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INTERVIEW WITH PATRICIA SCHULTHEIS, AUTHOR OF ST. BART’S WAY

One of Patricia Schultheis’s greatest strengths as a writer is her ability to examine relationships between people. She’s also very good at exploring relationships people have with expectations, rules, traditions, and other conventions of life. In her short story collection St. Bart’s Way, which I reviewed here last month, she offers a host of individuals, all trying to understand life and their role in it, particularly as it relates to others. In the interview below, Schultheis talks about how she creates these characters and how they come to inhabit her stories.

Schultheis’s other publications include her pictorial history Baltimore’s Lexington Market and numerous short stories and essays in national and international literary journals.

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When Your Favorite Author Breaks Your Heart

Musings: When Your Favorite Author Breaks Your Heart

I’m a frequent reviewer for both the daily Washington Independent Review of Books (WIRoB) and the quarterly Historical Novels Review of the Historical Novel Society (HNS). As an author and avid reader, I find that reviewing offers a host of benefits for me. Not only do I end up reading books outside my normal genre preferences, which is good for me as a writer, it also introduces me to wonderful debut authors about whom I then get to spread the good word. Completely selfishly, it’s also pretty cool to have, say, Viking or FSG quote me in a tweet to their vast legions of followers.

But the cherry on top of the pie is the chance to review my favorite authors’ latest books.

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A Sense of Place: Learning from Richard Russo

A Sense of Place: What We Can Learn From Richard Russo

When I was in graduate school and working on an early version of my first novel, Hawke’s Point, my thesis advisor asked me if I’d read Richard Russo. I hadn’t, but when he said my writing reminded him of Russo’s, I rushed out to get everything I could lay my hands on. The advisor’s comment was reinforced when a reviewer of Hawke’s Point also cited a similarity to Russo.

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6-1-2016. READING WITH YOUR EARS: ALL ABOUT AUDIOBOOKS

6-1-2016. READING WITH YOUR EARS: ALL ABOUT AUDIOBOOKS

Have you ever wished you had more time to read? If you’re like me, each week, when the new books are released, you vow to spend more time cuddled up on the couch, lost in a good story. For most of us, however, there aren’t enough quiet moments in the day to indulge. Say hello to audiobooks, your new BFFs.

Audiobooks allow you to capture all kinds of lost minutes: imagine reading at the same time you’re driving, exercising, cooking, and gardening. There is something magical about being read to that touches us deep inside, reviving memories of childhood bedtime stories and also linking us to our long-ago ancestors, who listened to tales told around the evening fire.

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Book Review: Open Country, A Civil War Novel in Stories

In my last posting, I highlighted Foreword Reviews magazine and its mission to draw readers to the best of independent publishing. What is perhaps most remarkable in the world of indie publishing is the sheer number of presses operating more or less on a shoestring in an industry whose margins continue to shrink. Indie presses typically don’t make fortunes for their owners, so what makes those people keep at it?

In a word, passion. Okay, perhaps two words, the other being dedication. Both are crucial to persevering in the best-seller-driven world ruled by publishing’s Big Five, but that big-press culture certainly leaves behind underserved readers and underrepresented writing voices, which is where indie presses shine.

Passion, dedication, and perseverance all describe Richard Peabody, the force behind Gargoyle, the Washington, D.C.-based

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West of Sunset Book Review

4/7/16 — Stewart O’Nan’s Novel Take on F. Scott Fitzgerald

It takes a lot of courage for an author to write a fictional book about a writer who’s almost as famous for his life as for his novels. Stewart O’Nan meets the challenge with West of Sunset, a novel about F. Scott Fitzgerald. In O’Nan’s imaginings we’re shown a depth, intelligence, and artistic struggle that meshes beautifully with the outlines of Fitzgerald’s life that his fans know so well.

The 2015 novel is a fictionalized account of the last three years of the famous author’s life. In the opening chapter, the forty-year-old Fitzgerald is no longer the golden boy of the literary set. In poor health and financially strapped, he’s about to leave the East Coast for Hollywood to work as a script-writing hack for MGM.

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Book Reviews: Two Finalists for INDIEFAB Best Literary Fiction 2015

3/20/16: Celebrating Vibrant Voices in Independent Publishing: 2015 Debut Novelists Caitlin Hicks and Barbara Stark-Nemon

Last summer, eight debut novelists gathered for 30 minutes in the virtual, electronic community of Twitter to compare first-time experiences, discuss the thrill of (finally!) being a published author, and exchange ideas about how to shift from creator to marketer in order to find an audience for our small, independently published books.

