↓
 

Late Last Night Books

because so much reading, writing, and living happens after-hours

Late Last
Night Books
because so much reading, writing, and living happens after-hours
Since 2013
Gary Garth McCann, founder and managing editor
an ad-free magazine about fiction by authors Terra Ziporyn * Sally Whitney * Eileen Haavik McIntire * Gary Garth McCann * Peter G. Pollak * Garry Craig Powell * Jenny Yacovissi * Lily Iona MacKenzie * Todd S. Garth * Daniel Oliver
Menu
  • Home
  • Book Reviews
  • Insights
  • Interviews
  • Authors
  • Guest Bloggers
  • About
  • Tag Cloud

Post navigation

<< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 … 33 34 >>

FREEFALL: THE MAGIC OF AUTHOR LILY IONA MACKENZIE

Late Last Night Books
TERRA ZIPORYN

Author of The Bliss of Solitude, Time’s Fool, Do Not Go Gentle, and the new novel Permanent Makeup as well as many nonfiction works including The New Harvard Guide to Women’s Health, Alternative Medicine for Dummies, and Nameless Diseases.

4 OCTOBER 2019 FREEFALL: THE MAGIC OF AUTHOR LILY IONA MACKENZIE
Author Lily Iona Mackenzie
Author Lily Iona Mackenzie

Lily Iona Mackenzie’s new novel Freefall: A Divine Comedy is a “coming-of-age” novel about four women turning sixty. As a woman of “a certain age,” this concept naturally caught my attention. The story of “wacky installation artist” Tillie Bloom and three friends from her teenage years follows the women’s lives over four decades in three countries, centered in the San Francisco Bay area, Whistler, BC, and Venice, Italy. The result is an imaginative, sometimes “hilarious,” romp with a touch of magical realism that also turns out to be a serious meditation on the relationship between art and mortality.

Besides Freefall, Mackenzie has published reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 160 American and Canadian venues.

(Continue Reading)

Hail Mary by Patti Liszkay

Late Last Night Books
DANIEL OLIVER

The Long Road (Black Rose Writing, 2018)

30 SEPTEMBER 2019 Hail Mary by Patti Liszkay

HAIL MARY, which will be published on May 7, 2020 by Black Rose Writing, is the sequel to EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTIONS by Patti Liszkay. This entertaining novel is a romantic comedy set in present-day Philadelphia. 

The colorful characters are a bona fide mixture of what makes up the population in this city. Silvio, the blue-collar plumber from Northeast Philly, Darren, a white-collar real estate agent living in the fancy suburb of New Conshohocken, and Angelo, a questionable, foul-mouthed business owner, are a sample. Liszkay does her native city justice through these characters’ portrayal because they match the city’s grit, new money, bluntness, and corruption. They mirror the blue-collar grit and bluntness in the famous movie, Rocky, but also the new wave of professionals living in the city and its suburbs these days.

(Continue Reading)

Graham Greene – A Masterclass in Fiction

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 SEPTEMBER 2019 Graham Greene – A Masterclass in Fiction

‘The most accomplished living novelist in the English language,’ John Irving said of Greene before the latter’s death in 1991—and yet how many Creative Writing students, especially in North America, have even heard of him these days, let alone read him? When I taught at a US graduate program, and recommended him, I generally found that my students did not know his work, even if they had heard of him. Of course, they had been stuffed full of novels by more ‘diverse’ writers.

So I shall stick my neck out and proclaim: You can save yourself thousands of dollars, writing students. Read half a dozen of Greene’s best novels carefully, as a writer does, and it will yield you more benefit than most MFA programs, especially those of the fashionable throw-the-western-canon-out-of-window variety.

(Continue Reading)

The Poe Festival (Oct. 5-6): An Opportunity for Fun and Learning

Late Last Night Books
PETER POLLAK

Author of Missing (2019);  Inauguration Day (2017);  The Expendable Man (2011); Making the Grade (2012); Last Stop on Desolation Ridge (2012); In the Game (2014); & House Divided (2015)

23 SEPTEMBER 2019 The Poe Festival (Oct. 5-6): An Opportunity for Fun and Learning

Honoring writers who paved the way with their contributions to the literary world is a great way to introduce young people (as well as the still young-at-heart) to the joys of the written word. In Baltimore, we are especially grateful for the existence of the Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum and the annual International Poe Festival and Awards which will take place this year Saturday and Sunday, October 4 & 5, from 11 am to 4 pm both days.

