Book Review: Stewart O’Nan’s City of Secrets

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Jerusalem has been called many things. “City of Secrets” probably not until that is Stewart O’Nan chose that title for his 2016 novel of the tumultuous years in the “Holy Land” after the end of the Second World War.

The title implies the story is about the city of Jerusalem, which to a large extent it is, but it’s primarily about one member of a group of people campaigning to get Great Britain to fulfill its 1917 promise that the land west of the Jordan River become a homeland for the Jewish people.

O’Nan assigns his protagonist the single un-Jewish name “Brand.” Brand is a Holocaust survivor who makes his way through the blockade set up by the British to prevent Jewish refugees from the Holocaust from reaching the Holy Land beyond the small annual quota.

Book Review: Kind Lies, a Mystery

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We recently exhibited our books at the Lancaster Community Library in Kilmarnock, VA, and I traded books with other vendors there. As I usually do, I signed my book to Abbot Lee Granoff, author of Crowns of Gold with the line, “Enjoy the adventure.” Later, I read the note he wrote in signing his book to me. “Enjoy the adventure.” Great minds, etc. I’ll print a review of his book later.

I also traded books with Ann Eichenmuller, whose book, Kind Lies, features a woman who lives alone on a sailboat at a marina on the Rappahannock River. It is a mystery. The book I gave her was my psychological suspense novel called The Two-Sided Set-Up, in which my protagonist lives alone on a trawler at a marina on the Rappahannock.

HISTORY LESSONS FROM PACHINKO

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10 JULY 2019 HISTORY LESSONS FROM PACHINKO

Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko opens with this sentence: “History has failed us, but no matter.” While Lee’s emphasis in the novel is aimed squarely on the “us” in that sentence, I was captivated by the history she explores, largely because my knowledge of it was sorely lacking.

Pachinko begins in Yeongdo, Korea, in 1910, the year the country was annexed by the Empire of Japan after years of war and intimidation. During the occupation that followed, Japan took over Korea’s labor and land and waged war on its culture. Japanese families were given land in Korea, where they chopped down trees by the millions and planted non-native species. Korean workers were forced to work in Japan and its other colonies.

CALL FOR WRITERS (AGAIN)

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Writers Wanted
Writing something? Let me know!

Do you have a new book? Are you working on one? If so, please let me know.

I’m offering this call to help publicize new writers and writing projects here on Late Last Night Books. I’ll even help with a not-so-newly published book.

There’s no gimmick. I’m looking for writers to interview in future blog posts. Whatever your write or wrote or are writing, you almost certainly qualify.

Any kind of writing is fair game: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, translations, and anything else involving putting words together. I’d love to know more about what you’re doing.

I’m offering up this space to writers in need of publicity once again because, frankly, the well has run dry.

Interview with Running Breathless author Morey Kogul

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These days many of us are glued to the news as conflicts near and far are reported with up to the minute details. Can you imagine then how it must have felt to residents of Dubno in Soviet occupied Poland in June 1941 to hear rumors that Germany was about to invade? Jewish families in particular had few if any choices to assure their survival. In one family a young man decided to ride his bicycle to a near-by town to learn what he could. For Wolf Kogul that was the beginning of years struggling to survive war, tragic loss and future guilt.

Each story of that time adds concrete knowledge of those terrible years, bringing the truth of specificity that history books can only generalize about.

CATCHING UP WITH WRITER NANCY BURKE

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Headshot of Author Nancy Burke
Author Nancy Burke. Photo by Martha Abelson Photograph

Nancy Burke is a writer, musician, and psychoanalyst who recently published her first novel, Undergrowth. In my mind, though, she remains a young girl who I saw annually at a mutual friend’s childhood birthday parties–so clearly I have a lot of catching up to do. In this interview, I had a chance to get the process started, at least it terms of Nancy’s writing life

That writing life has been prolific and diverse. In the years since those birthday parties, Nancy has received numerous writing awards and grants, and, as a psychoanalyst, has published non-fiction articles and edited the nonfiction book Gender and Envy. Also a songwriter, she has recorded two albums of her original songs: American Goodbye and a second scheduled for release later this year.