Geographically far-flung and working in a number of genres, we were brought together by a feature article about our eight books in the Summer 2015 issue of Foreword Reviews magazine, a well-respected quarterly periodical and website that focuses entirely on reviewing work published by independent presses—that is, anything not from an imprint of The Big Five publishing conglomerates.

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3/10/2016. BOOK REVIEW—MY BRILLIANT FRIEND BY ELENA FERRANTE

3/10/2016. BOOK REVIEW—MY BRILLIANT FRIEND BY ELENA FERRANTE

When I learned that Elena Ferrante (a pen name) refused to reveal any information about herself because she believed her novels should stand on their own, I wanted to applaud. As Mark Willen explained in his post on Late Last Night Books in July, Ferrante believes that “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” What a refreshing idea. I couldn’t wait to read My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy. Here’s what I found: the novel definitely stands on its own, but it’s almost as difficult to talk about as its enigmatic author.

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12/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: THE TIDE KING BY JEN MICHALSKI

12/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: THE TIDE KING BY JEN MICHALSKI

Jen Michalski is a wonderful storyteller. You could read her novel The Tide King purely for the characters and events that fit in with the reality we know. One reviewer on Amazon said she’d done that, finding the eternal-life-giving herb in the story unnecessary. If you read the novel that way, you’ll be treated to a beautiful piece of writing with well-developed characters and an exciting plot, but you will miss so much.

In her guest blog, “A Jolt of Vertigo,” published on Late Last Night Books last month, Michalski said she found herself writing about the fantastic herb because “sometimes reality is too constricting.” I never thought I would be a fan of magical realism in novels because I’ve always considered myself a true realist, a person who tells it like it is in her writing and her life.

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10/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW—SOMEONE BY ALICE McDERMOTT

10/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW—SOMEONE BY ALICE McDERMOTT

Alice McDermott has written several highly acclaimed novels, including one that won the National Book Award and three others that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She also teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which is only about 20 miles up the road from where I live. Despite her obvious writing skill and her physical proximity, I had never read one of her novels until now. To introduce myself to her work, I chose her most recent novel, Someone, and I don’t regret my choice. Someone took me into the mind of a sensitive, yet strong, woman named Marie Commeford, who searches throughout her life to understand the line between joy and sorrow, a deep but narrow crevasse that seems to open and close at will.

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8/10/2015—INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP CIOFFARI, AUTHOR OF DARK ROAD, DEAD END

8/10/2015—INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP CIOFFARI, AUTHOR OF DARK ROAD, DEAD END

Philip Cioffari’s novel Dark Road, Dead End, which I reviewed here last month, piqued my interest in illegal animal smuggling so much that I couldn’t wait to ask Cioffari how he came up with the topic and what strategies, in both research and writing, he used to make the novel so compelling. His sense of the atmosphere of southern Florida and the good and evil that battle there had me hooked on the first page. Cioffari’s answers to my questions appear below.

A multi-talented author, Cioffari has written novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His previous fiction works include Jesusville, A History of Things Lost or Broken, and Catholic Boys, all published by Livingston Press/University of West Alabama.

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Love Those Reading Lists

8/7/15 — Love Those Reading Lists!

Some of my favorite reading comes from lists. With enticing names like “Best,” “Great,” or even “Chosen,” they promise new discoveries and hours of entertainment. I know not everyone feels this way—Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada criticizes summer reading lists as stress inducers—but to me, reading lists actually remove the stress. Someone else has done the hard work of getting the goodies together, and I get to pick and choose what I want and ignore the rest. (I’ve even offered a few lists of my own in this space.)

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7/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: DARK ROAD, DEAD END BY PHILIP CIOFFARI

7/10/2015. BOOK REVIEW: DARK ROAD, DEAD END BY PHILIP CIOFFARI

I love a novel that teaches me about a phenomenon or a historical event. In my past two posts, I talked about The Tilted World, which introduced me to the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. This month I want to talk about another disaster that’s taking place even as I write: the smuggling of exotic and endangered animals, stolen from their natural habitats, into the United States for profit. Dark Road, Dead End, a novel by Philip Cioffari, explores the smarmy world of animal smugglers and the law enforcement officers who risk their lives trying to shut the practice down.

