FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Story Statement From WWII’s far eastern Poland, to the trail of Anders’ Army, and on to Brooklyn and the Catskills of the 1940s to the present day, A Lvov Story is the interwoven tale of Mariem Malman, daughter of a displaced Jewish doctor, and Josef Darowski, Catholic scholar and boy writer, destined to come together in a city soon to be torn apart, the story of which their granddaughter Rabbi Mira Darowski strives to write, even as her wife leaves her. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: Antagonists/Antagonistic Forces As the Nazis and Soviets wrestle for Lvov (today’s Ukrainian Lviv, war-torn again), Josef and Mariem struggle to survive the changing regimes, the more dangerous times of transition, and the personal trials besieging a man and woman thrown together, tasked with protecting, if not loving, each other through escaping Poland and the tribulations of Anders’ Army and on to the U.S. Religious duties and misconceptions, ethnicities seeking recognition and control clash throughout. Josef’s brother Harald, as twisted and selfish as Josef is compassionate and questing, plays Lvov’s factions for gain, forcing Josef to rid his world of a seed as bad as the outside forces that continue to threaten it. Preventing the storytelling of the Darowski generations are the frustrations of incomplete stories lost to the past and to trauma-affected memory and contemporary scholarly bickering of Mira, her mother Lisha (writing a memoir of Mira’s father, a celebrated novelist), and Joss (Mira’s father’s literary executor, striving to write his biography). Trauma and lost loves swirl alongside the emotional aftermath of her grandparent’s tragic legacy: Mira’s wife leaving her, choosing to die alone; Lisha’s struggle to accept her daughter for who she is; and Joss’s pining for Mira, his first love. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: Titles A Lvov Story The Bridge to Lost Cities FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: Comparable Titles Set in the same Lvov Helen Fremont revealed in After Long Silence, and like The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish and The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, A Lvov Story is a mystery playing out across time, cities, religions, and lost loves, using quotations and archival artifacts (including the first Pocket Books of Simon and Schuster published at the outbreak of WWII) to build an ergodic journey for the reader, who seeks the clarity and resolution of the tale’s puzzles, just as the characters do. Like The Nesting Dolls by Alina Adams, it is a family saga of three generations, each striving through the power of story to understand what war and generational trauma have wrought and their place within and beyond such narratives. FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: Hooks/Loglines with character, setting, and conflicts Because there are four protagonists in alternating POVs throughout the whole of the book, I give each separately. Josef – A naïve Catholic scholar and boy writer is unaware of the budding stories in which he is about to become a reluctant hero, springing from the day he saves a Jewish medical student’s spectacles and attempts to return them after witnessing his brutal attack in the university courtyard, leading him to act the savior for that student’s fiancé, a woman who will force him to flee with her after ridding the city of his mercenary and violent brother. Once free of WWII’s atrocities and living in the U.S., he attempts to write his story, even as it harms those he loves. Mariem – After losing her fiancé to the events of WWII, a young Jewish woman in war-torn Lvov grows into a traumatized survivor living in the U.S. Losing all she has known, spurning the dreams of escape to safe spaces she doesn’t believe exist, she becomes the embodiment of the violent upheaval of her people and seeks an unattainable return of herself and the world to an impossible purity. Unable to form a coherent understanding of all she’s endured, she prompts others to write it, so she might bridge the chaos that was her life, acting to free herself and aid those who come after her to know her story and that of the city that was her home. Mira – A female rabbi in contemporary New York writes the story of her grandparents’ survival of the Shoah, an act of reverence for the grandmother for whom she is named, and with whom she might have in common a threatening melancholy, and for the grandfather who loved her for who she is, a queer woman who is consumed by the past even as her wife leaves her to die alone after a cancer diagnosis. Her estranged mother and an alienated friend of her youth hold the keys to the stories she must unlock to fulfill her duty to her grandparents and history, forcing her to confront them both and seek that they accept and help her. Joss – A striving young academic and literary executor of a celebrated novelist he has idolized since childhood works to write that man’s biography, including his traumatic youth as the child of Holocaust survivors. Piecing together the tale from artifacts and papers entrusted to him at the university archives, he realizes he is bound to fail unless he can enlist the daughter of his subject, a woman who was the first love of his youth, who now holds materials that may fill the gaps in the archive’s collection, but who has rejected him in the past and attempts to forget her own history even as she delves into that of her family. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: Inner and Secondary Conflicts Again, because there are four protagonists in alternating POVs throughout the whole of the book, I give each separately. I’ve interwoven the inner and secondary conflicts and their triggers as those develop and change as the book progresses. Josef – Josef lost his mother as a boy and has grown up in a Catholic orphanage, the nuns of which now provide him shelter and scholarship as he studies literature at the university. Unlike his brother, who grabs the world by the horns and relishes in causing it pain, Josef is a thinker and dreamer. He desperately wants to be a writer like the American ones whose work he devours. A professor chides him for writing in English a tale of a lost soldier modeled after the father Josef barely knew, and suggests he find his own story. Just as the war begins, he witnesses an attack of a Jewish student (one which he came close to participating in due to his brother’s prompting) and attempts to return the spectacles lost in the fray, only to find the student has moved to America. Josef writes of this story, is once again chastised for trying to write someone else’s story, and stops writing as the Soviets take the city and he is forced to leave the university and find work, along with other protected intellectuals, in a typhus vaccine lab. As the city is invaded again by the Nazis, Mariem, the fiancé of the student whose attack he witnessed, arrives at the convent, having been brutally attacked and raped. He and one of the nuns, a friend from the orphanage, hide Mariem among the sisters until it is discovered she is pregnant. He feels he must assuage his guilt for failing to protect the attacked Jewish student by helping to further protect her and the baby she births. He is forced to ask his brother, now a pimp to “protected” Jewish women, to hide Mariem. When his brother attacks her and tries to harm the baby, Josef kills his brother, then flees after Mariem to the resistance forces outside the city, then onto the trail of Anders’ Army, the reforming Polish military corps that will be tasked with clearing the way to Allied victory in Italy. Mariem is with him all along, and he feels his penance for the mortal sin of fratricide is to protect her and the baby for the rest of his days if she will have him. She will, but only to save herself, and when likely witnesses to his brother’s murder show up in Mariem’s field hospital ward in Egypt, Josef begs her to flee with him. Following her with the baby after she instead flees from him to Italy and then on to America, he misses the chance to be a celebrated combat soldier in the army he managed to join, a wound he will continue to worry. Yet he still feels he must continue to protect this woman that so many have harmed, as well as the baby who is the result of that harm. Converting to Judaism and becoming a literary agent to support his young family, Josef remains in the loveless marriage, watches as his son—known to no one not to be his own—becomes the celebrated novelist Josef always meant to be himself. Mariem, in and out of residential mental hospitals, may be the key to his writing their story at long last, and he brings her to their successful son’s Catskills cabin to write for one year the tale of their journey. When Mariem takes her own life on the same night as their granddaughter is born, Josef shifts his goals to being all he can for that baby, young Mira, and while he continues to try to write their journey, he gives it up in the last years of his life, hoping that his son or his granddaughter will someday find the words he cannot bring himself to destroy and write them into the book he always meant to write. Mariem – Young Mariem’s family has been shunted from her prosperous home to the flat of her more conservative uncle. Her father, a doctor now allowed only to practice in the Jewish quarter, is desperately saving money while they await their visas to emigrate to America, a place he believes to be a haven, something Mariem cannot abide. Just before the Nazis and Soviets invade, Mariem’s fiancé is attacked and after he leaves her behind for America, she suffers from disillusionment that he will not wait for her and forms a dangerous predilection for the chaos