love to disappear into the pages of a novel, a short story offers a quick escape into…

Launched into Oblivion

These days, writers’ cries of frustration and rage are especially prolonged among those whose books are coming out NOW, during #Coronapocalypse! Consider their fate: No in-person book events. No book parties with friends and family. Closed or empty bookstores. No book fairs, writer conferences, or anything fun. (Sure, that’s a…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Mark Greaney

A longtime collaborator of the late Tom Clancy’s, Mark Greaney is a well-regarded author in his own right, penning, among other works, the bestselling Gray Man series. Today, Mark discusses its ninth installment, One Minute Out, which, the Providence Journal says, “cements [his] status as a preeminent storyteller whose thrillers…

An Interview with Art Taylor

Art Taylor, the author of On the Road with Del & Louise: A Novel in Stories, is back with a new short-story collection, The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74. This latest release is a compilation of 25 years’ worth of previous work. Here, Taylor talks about what it…

9 Irish (or Irish Adjacent) Books Not by James Joyce

Milkman: A Novel by Anna Burns (Graywolf Press). Reviewed by Robert Allen Papinchak. “Strip away what some may see as obfuscating language, and Milkman is basically a coming-of-age romance, a bildungsroman with the Irish Troubles of the 1970s as a backdrop. The novel is more a psychological and sociological study…

With a Little Help from My Friends

In the fickle business of publishing, it’s not unusual for a writer to go through more than one agent. Currently, I am seeking my third. I’ve recently completed that crucial first step in publishing a book: writing it. The manuscript isn’t perfect yet, and that’s why I need an agent:…

Meet Richard B. Frank

The author of Guadalcanal and Downfall, Frank, in the opening volume of a projected trilogy on the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II, cements his reputation as one of today’s foremost military historians. The first work in any language to tell the comprehensive story of the region’s role in the…

Found in Translation

Literary translation is a labor of love. To do it well takes time, and translators are notoriously badly paid. So I often wonder how many excellent untranslated books there are out there that we’ll never have the pleasure of reading. For instance, when Hungarian writer Magda Szabó died in 2007,…

An Update on Our Conference

Like you, we at the Washington Writers Conference are watching the COVID-19 situation closely. With two months to go before our conference, we continue to plan for what promises to be an exceptional event. At the same time, we will monitor developments, make contingency plans as needed, and alert you…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Jerry Mitchell

Mississippi investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell has spent decades chronicling some of the most heinous — and unprosecuted — racially motivated crimes from the past half-century. He recounts those efforts in Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era, which the Independent praised for…

An Interview with Sen. Sherrod Brown

A Democratic senator from Ohio first elected in 2006, Sherrod Brown is also the author of Desk 88: Eight Progressive Senators Who Changed America. Along with featuring well-known lawmakers like George McGovern, Robert F. Kennedy, and Al Gore Sr., the book profiles lesser-known figures such as Herbert Lehman and Theodore…

That’s Utter Nonsense!

In college, I lived my junior year on the Writer’s Corridor, peopled with brash young students who were supposed to bond with, and influence, each other. Turns out, we were just as catty and cliquish as any other social organization. We were a strange bunch, and one of the strangest…

Patrice Caldwell in Conversation with Elizabeth Acevedo and Justina Ireland

East City Bookshop welcomes Patrice Caldwell with A Phoenix First Must Burn, a collection of fantasy, science fiction, and magic stories that explore the Black experience, in conversation with contributing authors Elizabeth Acevedo and Justina Ireland. East City Bookshop is collecting donations of A Phoenix First Must Burn to be…

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Romance Roundup: March 2020

Spring is here! Well, almost. March has arrived, and the last days of winter are slipping away, which means it’s time for spring cleaning and garden prep at my house. Or, you know, avoiding spring cleaning and garden prep and reading a good book instead. This month’s roundup brings the…

Graceful Gratitude

Recently, I received some wonderful news: My full-length poetry manuscript, The Understudy’s Handbook, won the Jean Feldman Poetry Award from Washington Writers Publishing House and will be published Oct. 15, 2020. When I got the call, I was driving to visit two dear friends for our weekly “Sci-Fi and Supper”…

7 Most-Favorable Reviews in February 2020

Shuggie Bain: A Novel by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press). Reviewed by Mike Maggio. “This is an instant classic. A novel that takes places during the Thatcher years and, in a way, defines it. A novel that explores the underbelly of Scottish society. A novel that digs through the grit and…

Charlotte Alter in Conversation with Alexandra Petri

An optimistic look at the future of American leadership by a brilliant young reporter. Charlotte Alter is a national correspondent for TIME, covering the 2016, 2018, and 2020 campaigns, youth social movements, and women in politics. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street…

An Interview with Libby Copeland

In her new book, The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are, author Libby Copeland asks more questions than is humanly possible to answer. So many, in fact, that the reader soon discovers that the answers, their answers especially, are on a continuum. With the availability of…

5 Most Popular Posts: February 2020

The 2020 Washington Writers Conference. Our keynote speaker — Laura Lippman! — has been announced, our panels are set, the agent roster is filling, and excitement is building for the DC area’s premier writing event, which happens May 8-9 in North Bethesda, MD. Last year’s conference sold out, so don’t…