Writers’ Conferences – Are they Worthwhile? Part One

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Let’s start with the Associated Writing Programs Conference, since that’s the one most US writers are familiar with. It’s the biggest, the glitziest, with superstars like Margaret Atwood and Karen Russell giving keynotes, and–so one is told–it’s a great place to ‘network’, which actually means, as far as I can gather, to behave like a salesperson, using sycophancy, your natural oodles of charm (it’s well known that fiction writers are captivating extroverts, isn’t it?) to sell–well, yourself. Hmm… isn’t that a teeny bit like, well (am I still allowed to pronounce this word?) prostitution? Not that there’s anything wrong with prostitution, of course! But in fact, for most writers, AWP is an utter waste of money (especially) and time. It is, to use a British expression, rubbish.

How Writers Read Novels

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Do writers read differently than non-writers, and if so, what do they do that is different, and can non-writers benefit from the difference? The answers to those questions is ‘yes,’ ‘I’ll explain shortly,’ and ‘yes’ again.

To put it simply, writers observe how a novel is put together as they read the story. What writers observe and how that can add to one’s reading pleasure is what I’m about to explain using a novel by Jeffrey Deaver as my model example.

Deaver, who keynoted at two Washington/Maryland writers’ conferences in recent years, is a meticulous plotter. He spends as much time researching and plotting each of his novels as he spends in the writing. One reason is that he writes thrillers.

An Adventure of the Senses

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My brother, Larry Haavik, is a fine musician who defines music as an “adventure for the ear.” I recently attended his two lectures on the history of jazz. He talked about how from the earliest times, people have used sticks, animal skins and other materials to make music, gradually expanding and transforming their repertoire as they sought new sounds and new adventures for the ear. Exploring Longer scales, more beats per measure, unusual instruments, different rhythms, and other variations all contribute.

The same, of course, applies to art as painters seek new ways to paint the world and people around them. We can easily see how photography made realistic interpretations boring. The artist seeking new adventures in paint moved on to impressionism, expressionism, and so on to explore new ways of presenting the world around them.

TAYARI JONES AND AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

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10 MAY 2019 TAYARI JONES AND AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

I’ve been a fan of the writing of Tayari Jones since I read her novel Silver Sparrow several years ago, so I approached her new novel, An American Marriage, with a great deal of happy anticipation. I was not disappointed. But then numerous awards organizations can’t be wrong. Among the many honors An American Marriage has won since its publication in 2018 are Oprah’s Book Club selection, nomination by the American Booksellers Association for the 2019 Indies Choice Book of the Year Award, selection for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, and selection as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize.

All of these groups had various reasons for honoring An American Marriage, but for me the joy of reading the novel sprang from two main sources: Jones’s fresh approach to what could have been a hackneyed story and the beautiful simplicity of her writing.

FEW REGRETS: AN INTERVIEW WITH BILL WOODS

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Bill Woods

Bill Woods, author of the new novel Orient Beach, has been a published writer 57 years–sort of. He first published a story at age 15 in the Sunday Edition of The Memphis Commercial Appeal after winning a short story contest.

But then life got in the way.

“I had a little business meeting with myself when I finished high school,” Bill recalls. “On the one hand, I really, really wanted to be a writer. However, I grew up poor. Becoming a starving artist did not seem romantic to me. So now, a retired engineer, I’m back where I started. I still want to be the writer I wanted to be at 15. “

A lifetime later, Woods has become that writer.

A Conversation with Roz Morris, Pt. 4: Not Just a Teacher – Making Time for Your Own Writing

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Roz Morris: We’re both writers. We’ve both taught and mentored authors as well. I find it’s a double-edged sword. Getting involved in another person’s creative process can be draining because you want to do your best for them.