that engulfs their city. As the war escalates, her mother is lost to typhus and her father shifts his goal of escape to America to aiding in vaccine production, leaving Mariem unmoored. She acts as a resistance courier and has a dalliance with a Soviet soldier who reveals his Judaism to her. As the Nazis invade yet again, she herself is attacked and raped, leaving her to seek aid at the convent where a young Catholic scholar, a boy who once tried to contact her fiancé before he left for America, resides. The trauma of her attack causes her a mental break, and when she discovers she is pregnant, the boy, Josef, and one of the sisters of the convent help her hide with a Polish farming family, hoping she will marry the oldest son. Instead, she gives birth in the barn, witnessed by an Italian soldier Maurizio who, while allied to the Nazis, is a conscript who sees saving this young madonna as his new mission. He helps her and Josef escape onto the trail of Anders’ Army, but not before Josef’s brother Harald abuses her and harms the baby, causing her to flee to the resistance in the hills, where Mariem believes Maurizio will come to her and be more than her savior, but a love who will follow after them when he can. When he does not follow, she is dissociated from their plight and the baby born to her, but follows Josef, thinking that if she can return to being pure, become good through acting as a nurse to soldiers as her father was a doctor, all will be well, and more importantly, that she will be good enough for Maurizio. When Josef comes to her after recognizing wounded soldiers in her ward are men who may have seen them at the time of Harald’s murder, she escapes from Josef and the baby too, believing she is being called to Maurizio’s side finally. Maurizio has returned to his hometown from his service, after Italy has surrendered, but has joined a monastery, never meaning to be more than a guardian angel to Mariem. Considering herself rejected again, Mariem makes her way with demobbing soldiers back to Brooklyn, where she attempts to get the courage up to approach her former fiancé, only to have Josef and the baby find her before she can, whereafter her fiancé rejects her. Teetering on the edge of madness throughout the next years, she seeks to find coherence in the events of her life, first hoping that Josef will write their story, then that her son will. Along the way, she devises a new storyline for herself by a few years’ affair with her former fiancé while her son is a teenager, but when he breaks it off and her son goes away to college to write his own stories, never having written hers, she has a breakdown and spends the next seven years in a mental hospital. Following a suicide attempt there, Josef retrieves her and brings her to stay with him for a year in the Catskills cabin their son has bought, where she agrees to attempt to write her own story alongside him, but in her own warped way. When she realizes, by the end of the year, that she and he will never succeed, she concludes, after the birth of her granddaughter Mira, that if she removes herself from this life, the newborn baby may be her namesake and continue to write toward an understanding she was never able to achieve. She kills herself that evening, but continues beyond her death to influence Mira in a way that becomes clear to the reader, watching her throughout her life and waiting on the side of the path for Mira to catch up to her and carry Mariem forward, her past finally understood as Mira has reconstructed it. Mira – Mira began life as the namesake of her grandmother, victim of trauma, mental illness, and suicide. Her father is a celebrated novelist prone to drink, her mother an ambitious academic who does not relish her role as a mother, leaving Mira to find the love she needs from her grandfather, her GJoe, who nurtures her and is companion to her, accepting her for what she is, even as she comes to realize what that means. When her mother rejects her as a queer woman, and GJoe dies, Mira changes her career focus from Soviet Jewish history, a subject of interest due to what her grandfather and grandmother lost in the Shoah, to clergy, a career her father prompts her pursue, rather than academia, his ex-wife’s path. On her first sabbatical after her father’s death, she lives in the Catskills cabin that was her father’s and forms chapters of her grandfather’s writing about the lead-up to the war into the beginnings of a book of their story. Stymied during her second sabbatical by what little he or her grandmother left behind of their experience of the next phase of the war, when the Soviets held the city, she dredges up her old passion for Soviet Jewish history, as well as delves into what she can surmise from materials her father provided her and that she has found in the Catskills cabin. Making this work impossible is the fact that her wife Leah has left her