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

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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.

Book Review: Hurry Up and Relax

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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.

Review: Resist, Endure, Escape

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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.

SETTING THE FAMILY FREE—A GUIDE TO THE SPECIES

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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.

SUMMER HAZE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. TUCKER

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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.

Least Favourite Current Fiction Writers

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‘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.

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

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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.

When Less is More, or Why Victorian Novels Still Matter

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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.

Trusting Ourselves as Writers

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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.

THE ART OF WRITING

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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.

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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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.