Gary Garth McCann, Author at Late Last Night Books - Page 2 of 3

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Tawnysha Greene’s A House Made of Stars reviewed by Gary Garth McCann

2/20/16 REVIEW OF A HOUSE MADE OF STARS, A NOVEL BY TAWNYSHA GREENE The more fascinating because of the unique narrator—a man’s 10-year-old deaf daughter—is this story of abuse committed by a manic-depressive, unemployed (and probably unemployable) father, himself the child victim of abuse by a deaf mother. The abuse he commits is allowed to continue by his helpless, complicit wife, the mother of their children and a psychological victim of fundamentalist Christianity’s tenet that wives should be submissive to their husbands. The wife’s own mother wants her daughter to bring the children and live in safety and
economic stability with her.

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STAY-AT-HOME DADS: BRAFF’S THE DADDY DIARIES AND PERROTTA’S LITTLE CHILDREN

11/20/15 STAY-AT-HOME DADS: BRAFF’S THE DADDY DIARIES AND PERROTTA’S LITTLE CHILDREN I’ve bought three books because of tweets. Joshua Braff’s The Daddy Diaries was one. I expected a stay-at-home dad with an infant or toddlers, in the vein of Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. But the children in Joshua Braff’s novel aren’t little. The protagonist’s daughter is 10, his son 13.

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Novel Endings: Perrotta’s The Wishbones, Grimsley’s Boulevard vs. Mystery Endings

10/20/15 NOVEL ENDINGS I don’t think this can be a spoiler because I can’t remember the name of the book or the author. It’s set in small-town Minnesota in the fall, and the protagonist teaches school. I liked it and sent it home with a friend who came for the weekend. He taught high school in New York City. The teaching year had just begun, and he was in his usual back-to-school funk. I thought he’d enjoy reading about a fellow high school teacher in a book set at the beginning of the academic year. “Thanks a lot,” he said sarcastically in our next phone conversation.

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JOYCE RENWICK, IN PRAISE OF WHAT PERSISTS

9/20/15 REVIEW OF JOYCE RENWICK’S IN PRAISE OF WHAT PERSISTS “I kept finding the goat wandering in the dining room, or standing on the front room fireplace mantel just like she was wild on some mountainside… Pie Face was just an ordinary American mongrel milk goat, mostly black with white wedges under her eyes that gave her the name…[She] weighed about a hundred pounds and would chew or lick anything in sight that might contain minerals. She bit me every time I milked her so I’d gotten to expect it.”—from “The Goat” in the posthumous collection In Praise of What Persists.

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GUEST BLOGGERS HARRISON DEMCHECK, PALLAS SNIDER ZIPORYN, ERIC D. GOODMAN, CLIFFORD GARSTANG, TOM WOOD, NANCY LYNN JARVIS, JOSEPH D. HASKE, JOHN VANDERSLICE, LEE SUMMERALL, PETER GORDON

WE CELEBRATE LATE LAST NIGHT BOOKS’ 2-YEAR ANNIVERSARY WITH A REVIEW OF THE PAST YEAR’S GUEST BLOGGERS.

10/1/14 GUEST BLOGGER HARRISON DEMCHICK

FOR LOVE AND MAGIC.

There was a time when I determined, with absolute certainty, that I would never seek publication for my novel, The Listeners.

It wasn’t always that way. I was still in eighth grade when it clicked with me that writing is something one can do for a living, and from that moment on it was more than anything else what I wanted to do. (Continue reading)

11/1/14 GUEST BLOGGER PALLAS SNIDER ZIPORYN

Author of the recently published serial novel A Cappella Drug Lord – sometimes described as a cross between “Glee” and “Breaking Bad” – as well as the non-fiction book, The International Student’s Guide to American Colleges.

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Katie Gilmartin, Lambda-award Blackmail, My Love

8/20/15 INTERVIEW WITH KATIE GILMARTIN, AUTHOR OF BLACKMAIL, MY LOVE In my review last month of the 2015 Lambda Award-winning mystery Blackmail, My Love, I said that as I read Gilmartin’s account of gay life under 1950s police and societal brutality, I realized she was also in effect writing about what it’s like to be a member of the wrong party under a totalitarian government, where people are persecuted for being who they are, for thinking what they think, and for wanting to meet and interact with other like-minded people. Today I have a chance to ask author Gilmartin what inspired her writing.

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Review of Katie Gilmartin’s Blackmail, My Love

7/20/15 REVIEW OF KATIE GILMARTIN’S BLACKMAIL, MY LOVE

“He looked up, looked me over, hat to oversize feet. ‘San Francisco changes people,’ he said drily, and returned to his paper.”

