Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Wench

978-0061706547 – Hardcover – Amistad/HarperCollins – $24.99

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ first novel, Wench, just blew me away.  The writing is beautiful, and the story is compelling.  Perkins-Valdez has been able to imagine her characters in a very difficult time, in very difficult circumstances, capturing their pain and suffering as well as their joys, and the complexity of life lived by humans.  No stick figures here, male or female, black or white.  The author is sympathetic in the strongest sense of that word – she understands people.  She does not excuse anything, but she is able to imagine who they are, and therefore her readers are given no excuses either.  Here’s the story of the book (I took this from the author’s own website, which is one of the better author websites I have seen recently):

In 1851, a lawyer named Elias P. Drake purchased a plot of land near Xenia, Ohio with the intent to establish a summer vacation resort where the country’s elite could relax and enjoy the mineral springs in the area. At the time, it was believed that natural water could cure illnesses and bring about good health.  What made this resort unusual, however, was that it became a popular vacation destination for southern slaveholders and their enslaved mistresses.  Ultimately, these flagrantly open relationships offended the northern abolitionists who also frequented the resort.  After four years, the resort closed.

This part of the story has been confirmed by historians.  I took this forgotten historical note and sketched in a fictional account of what it would have been like to be an enslaved woman traveling to this free state each summer.  Why wouldn’t the women try to escape? What kinds of emotional attachments did they have with these men?  Initially, I believed that it was entirely possible that they actually loved the men.  Ultimately, I discovered that it was much more complicated than that.

Situated in the free state of Ohio, Tawawa House offers respite from the summer heat. A beautiful, inviting house surrounded by a dozen private cottages, the resort is favored by wealthy Southern white men who vacation there, accompanied by their enslaved mistresses.

Regular visitors Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet have forged an enduring friendship. They look forward to their annual reunion and the opportunity it affords them to talk over the changes in their lives and their respective plantations. The subject of freedom is never spoken aloud until the red-maned, spirited Mawu arrives and voices her determination to escape. To run is to leave behind the friends and families trapped at home. For some, it also means tearing the strong emotional and psychological ties that bind them to their masters.

When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet soon learn tragic lessons,that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the cruelest circumstances as they bear witness to the end of an era.

That’s the bare bones of the story.  Obviously, you need to read this book to understand how good it is.  And do listen to this interview.  In it, Dolen talks about how she became a writer, how this book came about, how she feels about her characters, and a great deal more.  Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a writer who deserves our attention.  I’m very much looking forward to her next book, and hoping she will be writing many more after that.

As an aside, the cover is beautiful, and perfect for this book, and has a sort of subliminal effect on me, which maybe contributed subtly to how much I liked reading this book and talking to its author.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Morgan Entrekin

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I am talking to book industry professionals who have varying perspectives and thoughts about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.
Publishing has been a crucial part of human culture for as long as people have been writing and reading.
How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics? Publishing Talks interviews help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds. Publishing Talks interviews give people in the book business a chance to talk about ideas and concerns in a public forum that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends.

I hope that Publishing Talks interviews will give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear about some of the thoughts, ideas and concepts that are currently being discussed by engaged individuals within the industry.

Morgan Entrekin is the iconic publisher of Grove Atlantic, one of the most prominent and successful midsized literary publishers of the past couple of decades.  He has all the chops of a “traditional” book publisher: a great commitment to authors and their texts, a belief in the enduring power of a great backlist. But he is also an astute marketer who understands readers and the necessity for publishers to pay attention to what readers want and need.

Entrekin grew up in Nashville, graduated from Stanford in 1977,  started in the business at Delacorte Press, working under the late, great Seymour Lawrence and editing the likes of Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut. In 1982 he moved over to Simon & Schuster, where he made his name by championing, acquiring and editing Bret Easton Ellis’s breakout novel Less Than Zero.  In 1984 he created his own imprint within Atlantic Monthly Press, Morgan Entrekin Books and a few years later he bought Atlantic outright; two years after that, he purchased Grove Press, which featured one of the great backlists that included D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Samuel Beckett.

Entrekin’s gained well deserved fame and credit for publishing Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain in 1995. In the course of promoting the novel, Entrekin is credited with more or less creating the pre-publication tour, sending Frazier to meet book buyers in various cities before the book landed in stores. It paid off: Cold Mountain was a huge success, sold over 1.5 million copies, won the National Book Award, and was made into a big-budget Hollywood movie. Other notable Grove/Atlantic titles include Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City, as well as the works of Sherman Alexie and P.J. O’Rourke.