After #Bookstagram

I joined #Bookstagram almost five years ago. If this is the first time you’ve seen that word — Bookstagram — it’s a hashtag that connects millions of readers on Instagram. These readers populate the hashtag with beautiful photos of everything from book stacks and shots of indie bookstores to pics…

Meet Louise Erdrich

A national treasure, Erdrich has written about Native American lives in a stream of novels, poetry, children’s books, and memoirs since 1984, winning two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the National Book Award, as well as the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement…

Art Taylor and Amber Sparks in Conversation with Tara Laskowski

We are excited to welcome two local short story authors as they launch new collections! Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories, and Art Taylor, author of The Boy Detective & the Summer of '74 and Other Tales of Suspense, will be in conversation with Tara…

Midnight in Berlin?

It was at a New Year’s Eve party in Berlin, if memory serves, that David Marwell showed me his Justice Department badge with a position, “Historian,” emblazoned on it. He’d been part of an Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s that was a euphemism for the band of Nazi…

The Raw Power of Ledger

When a poet’s purpose is tied to our own fate, we tend to notice the poems more seriously because it’s not only the “dexterous pen and the beautiful hand,” but a moral clarity we want. I think poetry works best when it gives us something about the world we can…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Jeremy Scott

Probably best known as the co-founder of — and voice behind — the popular YouTube channel “CinemaSins,” Jeremy Scott is also the author of a superhero-themed YA series featuring a band of physically challenged, crime-fighting kids. The first book in the series, The Ables, was called “smart, thought-provoking, and unique”…

An Interview with Alberto Cairo

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information, Alberto Cairo, a journalist, designer, and professor of visualization and infographics at the University of Miami, writes about how visuals are used both to express ideas and to mislead. The author holds nothing back while showing us how to read charts…

Meet Kristina Gaddy and Stephanie Gorton

Stephanie Gorton's Citizen Reporters is the fascinating history of the rise and fall of influential Gilded Age magazine McClure's and the two unlikely outsiders at its helm—as well as a timely, full-throated defense of investigative journalism in America. And Kristina Gaddy's Flowers In the Gutter is the true story of…

A Little Romance…

When I first started writing romance novels, I thought I was doing something unusual. After all, I was a reader of literary fiction — an English major (a snob). And I really didn’t read romance, I told people. After all, wasn’t saying you read romance akin to admitting you enjoyed…

Jessica Hindman in Conversation with Jeannie Vanasco

The Ivy welcomes writers Jessica Hindman and Jeannie Vanasco for a conversation surrounding their books Sounds Like Titanic and Things We Didn’t Talk About When I was a Girl. Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman has “performed” on PBS, QVC, and at concert halls worldwide. Her writing has appeared in the New York…

A Patriotic Pick: Feb. 2020

Whether it’s via their tone, topic, or tenor, certain works just say “America.” Here is one such title, suggested by Kathy Cannon Wiechman, winner of 2015’s inaugural Grateful American™ Book Prize (for Like a River: A Civil War Novel): Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s masterful, multi-volume…

The Lost Week

During the last week of January, I was hit by a freight train. Well, okay, it was an irritatingly anonymous, unnamed virus that kicked me to the ground and left no forwarding address. I couldn’t even claim the moral high ground of having gotten the flu, something people treat with…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Tara Conklin

Lawyer-turned-author Tara Conklin took the writing world by storm when her debut novel, The House Girl, became a New York Times bestseller. Equally impressive, her second novel, The Last Romantics, which Booklist called “perfectly paced, affecting fiction,” was also an NYT bestseller, as well as an IndieNext Pick and Today…

Meet Linnea Hartsuyker and Carrie Callaghan

From Carrie Callaghan, author of the critically acclaimed A Light of Her Own, comes Salt the Snow, a story of the trailblazing and liberated Milly Bennett, based on the life of one of the first female war correspondents whose work has been all but lost to history. And from Linnea…

We’ve Joined Bookshop

You know we love indie bookstores — “independent” is part of our name, after all — and we want to do more (and help our readers do more) to support them. To that end, we’re now a Bookshop affiliate! That means you can buy anything we review via our shop…

The Story of Oh!

When I was 10 years old, I fell in love with the bodice-rippers my mother read in the kitchen every night. Fat paperbacks with titles like Tender Fury or Captive Passions, their stories were all the same: The heroine, a changeling/gypsy/orphan who really comes from royalty, does battle with the…

Laura Lippman to Headline the 2020 Washington Writers Conference

We’re thrilled to announce that Laura Lippman will be the keynote speaker at our 2020 Washington Writers Conference on May 8-9 in North Bethesda, MD! Lippman has been called one of the “essential” crime novelists of the past 100 years, with 24 books published in 30 languages. She will speak…

Meet Jerry Mitchell

A multi-award-winning reporter and founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Mitchell has spent much of his thirty-four-year career working to reopen four cold cases from the civil rights era. In this powerful memoir, he chronicles how his unstinting search for long-lost documents, witnesses, and suspects led to the…