Poe’s place in the literary firmament is assured by those who champion him as an forerunner of the genres of science fiction, mystery and horror, but he is also a must read for his poetry and his critical essays. He belongs in the pantheon of early American writers that includes the Transcendentalists as well as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

(Continue Reading)

Book Review: Hurry Up and Relax

Late Last Night Books
JENNIFER YACOVISSI

Author of Up the Hill to Home

20 SEPTEMBER 2019 Book Review: Hurry Up and Relax

Perhaps, like me, you’re one of those people who, finding yourself in a crowd, looks around and wonders at the individual lives of each of the people surrounding you. The tattooed barista with half-shaved/half-purple hair, the guy with the sweat-stained underarms staring into the lingerie store display, the middle-aged business man shouting into his phone as though this were still 2005.

Hard as it is to imagine, all of these people have their own history, their own movie in which they star, their own universe in which they are the omnipotent point of view.

Well, Nathan Leslie imagines it. In Hurry Up and Relax—Leslie’s tenth book, coming out in October, the winner of the Washington Writers Publishing House 2019 Fiction Award—his darkly comedic eye takes in the refugees from the real estate bubble, the hostages of the gig economy, the Facebook stalkers, the Internet gamers trapped on the couch in permanent twilight.

(Continue Reading)

Review: Resist, Endure, Escape

Late Last Night Books
EILEEN HAAVIK MCINTIRE

Author of Shadow and the Rock, The 90s Club and the Hidden Staircase, and The 90s Club and the Whispering Statue

17 SEPTEMBER 2019 Review: Resist, Endure, Escape

I worked with Susan F. Darvas to publish RESIST ENDURE ESCAPE, a warm and personal account of growing up Jewish In Nazi and then Communist Hungary. She is one of a growing number of survivors who are telling their stories.

I also helped Erika Schulhof Rybeck, author of On My Own: Decoding the Conspiracy of Silence, publish this memoir of growing up in Austria, fleeing via Kindertransport at age 10 to a boarding school in Scotland, and finally at age 20 coming to America to join an aunt and uncle who had escaped from Vienna. Erika did not know she was Jewish. She was not told that her parents came from an illustrious Jewish family tracing back to generations of rabbis.

(Continue Reading)

SETTING THE FAMILY FREE—A GUIDE TO THE SPECIES

Late Last Night Books
SALLY WHITNEY

Author of When Enemies Offend Thee and  Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

10 SEPTEMBER 2019 SETTING THE FAMILY FREE—A GUIDE TO THE SPECIES

Toward the end of Setting the Family Free by Eric D. Goodman, one of the main characters thinks about what has to be done to “end this bloody twenty hours, thereby closing the darkest ordeal of his life,” but he can’t bring himself to do it. The fact that he is so conflicted is indicative of the many opposing threads that Goodman weaves together to create suspense and compassion in this tale of the escape of dozens of exotic animals from a homemade zoo in Chillicothe, Ohio. It’s a compelling story told by a skillful, adventurous writer.

The novel opens with a series of comments about animals from famous people as well as fictional characters who play leading roles in the story that’s about to unfold.

(Continue Reading)

SUMMER HAZE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. TUCKER

Late Last Night Books
TERRA ZIPORYN

Author of The Bliss of Solitude, Time’s Fool, Do Not Go Gentle, and the new novel Permanent Makeup as well as many nonfiction works including The New Harvard Guide to Women’s Health, Alternative Medicine for Dummies, and Nameless Diseases.

4 SEPTEMBER 2019 SUMMER HAZE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. TUCKER
Summer Haze by Mike Tucker

I had the opportunity to interview writer Michael J. Tucker this month about his new novel, Summer Haze. Mike is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Aquarius Falling and Capricorn’s Collapse, the poetry collection Your Voice Spoke To My Ear, and the memoir A Disrupted Life. His short stories include the Amazon best-selling short story series, Katie Savage.

