Hillary Clinton wrote to thank Barbara Morrison for writing Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. The letter said: “I am grateful to you for sharing your personal story and demonstrating the positive impact that social assistance programs make upon families, communities, and our country. Yours is a vital story to tell.” I found Innocent a compelling page-turner as well. (Continue Reading)
THIS IS NOT A REVIEW BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
This is not a review of British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five stories of Music and Nightfall. It’s a meditation on impermanence inspired by his writing.
Mono no aware is the Japanese idea of the pathos of things, expressed by Ishiguro as sensitivity for a past that seeps into the present of his characters’ lives. Their lives exist as words on paper, bound up in paragraphs of unresolved melancholy, tied inextricably to the falling of the day. (Continue Reading)
11/23/15 ERIC D. GOODMAN INTERVIEW BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
I love traveling by train, ensconced with strangers boarding and debarking according to some mysterious and personal trajectory. So right from the start I was intrigued by Eric Goodman’s Tracks, a novel in short stories about travelers on a train headed from Baltimore for Chicago. (Continue Reading)
10/23/15 MENDACITY “Mendacity is a system that we live in,” declares Brick in Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot 
Tin Roof. “Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.”
In Lucy Rosenthal’s novel, The World of Rae English, both liquor and suicide fail to kill Rae’s self delusions. Mendacity—habitual deviation from the truth—survives.
Rae English, the protagonist narrator, confesses this about her former husband: He’s on a book tour to promote his second book titled The Pitfalls of Deceit. Often he’s paired with John Dean. (Continue Reading)
9-23-15 YOUR TEST OF CHARACTER(S)
This is only a test—a test of characters. There’s only one question with multiple answers to chose from. I hope you’ll have to think about your answer before you read mine. The question: Can you name a novel that has only one character? Choose one answer from among the following:
1. Life of Pi by Yan Martel
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
4. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
5. Downtown by Ed McBain (Continue Reading)
8/23/15 WORDS OF POWER. Words are the struck notes of the writer’s composition. Consider: “It is all excessive, violent, and at the same time full of tenderness.” These words appear on page twenty-four of To Live Within. Excessive. Violent. Tenderness. The words resonate individually and as a powerful chord hinting at the essence of being alive in Lizelle Reymond’s 1969 memoir.
In a book published last year, Robin Black plucks a power cord. “I always wanted to be powerful. In this decade, finally, I look powerful. I feel powerful. And I feel alone.” The repetition of the word establishes strength before the counter melody intrudes in Life Drawing: A Novel. (Continue Reading)
7/23/15 BASED ON A TRUE STORY. What does it mean—based on a true story? 
If the book I’m reading is nonfiction, my second brain puzzles over which details have been suppressed, fabricated, devised, or rearranged. If the book is fiction, it is sure to be followed by others’ speculations about the models for characters, locales, plots and careers found among the author’s family and acquaintances. (Continue Reading)
6-23-15 GLAMOR AND CLAIRVOYANCE IN NEWPORT
In her new novel Newport, Jill Morrow creates a mystery worthy of Masterpiece Theatre with unexpected and clever twists on the British model. One surprise is there is no crime and no death—until the gathering-of-the-suspects scene. And then there’s another surprise, and another.
It’s the 1920s and suave lawyer Adrian de la Noye is on a ferry to Newport. He’s on his way to an opulent sea view cottage, “beautiful in an old-fashioned, lavender-and-crepe sort of way,” at the insistence of his firm’s wealthiest client to draft a new will. At Adrian’s side is his awkward young colleague Jim Reid. (Continue Reading)
5/23/15 THE RAINS DOWN IN ZAMBIA. SONIA LINEBAUGH ON ALEXANDRA FULLER’S “LEAVING BEFORE THE RAINS COME
Alexandra Fuller moved to Wyoming two decades ago—but it’s her twenty years growing up in Zambia that inhabit her psyche and her writing. I know, I know, it’s my third post in a row about Africa. And about heartbreak. I’ve been plenty of other places, and heartbreak happens everywhere, but Africa keeps coming to me.
The book is titled Leaving Before the Rains Come, words the author’s father said about deciding to sell his farm beside the Zambesi River. It refers as well to the author’s anfractuous path to leaving her marriage. (Continue Reading)
4/23/15 DAN ELDON’S DEZIREE SAFARIS
The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon. Death by the will of the people. I didn’t want to write about this death, but can’t seem to put it aside. It’s been almost twelve years since Dan Eldon’s death on July 12, 1993. I first learned about it from the book of his journals which I picked up on the sale table at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Dan didn’t die in DC. He was stoned to death in Somalia, a young white man in the wrong place at a most difficult moment. (Continue Reading)
3/23/15 LEE SUMMERALL’S SAFARI ENCOUNTER BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
Lee Summerall’s writing is casual, irreverent, personal, rambling, and chock-a-block with imagery that tastes of lemon and red
wine. Lee’s travel dispatches arrive erratically from exotic worlds—China, Tunisia, Rome, Namibia, Morocco. Most recently she reported on a close encounter with an elephant much too interested in her three-ton safari vehicle. It brought to life my own adventures in Krueger in 2013, but I don’t think you had to be there to enjoy the writing, so I convinced Lee to let me share her dispatch with Late Last Night Books followers.