Yet the San Francisco we know today—the city so embracing of gay people—is not the San Francisco that existed in the 1950s when Blackmail, My Love takes place. The book resonated for me because I remember the fear I felt when, as a teenager in the early ’60s, I realized I might be homosexual and that, as I became an adult and remained wifeless, everyone else would suspect the truth.

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RE-READING ANNE TYLER

6/20/15 Re-reading Anne Tyler: “She took the bowl of peas and brought it down on his head. It didn’t break, but peas flew everywhere.” Meet Pearl, having supper with her little girl Jenny and her two teenage sons in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: “Jenny’s face was streaming with tears, but she wasn’t making a sound and Pearl seemed unaware of her.

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UP THE HILL TO HOME AUTHOR JENNIFER YACOVISSI INTERVIEWED BY GARY GARTH MCCANN

5/20/15 INTERVIEW OF JENNIFER YACOVISSI, AUTHOR OF THE NEW HISTORICAL NOVEL UP THE HILL TO HOME

A month ago here I reviewed Up the Hill to Home, a pleasantly leisurely read scattered with gems of insight and historical interest that bring to life a Washington, DC that you don’t see in the news. Today I’m pleased to interview author Jennifer Yacovissi.

Question: Years ago I used the wonderful Washington Star archives at the Martin Luther King Public Library for some research on DC history. Did your research for Up the Hill to Home take you to the Star archives or to the Library of Congress or to other places of interest?

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INTRODUCING JOSEPH D HASKE, OUR GUEST BLOGGER FOR 5/1/15

4/29/15 INTRODUCING JOSEPH D HASKE, OUR GUEST BLOGGER FOR 5/1/15

Joseph D. Haske is a writer, critic and scholar whose riveting debut novel North Dixie Highway I reviewed here on Late Last Night Books February 20, 2015. His fiction appears in journals such as Boulevard, Fiction International, the Texas Review, the Four-Way Review, Pleiades, and in the Chicago Tribune‘s literary supplement, Printers Row. His poetry and fiction are also featured in various anthologies as well as in French, Romanian and Canadian publications. Haske edits various literary venues, including Sleipnir and American Book Review. We look forward to having him as our May 1, 2015 Guest Blogger.

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JENNIFER YACOVISSI’S NOVEL UP THE HILL TO HOME REVIEWED BY GARY GARTH MCCANN

4/20/15 REVIEW OF JENNIFER YACOVISSI’S UP THE HILL TO HOME

I have eclectic reading tastes. Up the Hill to Home differs from North Dixie Highway, which I reviewed here in February, as much as baking bread in your middle-class home with the help of all your young children differs from finishing a fifth of cheap whiskey alone in the backseat of the car you’re currently living in. No book is for everyone. Up the Hill to Home is for unhurried readers, ones who savor gentler, kinder domesticity and who don’t need a fast plot but can settle in for a long, relaxing saga with gems sprinkled here and there and with a conclusion that leaves you sad and happy at once.

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Penelope Lively, How It All Began, characters Henry and Charlotte on aging

3/20/15 “UNTIL I GO.” A LIFETIME OF READING PENELOPE LIVELY

“Nowadays, you eye the young and remember…[h]ow it was to have smooth skin and a supple body, to be able to bend and squat and lift and run for a bus and skip down the stairs. To have this long unknowable future, in which lurked heaven knows what, and it is the mystery that is so alluring. Your own future is also unknowable, except that you can make a few shrewd guesses, and it is not particularly alluring.”

Penelope Lively is among a handful of authors who started writing when I started reading and have now progressed to writing characters at the long end of life, where I find myself.

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Interview with Joesph D Haske, author of North Dixie Highway

2/20/15 INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPH D. HASKE, AUTHOR OF NORTH DIXIE HIGWAY

Professor of English at South Texas College in McAllen, Haske was awarded the 2011 Boulevard Emerging Writers award for short fiction. His work is featured in journals such as Boulevard, Pleiades, The Texas Review, AleCart, and Fiction International. Last month on Late Last Night Books I reviewed his riveting debut novel, North Dixie Highway, and today I’m honored by the chance to interview him.

Q: Why did you choose rural poverty as the environment for your first novel?