Tucker’s newest work, Summer Haze, is a coming-of-age novel about three gifted musicians who all overcome childhoods of verbal, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse but eventually bond as a band of singer songwriters . They play in dive bars throughout the South and casinos along the Gulf Coast, navigating the challenges of friendship, rivalry, success, and, eventually, loss.

(Continue Reading)

Least Favourite Current Fiction Writers

Late Last Night Books
GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 AUGUST 2019 Least Favourite Current Fiction Writers

‘I would dread a world where to publish I had first to be certified as a nice person,’ wrote Lionel Shriver in The Spectator (16 December, 2017), and I agree. So, in the interests of countering what I consider to be the noxious and nauseating habit of being nice all the time—how the kindergarten teachers who police our arts love to lecture us on that—I have decided to publish a list of my least favourite writers. No gushing over how wonderful these fictioneers are, or what exemplary human beings they may be. No. These are people whose writing is over-rated, in my view (‘but that’s just me,’ as the current phrase goes, as if we should apologise for having an opinion at all, which we do if we are to remain PC-approved), or whose personalities I find abhorrent, usually because they’re sanctimonious or affected or hypocritical–but I feel I’m entitled to a little prejudice.

(Continue Reading)

The Power of the Mind: A Review of Rachel Kadish’ The Weight of Ink

Late Last Night Books
PETER POLLAK

Author of Missing (2019);  Inauguration Day (2017);  The Expendable Man (2011); Making the Grade (2012); Last Stop on Desolation Ridge (2012); In the Game (2014); & House Divided (2015)

23 AUGUST 2019 The Power of the Mind: A Review of Rachel Kadish’ The Weight of Ink

It’s the year 2000 and a cache of documents from the 17th century written in Portuguese, Hebrew and English has been discovered in a London suburb. With the help of a graduate assistant, an elderly female history professor begins to uncover the mystery of their origins. For her, it’s a last chance to go out on a high note; for him, it’s a distraction from a Ph.D. thesis on Shakespeare that’s not going well.

But The Weight of Ink is not just about that discovery and what it reveals about the past, although what they learn is quite startling. Instead, Kadish tells us the story of the people who composed and preserved the documents themselves. Dry? Pedantic? Just the opposite.

(Continue Reading)

When Less is More, or Why Victorian Novels Still Matter

Late Last Night Books
TODD S. GARTH

The Self of the City: Macedonio Fernández, The Argentine Avant-Garde and Modernity in Buenos Aires (2005);  Pariah in the Desert: The Monstrous and the Heroic in Horácio Quiroga (2015).

20 AUGUST 2019 When Less is More, or Why Victorian Novels Still Matter

In today’s environment of openness and explicitness, when virtually anything can and will be said and written, it’s a logical assumption that our level of communication and understanding is higher than ever—that very little is left to be revealed.

This has always intuitively seemed wrong to me, but it was the happy coincidence of reading Andrew Sean Greer’s best-selling novel, Less, and Anthony Trollope’s 1867 opus, Phineas Finn, more or less together, that helped me understand why.

If you’re not familiar with Trollope, or with Victorian writing generally (or, for that matter, with Henry James, the primary link between 19th and 20th century aesthetics and sensibilities), it helps to know that these novels are really, really long.

(Continue Reading)

Trusting Ourselves as Writers

Late Last Night Books
LILY IONA MACKENZIE

Author of the novels  Curva Peligrosa,  Fling!, and Freefall: A Divine Comedy, and the poetry collection All This

10 AUGUST 2019 Trusting Ourselves as Writers

“I write to make sense of my life.” —John Cheever

I’ve been reading Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, and it’s been extremely illuminating in many ways. John Cheever, considered one of the best 20th Century short story writers, struggled at times, as most writers do, to trust his impulses in creating short stories and novels. Many of his works first appeared in the New Yorker, and for much of that time, William Maxwell, long-time editor at that magazine, was both his good friend and editor. This relationship eventually became a problem for them both.