She writes: South Africa’s Kruger National Park is about the same size as Pinellas County, Florida. While Pinellas County has about a million residents, Kruger has about a million animals: all the usual suspects including the Big Five, every kind of antelope, all the cats (or so they say), and over two hundred varieties of bird. (Continue Reading)
2/23/15 DANGEROUS CHARACTERS BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
In 1927 Elmer Gantry was banned in Boston and denounced from pulpits across the USA.
Gantry was a hard-drinking, womanizing, college football player, who grew into a sometimes sober, womanizing, evangelist minister. The denunciations weren’t because ministers were suddenly being held to a higher standard—it was because the fictional Elmer Gantry was a character in a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis.
In 2008, the Swedish novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, knocked American readers out of 
their collective comfort zone. The story seemed to be about a journalist named Mikael, publisher of a Swedish political magazine, but several chapters in, readers’ imaginations got hijacked by “pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander.” (Continue Reading)
1/23/15 HYPE: ARE YOU BEING SERVED? BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
“The Intellectual Situation (The Hype Phase)” is a 2008 essay by the editors of n + 1 magazine. According to the writers, the hype
cycle starts when “the ginned up enthusiasm of publicists combines with word of mouth (and blog) to create so-called buzz.” After the release date, “backlash surges alongside the ongoing hype.” Then follows “backlash-to-the-backlash.”
WhenI search Amazon for novels I get 750,111 results, 6992 of them hyped as best-sellers. French author Michel Houellebecq’s (pronounced WELL-beck) “Suomission” is one of them, an instant out-of-stock bestseller at $44.96 for the paperback edition in French. The ginned up enthusiasm comes from the media in general, not a few well-connected publicists. (Continue Reading)
11/23/14 THAT LITTLE MAN IN YOUR HEAD BY SONIA LINEBAUGH
Google the word humunculus (or homunculus) for a definition of the “little man” and you’re sent spinning in a dozen directions from the alchemy of Paracelsus who was born the year after Columbus sailed for the New World, to Louise Erdrich’s 2001 The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse, to neurobiologist Christof Koch’s 2013 NPR interview. (Continue Reading)
10/23/14 REACTION TO GOSSAMURMUR & OUTRIDER BY SONIA LINEBAUGH. “I have always gone to poetry for the news of our consciousness.” Anne Waldman to Robin Edwards about her book-length poem Gossamurmur.
Gossamurmur pits original Anne against her doppelganger imposter identity thief sci-fi ecology time travel. (Continue Reading)
9-30-14 OUR OCTOBER 1, 2014, GUEST BLOGGER, IS HARRISON DEMCHICK.
Read what Harrison says about the romance of being a writer versus the reality. He knows what he’s talking about. Harrison is an award-winning, twice-optioned screenwriter, and the author of literary horror novel The Listeners (Bancroft Press, 2012), and the editor of novels as diverse as Purple Jesus and Hume’s Fork by Ron Cooper, The Trials of the Core by Michael E. Thies, Renhala by Amy Joy Lutchen, The Understory and The Sinful Life of Lucy Burns by Elizabeth Leiknes, the Young Inventors Guild novels by Eden Unger Bowditch, The Goddess Letters by Vicki Matthews, and a couple dozen more. (Continue Reading)
NOTES TO MYSELF after reading a few passages of Sri Aurobindo’s intense and intelligent book, The Life Divine.
SA: The human cannot remain always on the lowest rung. (Continue Reading)
8/23/14 EXCESSIVE. VIOLENT. TENDER. by Sonia Linebaugh
“It is all excessive, violent, and at the same time full of tenderness.” These words are used by Lizelle Reymond to describe a landscape in Bengal, India, in To Live Within. Excessive. Violent. Tenderness. Individually and as a powerful chord the words express not only the land, but the essence of being alive in the 1969 memoir.
In a book published last month, Robin Black uses the word power itself. “I always wanted to be powerful. In this decade, finally, I look powerful. I feel powerful. And I feel alone.” The repetition of the word establishes strength before the counter melody intrudes in Life Drawing: A Novel. (Continue Reading)
7/23/14 Out of the Woods, reviewed by Sonia Linebaugh
Lynn Darling spent her life losing her way. She used to love the adventure, but by the time she’s into her fifties, a widow of ten years with her daughter off to college, getting lost has lost its allure. In order to find her way, both practically and metaphorically, Darling runs away to the Vermont woods only to find more ways to be lost.
SENSUAL IMPRESSIONS: A Confederacy of Dunces/The Master and Margarita
My husband and I were 23 and 22 when we visited New Orleans two months before John Kennedy Toole’s March 26, 1969, suicide.
I remember a quaint room off a garden with a wrought iron fence, the smokey power of Nat and Canonball Adderley’s jazz, and the tinny horns of old men who played for tips in narrow spaces between the clubs. This year, when I first read Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, the impression of sensual overload came rushing back. New Orleans is a city that doesn’t let go. (Continue Reading)