Garry Craig Powell: It’s incredibly hard not to be drained by it—and that’s one of the best arguments I can think of not to become a creative writing teacher.

RM: Do you find it’s a struggle to protect your own creative mojo?

GCP: It’s a constant struggle, and most teachers fail to do so. During term-time, my own creative and intellectual energies were almost entirely absorbed by my students’ work. Sometimes, especially when working with highly-motivated, talented graduate students, that was worthwhile.

Getting Re-acquainted with P.D. James

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P.D. James, The Black Tower (1975)

I hadn’t read a P.D. James novel in some years, but came across this one and I’m glad I read it. For those who are not familiar with her, James’ reputation was stellar. (Her dates are 1920-2014.) On the front cover Time Magazine is quoted as calling her “The reigning mistress of murder.” Two British papers are quoted on the back describing The Black Tower “a masterpiece” and James is labelled the “greatest contemporary writer of classic crime.”

James wrote a series of fourteen crime novels featuring a reserved male detective by the name of Adam Dalgliesh. He’s the opposite of James Bond. He uses deduction, perseverance and a dedication to an often thankless job to ferret out the criminal.

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Serendipity and Writers’ Conferences

The annual conference of the Maryland Writers’ Association was held two weeks ago. For a writer like me, this and other writers’ conferences offer a slew of opportunities and the serendipity of meeting new people and old friends–all at a relatively low cost.

The keynote speakers alone were worth the price at the MWA conference. Chuck Sambuchino, freelance editor, bestselling book author, and former longtime staffer for Writer’s Digest Books, opened the conference with a half-day session on how to query an agent. For many years he edited the Guide to Literary Agents and the Children’s Writer’s & Illustrators Market.

Keynote speaker Crystal Wilkinson, feminist poet and author, talked about character development and agreed to a quickly arranged and informal “fireside chat” on poetry.

How are writers detectives?

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11 APRIL 2019 How are writers detectives?
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I’ve been thinking recently how writers are like detectives. They need to be constantly observant, picking up clues from what people are wearing, how they gesture, the words they speak, the way they interact with others. They study people’s facial expressions and what they suggest, storing away the data in their memory banks or taking notes in a writer’s journal that they’ll refer to later.

Detectives need to ask questions, the right questions, without arousing the suspect’s suspicions. Writers are also usually operating undercover in this way, querying their family members, friends, and acquaintances on unfamiliar subjects, building up their store of knowledge.

A good detective, like an amateur psychologist, also is skilled at looking beyond surfaces, trying to discover the hidden meanings in words, expressions, gestures, aware that most things have multiple meanings.

JUST PUBLISHED A BOOK? THIS MIGHT HELP

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Writing these things is pretty much like sending out a message in a bottle. If I’m lucky–and often I’m not–a handful of family and friends might glance at my blogs. I often feel like giving up.

Why should anyone read what I have to say here? Everyone’s busy. I get that. Heck, I don’t read most of what my friends write, so why should they read my stuff?

And why should they read my book review of a book that has already been reviewed countless times?

Honestly, the last thing the world needs is another blog by an obscure writer. But obscure writers with newly published books need blogs about them desperately.

That’s why this month–instead of my usual solipsistic musings on reading, writing, and literature–I’m going to make an offer.

The Power of ‘What If?’

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1 APRIL 2019 The Power of ‘What If?’

Many great stories start with the author asking themselves, “What if x then y?” And a new story is born. “What if there was a boy who lived in a cupboard who was actually a wizard?” These two simple words have incredible powers in a writer’s mind.

One of the tutors for my Masters programs preaches the power of “what if.” If you’re stuck for a story idea, just start writing out a bunch of what if possibilities. -What if aliens came to the universe on a motorcycle? -What if the earth stopped spinning, and a 10 year old girl was the only person who could set it right again? Just think of as many what ifs as you can, until your brain hurts, and then go back through your list and start writing the one that sticks out in your mind the most.