Maxwell, a fine writer himself, wore blinders when his writers attempted to move beyond the traditional realist fiction that he favored. At a critical time in Cheever’s life and career, Maxwell refused to publish any Cheever stories that didn’t fit into this narrow groove, causing Cheever to doubt his craft.

(Continue Reading)

THE ART OF WRITING

Late Last Night Books
TERRA ZIPORYN

Author of The Bliss of Solitude, Time’s Fool, Do Not Go Gentle, and the new novel Permanent Makeup as well as many nonfiction works including The New Harvard Guide to Women’s Health, Alternative Medicine for Dummies, and Nameless Diseases.

4 AUGUST 2019 THE ART OF WRITING

NOTE: As part of an occasional “Writers on Writing” series I will be featuring occasional guest bloggers. Kicking off this effort is this piece by novelist Bill Woods. — Terra

GUEST BLOG BY BILL WOODS, AUTHOR OF THE NOVEL ORIENT BEACH AND NOVELLA AND SHORT STORIES THE MUSE OF WALLACE ROSE

Bill Woods

A few days ago, a Facebook friend sent me Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a surreal picture a 3rd grader might idly do with crayon. And yet it creates pure emotion in me. Neither I, nor intellectual art critics, can explain how an artist captures emotion on canvas—or how my brain a century later can extract that same emotion. I doubt Van Gogh had a clue either. The process seems to be: ‘Emotion > canvas > emotion,’ no thought required.

(Continue Reading)

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

Late Last Night Books
PETER POLLAK

Author of Missing (2019);  Inauguration Day (2017);  The Expendable Man (2011); Making the Grade (2012); Last Stop on Desolation Ridge (2012); In the Game (2014); & House Divided (2015)

23 JULY 2019 Book Review: Stewart O’Nan’s City of Secrets

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.

(Continue Reading)

Book Reviews: BE WITH ME ALWAYS and THE UNREPENTANT

Late Last Night Books
JENNIFER YACOVISSI

Author of Up the Hill to Home

20 JULY 2019 Book Reviews: BE WITH ME ALWAYS and THE UNREPENTANT
BE WITH ME ALWAYS and THE UNREPENTANT could not be more different from each other--except they are both compulsively readable.

Book Review: Kind Lies, a Mystery

Late Last Night Books
EILEEN HAAVIK MCINTIRE

Author of Shadow and the Rock, The 90s Club and the Hidden Staircase, and The 90s Club and the Whispering Statue

17 JULY 2019 Book Review: Kind Lies, a Mystery

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.

(Continue Reading)

HISTORY LESSONS FROM PACHINKO

Late Last Night Books
SALLY WHITNEY

Author of When Enemies Offend Thee and  Surface and Shadow, plus short stories appearing in journals and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017.

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.

(Continue Reading)

CALL FOR WRITERS (AGAIN)

Late Last Night Books
TERRA ZIPORYN

Author of The Bliss of Solitude, Time’s Fool, Do Not Go Gentle, and the new novel Permanent Makeup as well as many nonfiction works including The New Harvard Guide to Women’s Health, Alternative Medicine for Dummies, and Nameless Diseases.

4 JULY 2019 CALL FOR WRITERS (AGAIN)
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.

(Continue Reading)

Interview with Running Breathless author Morey Kogul

Late Last Night Books
PETER POLLAK

Author of Missing (2019);  Inauguration Day (2017);  The Expendable Man (2011); Making the Grade (2012); Last Stop on Desolation Ridge (2012); In the Game (2014); & House Divided (2015)

23 JUNE 2019 Interview with Running Breathless author Morey Kogul

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.

(Continue Reading)

Weird Since 1637

Late Last Night Books
EILEEN HAAVIK MCINTIRE

Author of Shadow and the Rock, The 90s Club and the Hidden Staircase, and The 90s Club and the Whispering Statue

17 JUNE 2019 Weird Since 1637
H.P. Lovecraft spent his life in Providence, RI, a town known to be weird since 1637.

Post navigation

<< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 … 33 34 >>
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
banner photo copyright Dervish_design - Fotolia.com
Log in
©2021 - Late Last Night Books - Weaver Xtreme Theme Privacy Policy
↑