We had a terrific talk, covering a wide range of interesting topics, from the current state of the book business, to the kinds of things that Entrekin is doing at Grove/Atlantic to stay current.  Morgan is thoughtful, intelligent and incisive on every topic he discusses; he cares deeply about the books he publishes, backlist and frontlist titles alike, and is clearly still motivated and excited by the same beliefs and ideas that brought him into the book business in the first place.   Anyone interested in understanding how a publisher can navigate the changing landscape of the business will benefit from listening to what he has to say in this interview.

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Kelli Stanley: City of Dragons

978-0312603601 – Hardcover – Thomas Dunne/Minotaur Books – $24.99

Reading Kelli Stanley’s City of Dragons was a pleasure from beginning to end.  I liked her incredible attention to details in the San Francisco of the 1940s setting.  I really liked her main character, the wounded private eye, Miranda Corbie.  Kelli’s love of noir fiction, and love for a great story really show.  Good fiction should be able to take you into another place and time coupling the author’s skills with your own imagination.  This book certainly succeeds in grabbing you early, and keeping your attention.  Anyone who has read and loved the great classic detective novels will feel at home with Kelli Stanley’s writing.  And she has that political edge that so many writers of the 30s and 40s brought to their work.

There’s a lot going on here.  You can feel San Francisco in the dark of pre-World War II, taste the cigarettes and booze, and feel the very real danger her characters experience, the otherness of Chinatown, and the deaths and broken lives that dot this sometimes harsh and painful cityscape.  And you can feel throughout how much heart and soul the author has put into this book.  It’s a pleasure to read, and has a story that won’t let go.  Lots of fun overall, and City of Dragons works on many levels, so it will satisfy readers looking for entertainment or something with a bit more depth as well.

Kelli loves her work and loves to talk about it too, so we had a great conversation.  This is a writer with a great future and I am very much looking forward to her next book.  I’m also hoping to get her to contribute a reading from this novel to Writerscast in the near future.  Kelli’s own website is worth a visit as well.  City of Dragons is available as an e-book in various formats, and in digital audio as well.

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Kermit Moyer: The Chester Chronicles

978-1579621940 – Hardcover – Permanent Press – $28.00

What a pleasure it was to discover this writer.  The Chester Chronicles is a collection of interlocking stories that serve to create what is essentially a coming-of-age novel.  We are introduced to Chet Patterson as a pre-adolescent and stay with him as he grows unto early manhood.  He is the son of a military man, so at the heart of the book is the peripatetic journey of a budding intellectual, who often does not fit in with the crowd and is always in search of both his internal and his social identity. There are lots of adventures along the way, many having to do with girls and sex, boys and drinking.

There are certainly elements here that will be most familiar to people of a certain age, who lived through the ’50s and ’60s, especially the defining moments of those times.  But as with any good book, the character and his story transcend the specifics of the place and time in which the book is set.   The point is, after all, for us to see him as a person on a journey, and to understand where he has been, and perhaps also, therefore, to understand who he will become.  As the author says of himself and of his character, he is “plagued with Oedipal anxieties and existential doubt, yet nonetheless convinced of his heroic destiny.”  There are several moment in the book that can make the reader laugh out loud, and there are others where it is equally impossible not to deeply feel his pain.  I’d say that’s a pretty good accomplishment for any writer.

In my interview with Kermit Moyer, we talked about some of the autobiographical elements of the book, some of the stories which stood out for me as a reader, as well as some of the characters in the book that affected me the most.  We talked quite a bit about autobiographical fiction and how this book fits into the tradition of fictionalized autobiography and works transformationally both for the author and the reader.  Moyer provides an interesting explanation of his writing which I hope will help introduce new readers to his fine writing.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Richard Curtis

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I am talking to book industry professionals who have varying perspectives and thoughts about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.
Publishing has been a crucial part of human culture for as long as people have been writing and reading.
How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics? Publishing Talks interviews help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds. Publishing Talks interviews give people in the book business a chance to talk about ideas and concerns in a public forum that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends.

I hope that Publishing Talks interviews will give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear about some of the thoughts, ideas and concepts that are currently being discussed by engaged individuals within the industry.