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REVIEW OF JOSEPH D. HASKE’S NORTH DIXIE HIGHWAY

1/20/15 Review of Joseph D. Haske’s North Dixie Highway A prologue explains that no single “Dixie Highway” exists, but instead the term applies to roads south that reach as far north as Canada. Haske’s story lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Publisher Texas Review Press offers, in part: “Weaving multiple storylines with vivid description of characters and landscape, Haske’s debut novel brings new life and a unique voice to the fiction of rural America. North Dixie Highway is a story of family bonds, devolution, and elusive revenge.”
Author reviewer Larry Fondation adds (in an Amazon editorial review) “It may be fueled by alcohol and anger, but it’s based on love and loyalty: avenging the dead, defending the living.”

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LATE LAST NIGHT BOOKS, a blogzine about fiction “because so much reading, writing, and living happens after-hours”

12/20/14

ALL OF THE BLOGGERS AT LATE LAST NIGHT BOOKS WISH YOU HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND SAFE TRAVELS.

Scroll down for the most recent posts. We’ll be back on January 4 in the new year.

“Little girl, big date!”

For the text of this 1949 New York Central ad…

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“It is rather funny I think,” wrote Barbara Pym in 1939 of her novel-in-progress, Crampton Hodnet.

11/20/14 “It is rather funny I think,” wrote Barbara Pym in 1939 of her novel-in-progress, Crampton Hodnet. The war prevented her from pursuing publishers, and after the war she felt the book was dated and turned her attention to another of her novels. As a result, Crampton Hodnet wasn’t published until 1985, among the last of her works to appear. Every now and then I re-read one of the thirteen novels of Pym, among my favorite novelists, a master of postwar English humor and ahead of her time in her views of male-female relationships.

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REVIEW OF M L DOYLE’S MYSTERY, THE GENERAL’S AMBITION

10/21/15 REVIEW OF M. L. DOYLE’S THE GENERAL’S AMBITION

Given lemons, make lemonade. M. L. Doyle is no longer a Late Last Night Books blogger, so I’m taking advantage of our loss by reviewing her latest book, something I couldn’t have done while she was one of us. Whether in or out of uniform, press corps Army Sergeant Lauren Harper faces the problems of today’s Every Woman as she is drawn into a murder investigation. Her direct superior in the press corps, now divorced and without his family, imposes his affections upon her. He wants to marry her, rather than to be her best friend. Lauren once longed for this but thought it could never be. But is she in love with him now?

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INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. TUCKER, AUTHOR OF AQUARIUS FALLING AND CAPRICORN’S COLLAPSE

9/20/14 INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. TUKCER, AUTHOR OF AQUARIUS FALLING AND CAPRICORN’S COLLAPSE.

On August 20, I reviewed Aquarius Falling on Late Last Night Books, and on October 13 Mike will join us here as a monthly columnist..

Q: Most of us have many all-time favorite books. What are a few of yours and why are they among your favorites?

A: It starts with The Talented Mr. Ripley and includes the entire Ripley series by Patricia Highsmith. Her main character, Tom Ripley, is a psychopath, but Ms. Highsmith tells her stories in such a way that you are cheering him on, you want to see him survive and avoid capture. She was an amazingly talented author.

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Late Last Night Books’ guest bloggers round-up

9/1/14 A ROUND-UP OF OUR FIRST YEAR’S 1ST-OF-THE-MONTH GUEST BLOGGERS

To read their full posts, click on “guest bloggers,” above. A biographical sketch appears at the bottom of each blogger’s full post.

Carolyn Sienkiewicz, October 1, “I have a particular attraction to mysteries translated from another language. When I see an author’s name that is clearly not English in origin, I’m inevitably enticed to pick up the book. The draw for me is that I know that there, between those inviting covers, will be a story that comes from another culture.”

Ron Cooper, November 1, “If you prefer stories about laid-off sheet metal workers driven to sell weed to pay rent on their roach-infested shotgun shacks, bankrupt farmers trying to figure out how to commit suicide yet have their families still collect double indemnity life insurance, and out-of-work grocery store clerks living out of their cars and who convince themselves they’re really not whores as they blow another stranger for the price of a shot of cheap liquor, rather than another NYT best seller about Hartford suburbanites swapping neuroses, you now have choices.”

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LATE LAST NIGHT BOOKS HAS A NEW LOOK

8/29/14 — IN ANTICIPATION OF ITS SECOND YEAR, AND IN ANTICIPATION OF ITS FIRST TRIP TO THE BALTIMORE BOOK FESTIVAL, SEPTEMBER 26-28, LATE LAST NIGHT BOOKS HAS A NEW LOOK AND WELCOMES NOVELISTS GARY CRAIG POWELL AND MICHAEL J. TUCKER AS NEW MONTHLY COLUMNISTS.

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