just on the cusp of this time away, and she discovers some weeks into the sabbatical that Leah has been diagnosed with late-stage cancer and has run off to die alone, not wanting to face the treatments her own mother suffered to no avail. A melancholy settles over Mira as the writing falters and the realities of her own life demand much of her. It is only her spirituality, her children away at school, and the thought of her project and not ending like her namesake did that keep her going. Meanwhile, she realizes that she might need the help of Joss, her longtime childhood friend, with whom she tested her sexuality as a teen. He is the literary executor of her father’s estate and reins over his papers, some of which may offer clues to the story of her grandparents she is still determined to tell. When they do meet, all ends in friction, and she sinks deeper into depression, even as she tries to work. Her mother comes to see her, trying to make amends for all the years she hasn’t been accepting of her, and offers her a job on the university campus where she works. When Joss finds her seeking solace at the synagogue for Yom Kippur services, she means to try again to work with him. Before they can begin, she is so conflicted about what that means, with the offer of her mother’s and all that she is still reeling in with her wife’s departure and impending death, that she begs off from breaking fast with him and returns to the cabin. There she finds the elderly fiancé of her grandmother, finally coming forward to break his silence and aid her in confirming facts for the story. His words prompt Mira to look again in the cabin for what papers might have been hidden there, even from her, and she does indeed find them, including writings by her namesake. These show her the true story of her father’s conception, the traumas her grandmother and grandfather suffered, all in a barrage that no amount of praying can stem or salve. Once again, she considers taking the path of her namesake, leaving the world and this project, especially as the new writings show her that beloved GJoe was not her grandfather after all. But at the site of her namesake’s suicide, she reconsiders, feeling his love even then, and hearing the voices of all, past and present, who will help her write forward. She continues to write, and despite publishers who ultimately want her to whitewash the story into one that ends in hope, she determines, with the help of her new wife, a documentarian from current-day Lviv, Ukraine, to ensure that the full truth of her grandparents’ experiences and all that proceeded from them are eventually told. Joss – Joss grew up without his mother and with an absent father, always away on business in Europe, leaving others at the family’s Catskills mountaintop resort to raise him. From a young age, he sought the company of Manny Darowski, celebrated novelist and a friend in her youth of his deceased mother, asking him questions about her. As the novelist becomes more and more a father figure to him, albeit reluctantly, Joss eventually asks questions about Manny himself, his history, and his work. Manny’s daughter Mira also becomes focal for Joss, and as they grow from playmates to fast friends in their teen years, Joss realizes he loves her. Before leaving for college, they attempt one awkward and painful sexual encounter, which Joss romanticizes, despite Mira’s clear rejection of him as more than a friend, unable to bring himself to accept her sexual preference for women, his sister Etta among them. Years later, he is a budding academic, a scholar on Darowski’s fiction, his literary executor, but still not taken seriously in academia since he has yet to augment his journal scholarship with a book. An adjunct under department chair Lisha Sandoval Darowski, who is Mira’s mother and Manny Darowski’s ex-wife, he guards his Darowski archives from others as much as he can. When Mira arrives for her sabbatical, Joss realizes he needs some of the materials she might still have and needs as well to heal things over with her. When they meet, he makes a gaffe about her wife Leah and loses the best chance he has of working with her and mending their relationship. Eventually, he realizes he’s been selfish with the archival material and tries to make peace with Lisha, allowing her the access she seeks to help her memoir writing, and further suggests the two of them try again to work with Mira. He is still worried about this, and it is only with the aid of the elderly fiancé of Mira’s grandmother that he musters the courage to renew his relationship that Yom Kippur. He goes on to work alongside the two women and marry a colleague who has long sought his attention. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: Setting The setting of Lvov, Poland in the spring of 1939 is one fraught with growing nationalistic policies, popular anti-Semitic attitudes, and more open aggressions against Jews than ever before, despite a long-established, diverse Jewish community that makes up nearly a third of the population. This story unfolds at the university, a petri dish of the city’s attitudes, and that of the wider nation and Europe. We are in courtyards where Jews are subject to knife attacks on student-sanctioned and administration-ignored “Free of Jews days.” We are in classrooms where Jews stand rather than sit on the ghetto benches to hear the lectures of professors, some of whom decided for the sake of their careers to convert from Judaism to Catholicism. We are in garden sheds behind convents where many nuns shun Jews when the war begins as deserving of their fates, even as some are righteous actors in their salvation. We are in the rooms of Poles who debate the place and morality of Jews even as they sink into card games and illicit sexual encounters. We are in markets and doctor’s offices and flats in the Jewish quarter, suffering the current state of things and readying for the next wave of pogroms and Aktions as the city changes hands again and again, debating what it means to be Jewish, Polish, and safe. And whether it was or will ever be possible to be all of those at once. We are also in the hills beyond the city with resistance fighters of all stripes and motivations, in the farmhouses and barns of allies to the Jews if just because they recognize the immorality of the invaders. We are in typhus vaccine laboratories that strive, even as the invaders sponsor the production, to protect the population, smuggling vaccine to ghettos and sending watered-down concoctions to the Nazi front. We are on the trail of those starving and dying as they trek the whole of the Soviet Union to join the newly forming Anders’ Army, a Polish corps reborn once the Soviets considered themselves allies against the Nazis again. We are in orphanages, field hospitals, and military publications offices in Iran, Iraq, and finally Eretz Yisrael and Egypt, preparing to strike one of the final blows against the Nazis in Italy, just across a tumultuous sea. And we are in Brooklyn and the Catskills from the mid-1940s until the present day. In synagogues, yeshivas, and bakeries, in children’s hospitals, in flats above tailors’ shops, and in once-coveted well-heeled apartment buildings. We are in mental hospitals upstate and in the Catskills, summer haven for New York’s vacationing Jews, in camps and rented cabins and on docks by the lake. We view the surrounding hills from mountaintop resorts, downtown coffee shops, and doctor’s houses, in police stations, post offices, shops, and cafes under siege by protesting students from the university campus, itself a place of division and ever-warring factions. And finally, we are in a mountaintop cabin that housed three generations of pain, of writers striving to know themselves and the truths they each tried to hide from one another. There we are witness to this and other struggles, including births and deaths under the moon as man first walked on it. And down below it, we are at a stream that leads to and from the falls, where one story ends and another begins.

Hey hey! It’s Wednesday! Welcome back, friends! During out podcast recordings, Sarah mentioned that either someone on a subreddit she follows or a discord she’s in treats themselves for making it through the sweaty summer. Isn’t that great? So I’ve decide to do the same and treat myself to a commissioned pair of Dungeons & Dragons dice. I’m starting my first in-person campaign with my partner later in the fall and I have no dice. Fabled Dragon Dice will be designing them and I’m so stoked! Also, in wonderful love-filled news. I worked a Saturday bookstore shift and my partner picked me up, got me bath stuff to enjoy while they made dinner (homemade mac & cheese), brought me wine in the tub, and also made a top notch charcuterie board for snacking. I am still dreaming about the garlic confit he included. … If you’re a crafter, you know that projects take way more time than we might realize. So if you’re brainstorming what to make a friend or family member who loves books, Autostraddle has a great DIY guide on how to make miniature replicas of books! Making someone a mini bookshelf of their favorite reads sounds like a wonderful idea. … Saturday, August 20th is Bookstore Romance Day! I’m running a virtual panel that afternoon, if any of you are available and want to attend. (Register here!) I’d love to have ya! You can also check to see if your local independent bookstore is doing something in celebration. … I am very curious about this movie, Spin Me Round. The movie poster is designed like a romance cover, but I get more thriller vibes from the trailer. It’s out this week! … Check out this adorable artwork for Denise Williams’ Will You Take This Man! You can get this as a print if you preorder through Dog Eared Books’ Ames location. … Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way! View the full article