10 Romantic Reads for Valentine’s Day

The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. “I don’t read much romance, but this one still makes my heart flutter. This sweeping book is chockfull of *all* kinds of love: young love; forbidden love; love of country; a mother’s love; chaste love — you name it, it’s probably in there somewhere.…

The Sword of Justice

In her debut novel, The Ninja Daughter, author Tori Eldridge turns a young woman with a passion for justice into a modern-day martial-arts hero. Lily Wong is an anachronism — a protector of women whose nickname is Dumpling. Her family is a mix of cultures: Her Norwegian-Viking father is a…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Nic Stone

As a bestselling author of several YA titles, including Dear Martin, Jackpot, and Odd One Out, Nic Stone knows how to create stories that resonate with young readers. The Wall Street Journal calls her new book, Clean Getaway, aimed at the slightly younger middle-grade audience, “a road novel that serves…

Meet Chris Wilson

Meet Chris Wilson, author of The Master Plan, and hear how he turned a life sentence into a second chance. His unforgettable and triumphant story inspires young people and adults to develop their own master plan and to be a positive force for helping their neighbors and communities. For every…

An Interview with A.S. King

I have known author A.S. King for nearly 40 years. We’d both vehemently deny that either of us is old enough to have a friendship that spans so many decades, but the yearbooks don’t lie. Amy has published 11 critically acclaimed books and was recently awarded the 2020 Michael L.…

“Who Do I Make This Out To?”

Every writer dreams of the day when they crack open a copy of their own book to sign it for a reader. It’s a cool part of a process that’s often fraught with rejection and worry, and it should definitely be enjoyed. Here — after many years of work and…

The Writing Seminars Presents Jacqueline Osherow

Join us at Gilman Hall at Johns Hopkins for the latest installment Chaffee Visiting Writer Jacqueline Osherow. Raised in Philadelphia, poet Jacqueline Osherow received her BA from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and her PhD from Princeton University. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Hoopoe’s Crown (2005).…

Romance Roundup: February 2020

It’s February, and love is in the air. Of course, if you’re a romance fan like me, love is always in the air! When it comes to setting and plot, this month’s novels couldn’t be more different from each other. But they all have one thing in common: swoon-worthy love…

Ideas, Man

I won’t belabor the controversy surrounding American Dirt. I see both sides of the debate about whether an author who does not have personal experience of a culture can write about that culture. But if push comes to shove, I’d probably be more sympathetic with the argument that fiction writers…

Books for the Block

Join the MahoganyBooks team for the Black History Month edition of our Books for the Block initiative. On February 8, 2020, MahoganyBooks, supported by a generous donation from the Steve and Marjorie Harvey Foundation, will be giving away free books to local youth to promote literacy. Over the years, MahoganyBooks…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Brian Kilmeade

Fans of “Fox & Friends” know Brian Kilmeade as a co-host of the popular morning show. But he’s also the author of several books of history, including George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution, Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans: The Battle That…

An Interview with Susan Muaddi Darraj

Susan Muaddi Darraj is an award-winning writer, editor, and professor of English. Her previous work includes the 2014 collection A Curious Land: Stories from Home, which won the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and 2007’s The Inheritance of Exile. Recently, she has shifted gears to focus on middle-grade…

7 Most-Favorable Reviews in January

A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by John Hornor Jacobs (Harper Voyager). Reviewed by Mariko Hewer. “If there is a weakness to this second story, it is the sections told through Cromwell’s eyes; they move slowly, especially in comparison with Parker’s adventure-style writing. Readers may find…

5 Most Popular Posts: January 2020

“Not Another ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2020’ List!” by Lupita Aquino. “But after reading through the 20th list of ‘Most Anticipated Books,’ I noticed a trend. The same titles are featured over and over, with few exceptions. Also, unless the lists are demographic-specific — e.g., ‘Most Anticipated Queer Books’ or…

Lay Your Troubles Down

I was talking to my friend Nancy about how I am often gifted self-help books on parenting, like The New Puberty. I noticed my body reacting to all the terrible things that could happen to my children. It felt like a distilled version of the news being injected into my…

Meet Matt Stoller

In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed.…

Friend or Foe?

I support libraries. I support independent bookstores. So, why do I have to choose between them? Ever since libraries have been vulnerable to budget cuts, dedicated citizens have formed nonprofits under the “Friends of the Library” banner in order to maintain library services and, in some cases, expand their reach.…

American Dirty

To be honest, I didn’t want to write about American Dirt. I don’t plan on reading the book anytime soon, given the pile of books waiting on my nightstand. And, besides, many (many) other writers have written passionate, thoughtful criticisms about Jeanine Cummins’ new novel. I have friends who detest…

Authors on Audio: A Conversation with Sara Fitzgerald

An award-winning longtime writer and editor at the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, and other newspapers, Sara Fitzgerald is also author of the just-released The Poet’s Girl: A Novel of Emily Hale and T.S. Eliot, a story “written in the spirit of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank.” Fitzgerald recently…

An Interview with Amy C. Edmondson

In her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, Amy C. Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, looks at ways various organizations can thrive by encouraging individuals’ creativity while at the same time fostering a supportive, pro-teamwork environment. She discusses some…

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