Richard Curtis, president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., is a leading New York literary agent and a well-known author advocate.  He is also the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including several books about the publishing industry. His interest in emerging media and technology has enabled him to help authors anticipate trends in publishing and multimedia.  He has lectured extensively and conducted panels and seminars devoted to raising consciousness in the author and agent community about the future of communications.  He was the first president of the Independent Literary Agents Association and subsequently president of ILAA’s successor organization, the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR)  He blogs regularly on www.ereads.com.  He is also, uniquely among literary agents, a publisher himself, having founded the innovative digital publishing imprint, E-Reads almost ten years ago.

I have known Richard for a very long time, have done business with him, and collaborated with him on an experimental publishing project a few years ago,  But mostly, over the years, Richard and I have talked about the book business, the future of publishing and of authors, and particularly, the future of digital publishing.  So it made a lot of sense for me to talk to Richard as part of the Publishing Talks series, as I knew he would have a great deal of interesting and compelling ideas to share about these subjects, which he almost always does.

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David M. Carroll: Following the Water

978-0547069647 – Hardcover – Harcourt Houghton Mifflin – $24.00

David M. Carroll has been “following the water” for almost his entire life.  He grew up in Connecticut, then lived in Massachusetts, and moved to New Hampshire to find places less disturbed by humans, where he could study turtles and their woodland, waterine habitats.  Which he has done now for many years.  Following the Water is subtitled “A Hydromancer’s Notebook; a hydromancer would be one who divines by the motions or appearance of water, which is certainly descriptive of what David Carroll does in his life and in this book, a poetic journal of a year of divining the natural world by close observation of it.

Most of us spend far too little time in nature, and many of those who do “use” the natural world for entertainment or work in a way that would be difficult to distinguish from how they treat the non-natural world.  What is so beautiful about Carroll’s work and his writing about it, is the depth of his observation, and his literal being in place.  Reading his elegiac descriptions of the watery environments of New England transported me to an almost metaphysical trance-like state of mind where I could imagine myself inhabiting the outside space in which he spends so much of his time.

Of course there is a terrible sadness in this book, as Carroll experiences the changes in the places he has known so well and so long, always brought on by the effects of constantly encroaching human development.  He knows the turtles and their environments will soon be threatened and knows there is almost nothing that can be done to protect them.  This is a feeling that many who work in and strive to protect our remaining wild places share, an ever present sense of desperation, as we near the tipping point of urban and suburbanization.

Carroll writes beautifully, and his drawings are exquisite.  Reading this book made me wonder how I had managed to miss reading his earlier books, and has spurred me to go out and get them all.  Here’s a perfect example of the quiet power of his prose:

“As daylight diminishes, the peep-frog chorus intensifies in the backwaters of a fen a quarter mile away. With raucous clamor and a rushing wind of wings beats a flurry of grackles lifts off from the topmost canopy of the red maple swamp. In the quieting that follows, I hear again the drift of evensong from their red-winged cousins on the far side of the wetland mosaic. The season, like the water glimmering all around, extends before me.”

David Carroll is as enjoyable to hear talking as his writing is to read.  Interviewing him was a pleasure, tinged with a shared sense of dismay about what has happened to our shared New England natural environment.  Both this book and this talk are among my favorites, and I hope listeners will agree.

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Matthew Aaron Goodman reading from Hold Love Strong

978-141-656203-0 – Hardcover  – Simon & Schuster Touchstone – $24.99

Writerscast is proud to inaugurate a new series of authors reading from their work we are calling AuthorsVoices.   I hope you will agree that hearing these works read aloud, especially by the original authors, will add greatly to one’s experience of the writing and the authors’ distinct sense of their own words. With writers touring for books less frequently now, these podcasts should provide readers with an opportunity to hear some of our best contemporary authors reading  from, and sometimes performing their own works.

Matthew Aaron Goodman’s first novel is called Hold Love Strong; in my opinion, it is a particularly powerful work of fiction (my interview with him is below).  This is a terrific book, with powerful language and vivid imagery.  Matthew gives his words their full due with this excellent reading from his book.

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Matthew Aaron Goodman: Hold Love Strong

978-1416562030 – Hardcover  – Simon & Schuster Touchstone – $24.99

This is flat out one of the best books I have read in a long time.  It begins with an incredible story that grabs you instantly and will not let go.  I felt like I was holding my breath almost throughout the book.  Matthew Aaron Goodman avoids cliches at every turn, loves his characters, demands respect for them from beginning to end, but never hides from the pain and suffering they experience.  As readers, we feel like we are living in, through and with his characters, which is a triumph of both the author’s imagination and his deeply felt love for the people he writes about.