Someday My Duke Will Come Someday My Duke Will Come by Christina Britton is $1.99 at select vendors! This the second book in the Isle of Synne series and we’ve featured the first book on sale previously and the third book is currently discounted. This historical romance features a fake engagement, which can be some major catnip. A fake engagement becomes the real thing in the next book in the series New York Times bestselling author Grace Burrowes calls “first-rate Regency fun!” Lady Clara Ashford’s world changed fifteen years ago at the hands of a rogue who took her innocence. Determined never to give into temptation again, she settles into a life as caregiver for her family. With her younger sister recently engaged and about to embark on a life of her own, Clara feels adrift and without purpose―until Quincy, the new Duke of Reigate, arrives on her doorstep in need of a fake fiancée. When Quincy Nesbitt unexpectedly inherits a dukedom, he’s determined to do his best by the title. One thing he won’t do? Marry a woman he’s never met just because she was engaged to his older brother. So, he enlists Lady Clara’s help, since he can’t marry another when he’s engaged to her. But as they pretend for the ton, Quincy finds himself falling for real. Now, he just has to convince Lady Clara to take a chance on him. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Seven Nights in a Rogue’s Bed Seven Nights in a Rogue’s Bed by Anna Campbell is $1.99! This is the first book in the Sons of Sin series and has some heavy Beauty and the Beast vibes. Some readers felt this was a beautiful, emotional romance, but some felt the second half was more interesting than the first. Will a week of seduction… Desperate to save her sister’s life, Sidonie Forsythe has agreed to submit herself to a terrible fate: Beyond the foreboding walls of Castle Craven, a notorious, hideously scarred scoundrel will take her virtue over the course of seven sinful nights. Yet instead of a monster, she encounters a man like no other. And during this week, she comes to care for Jonas Merrick in ways that defy all logic—even as a dark secret she carries threatens them both. …Spark a lifetime of passionate surrender? Ruthless loner Jonas knows exactly who he is. Should he forget, even for a moment, the curse he bears, a mere glance in the mirror serves as an agonizing reminder. So when the lovely Sidonie turns up on his doorstep, her seduction is an even more delicious prospect than he originally planned. But the hardened outcast is soon moved by her innocent beauty, sharp wit, and surprising courage. Now as dangerous enemies gather at the gate to destroy them, can their new, fragile love survive? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Welcome to the Goddamned Ice Cube by Blair Braverman is $1.99! This is a memoir by a woman who learned to drive sled dogs! If you aren’t following Blair on Twitter, I highly suggest you do. There is lots of good dog content. By the time Blair Braverman was eighteen, she had left her home in California, moved to arctic Norway to learn to drive sled dogs, and found work as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. Determined to carve out a life as a “tough girl”—a young woman who confronts danger without apology—she slowly developed the strength and resilience the landscape demanded of her. By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube brilliantly recounts Braverman’s adventures in Norway and Alaska. Settling into her new surroundings, Braverman was often terrified that she would lose control of her dog team and crash her sled, or be attacked by a polar bear, or get lost on the tundra. Above all, she worried that, unlike the other, gutsier people alongside her, she wasn’t cut out for life on the frontier. But no matter how out of place she felt, one thing was clear: she was hooked on the North. On the brink of adulthood, Braverman was determined to prove that her fears did not define her—and so she resolved to embrace the wilderness and make it her own. Assured, honest, and lyrical, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube paints a powerful portrait of self-reliance in the face of extraordinary circumstance. Braverman endures physical exhaustion, survives being buried alive in an ice cave, and drives her dogs through a whiteout blizzard to escape crooked police. Through it all, she grapples with love and violence—navigating a grievous relationship with a fellow musher, and adapting to the expectations of her Norwegian neighbors—as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a man’s land. Weaving fast-paced adventure writing and ethnographic journalism with elegantly wrought reflections on identity, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of Braverman’s journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Kissed