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Elena Ferrante: Italy’s Most Important Contemporary Writer

7/7/15 – Elena Ferrante: Italy’s Most Important Contemporary Writer

I wish I could introduce you to Elena Ferrante, but I can’t. The best I can do is make a stab at introducing you to her work. To some extent, of course, that is the case with all authors, although some writers appear so often in the media, we can be lulled into thinking we really do know them.

That is not a danger with Elena Ferrante. It’s not just that Ferrante is a pen name or that the author is reclusive. It is that she has, from the start, insisted her identity remain a mystery. When her first novel, Troubling Love, came out in 1991, she told her publisher that writing it was enough.

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A Different Kind of Summer Reading List

06/07/15 — A DIFFERENT KIND OF SUMMER READING LIST

When I was growing up, a summer reading list was big and heavy; heavy in the sense that it included those weighty tomes that you didn’t have time for during the rest of year—War and Peace, Ulysses, the Illiad. Gradually the summer list turned to beach reading, which was the exact opposite—easy books that you could read and enjoy without much thought. They provided an escape and a way to spend hours lying in the sun getting skin cancer without exerting too much effort. That seemed to lead to a burst in escapist literature of many genres: the kind of book you enjoyed but forgot as soon as you put it down.

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5/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: THE TILTED WORLD BY TOM FRANKLIN AND BETH ANN FENNELLY (ONE OF THE BEST HISTORICAL NOVELS I’VE EVER READ)

5/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: THE TILTED WORLD BY TOM FRANKLIN AND BETH ANN FENNELLY (ONE OF THE BEST HISTORICAL NOVELS I’VE EVER READ)

In March 1927, after months of nearly nonstop rainfall, a levee on the Mississippi River near Greenville, Mississippi, collapsed with more than double the water volume of Niagara Falls. The deluge, combined with flooding from additional breaks in the levee system, covered 27,000 square miles in 10 states up to a depth of 30 feet. Authorities have called it the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States. And yet many people have never heard of it. In their gripping new novel The Tilted World, Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly have righted that omission and brought the horrors and heroism of the flood to life.

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Book Review: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

5/7/15 – Review: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Some of my best friends are copy editors. No, really. After decades working as a journalist, and now as a novelist, I know how important copy editors can be, how often they save writers from embarrassing errors, and how underappreciated (and underpaid) they are. I’m also aware of the stereotype that suggests copy editors are obsessed, persnickety, humorless, and mean. Like most stereotypes, there’s some truth to it…but not that much.

Enter Mary Norris, the long time page OK’er at The New Yorker, and her new memoir, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. The book is actually a modified memoir—one part life story, one part inside look at the magazine, and two parts lessons on the rules of grammar and why they make sense (but sometimes don’t).

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4/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: LILA BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

4/10/2015—BOOK REVIEW: LILA BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Lila is a novel about nothing and about everything. The plot is simple: an abused, neglected child is stolen by a woman and raised with a band of migrant workers until the woman disappears, and the child, now a young adult, is left to take care of herself. She spends time in a brothel in St. Louis and then one day wanders into Gilead, Iowa, where she meets John Ames, an older preacher whose wife and child died years ago.

The young woman (Lila) and John are drawn to each other by forces that maybe aren’t love, but are just as powerful. They marry, and then, almost by accident, they have a son together. That’s it.

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Book Review: All MY PUNY SORROWS BY MIRIAM TOEWS

3/7/2015 — BOOK REVIEW: MIRIAM TOWES’ ALL MY PUNY SORROWS

Miriam Toews has managed to do the seemingly impossible: Write a novel about depression and suicide that is funny, loving, witty, heartbreaking, clever, and insightful, all while contributing to the public debate over an individual’s right to die with dignity. Toews has long been a best-selling, award-winning author in her native Canada, but readers south of the border have been slow to discover her. All My Puny Sorrows, her sixth and arguably best novel, should change that.

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Book Review: ‘Claire of the Sea Light’ by Edwidge Danticat

2/7/15 — REVIEW: EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT

I spent a few days in Haiti last week without leaving home. My tour guide was Edwidge Danticat, and the mode of transportation was her magnificent novel, Claire of the Sea Light, which brought Haiti’s sights, sounds, smells to my senses, while introducing me to the people and their incredible courage, perseverance and hope. It was a remarkable journey, one I won’t forget for quite a while.

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