It’s difficult to believe that this is Goodman’s first novel.  His mastery of language, his ability to inhabit the hearts and souls of his characters, and the simple clarity of his voice are all remarkable for any author, much less a first novelist.  I was blown away, and have been recommending this book widely to friends and colleagues.

Cornel West gave it a very fine blurb that is worth reprinting here: “Matthew Aaron Goodman’s Hold Love Strong is a powerful and poignant story of the gallant Abraham who struggles on the night side of American society yet exudes a light of genuine hope. Goodman is an activist and artist who never loses sight of the humanity of those either imprisoned or free!”

I also recommend readers to visit Matthew’s own site where you can read some more of his work.  In 2007, working hand and hand with formerly incarcerated men and women, Matthew created The Leadership Alliance, a community empowerment project  that unites recently freed people with volunteer partners.  And there is a wonderful review of Hold Love Strong by Nina Sankovitch on Readiac that I think describes perfectly the power and impact this book can have on readers.

In my interview with Matthew, we talked about his own life story to help understand how he came to write Hold Love Strong, the work he has done in New York communities and elsewhere, and alot about the book itself, its characters and story, and of course what he is working on now.  He is as compelling talking about his work and ideas as he is writing about them.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk Interviews David Rothman

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I am talking to book industry professionals who have varying perspectives and thoughts about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.
Publishing has been a crucial part of human culture for as long as people have been writing and reading.

How will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and its economics? Publishing Talks interviews help us understand the outlines of what is happening, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds. Publishing Talks interviews give people in the book business a chance to talk about ideas and concerns in a public forum that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends.

I hope that Publishing Talks interviews will give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear about some of the thoughts, ideas and concepts that are currently being discussed by engaged individuals within the industry.

David Roth­man grew up in the D.C. area, went to the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina and worked as a reporter for the Jour­nal in Lorain, Ohio, where he cov­ered poverty and pub­lic hous­ing and was a fea­ture writer. Among other sto­ries, Roth­man chron­i­cled the after­math of the Kent State mas­sacre.

Related dis­tantly to the late Hol­ly­wood scriptwriter Arnold Bel­gard, Roth­man is the author of six non­fic­tion books on technology-related top­ics and lives with his wife, Carly, in Alexan­dria, Vir­ginia. He is well known on the Internet and among digerati for having created and operated Tel­eRead, a pop­u­lar site devoted to libraries and technology and recently has published a novel based on real-life Washington, D.C., The Solomon Scandals.

I talked with David Rothman about his long history of involvement in technology, the internet and digital reading alternatives, with emphasis on Teleread, and we then moved on to cover some of the current issues of the day, including the business structure of the rapidly growing e-publishing marketplace, copyright issues in the digital era, and how the web might enable new compensation models for authors and other creators.  David displayed his typical verve and journalist’s willingness to tackle any subject and every challenge.

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Jennifer Estep: Spider’s Bite

978-1439147979 – Mass Market Paperback – Pocket Books – $7.99

Jennifer Estep has written three books before this one, in an edgy paranormal romance series she called Bigtime.  Spider’s Bite kicks off a new series, this one she calls urban fantasy, and I think the description is apt.  It’s gritty, violent, tough, but full of love and a kind of self-defined punk-inspired love that has a depth and strength that is really admirable.

I know the book business likes to categorize books, sometimes quite narrowly, and there are good reasons for that.  So this book falls into a category that Publishers Weekly calls “urban fantasy.”   While I am not quite sure I know what that means, this novel is certainly a full on fantasy novel set in a city, so I guess that label fits in a literal way.  But all labels and categories aside, author Estep has fashioned a terrific set of characters, in particular our hero, Gin.  The first line of the book makes clear what we readers are getting into: “My name is Gin, and I kill people.”  And she does, she is an assassin after all.

I was very impressed with Estep’s writing and she has fashioned a terrific story line.  Some of the characters run to type, but they fit the story so well, we don’t mind.  The author has set her imagination loose on the southeastern city in which the story takes place, maybe in our future, or maybe in an alternate universe, it’s wild and never dull.  I’m looking forward to reading the sequels too.

Jennifer and I had a fun interview talking about this book, how she started as a writer and where her ideas come from.  She’s a dedicated reader turned writer, and her love for books, ideas and writing shines through her work and her words.

See an excerpt from the book at chptr1.com.  Visit Jennifer’s well put together site to learn more about her and her books.

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