by Magic Kissed by Magic by Erica Ridley is FREE! This is the first book in the Magic & Mayhem series. Seems light and silly if that’s what you’re after right now! If you haven’t listened to Ridley on the podcast yet, check it out! Enjoy an Outlander-meets-Frozen romantic comedy from a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author: Adventurer Lance Desmond needs to produce a fortune before his arch-rival collects the bounty on his head. He risks an ancient curse to retrieve treasure hidden within icebound Castle Cavanaugh, only to become trapped inside. Not with the gold he so desperately needs, but with medieval Princess Marigold who’s been cooling her heels since…well, medieval times. The lonely princess refuses to acknowledge the blossoming attraction between them. Not just because she deserves a better future than a penniless rogue. But because at midnight, he’ll vanish like all her other would-be heroes. And the evergreen in the parlor will have one more figurine hanging from its boughs… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

A writing community can take many forms, from an established website like Writer Unboxed, to an online group you participate with over Facebook or Discord, to an in-person group you meet up with monthly at a local library, to a critique partner you rely upon who lives on the other side of the world. And that’s just a start. This year’s OnConference was built to honor COMMUNITY, pushing beyond the traditional online conference experience to provide unique opportunities to connect with one another throughout the event. (Click HERE to learn more about that.) Beyond the community activities we have planned for our 3-week event, our community lounge will stay open for 4 full months, allowing you to gather for writing-related activities through the end of 2022. All to say that we understand how important community can be to a writer’s life; it can not only help you to persevere in the writing craft, but can help you to be a better writer overall. It has done just that for so many of us. So it makes sense that this year’s scholarship opportunity be about community as well. Who should apply? If you’re interested in an OnConference focused on deep craft and community-centric extras– If you, too, know the value of a writing community and would like to forge new connections through this event– If you have a story to tell about the positive impact community has had on you and your writing life– If you might not otherwise be able to participate in this year’s OnConference but are seriously interested– then we hope you’ll consider applying for WU’s Community Scholarship. How to enter: Please send the following to unconference@writerunboxed.com: A response to this prompt: “How has COMMUNITY helped to support you and your writing? How has it helped to propel you forward?” (300 words or less, in the body of the email) A Word document or PDF attachment showing five consecutive pages of your manuscript Optional: A response to this prompt: “Is there anyone else within your community that you would award an OnConference ticket to if you could? Why?” (150 words or less, in the body of the email) Application deadline for this scholarship is Wednesday, August 31st. Don’t be shy! If you value community and would like to participate in the upcoming OnConference, we’d love to hear from you. WU Community: How have others supported you, helped to evolve your craft, and kept you inspired? Even if you are not applying for the scholarship, we’d love to hear from you in comments. And for anyone else who is interested in our event, you can read more about the OnConference on Eventbrite. About Writer Unboxed began as a collaboration between Therese Walsh and Kathleen Bolton in 2006. Since then the site has grown to include ~50 regular contributors--including bestselling authors and industry leaders--and frequent guests. In 2014, the first Writer Unboxed UnConference (part UNtraditional conference, part intensive craft event, part networking affair) was held in Salem, MA. Learn more about our 2019 event, ESCAPE TO WuNDERLAND, on Eventbrite. In 2016, the Writer Unboxed team published a book with Writer's Digest. AUTHOR IN PROGRESS: A No-Holds-Barred Guide to What It Really Takes to Get Published has been well-received by readers who seek help in overcoming the hurdles faced at every step of the novel-writing process--from setting goals, researching, and drafting to giving and receiving critiques, polishing prose, and seeking publication. James Scott Bell has said of the guide, "Nourishment for the writer's soul and motivation for the writer's heart." You can follow Writer Unboxed on Twitter, and join our thriving Facebook community. Twitter | Facebook | More Posts [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

The CrimeReads editors select the season’s best debut novels. * Latoya Watkins, Perish (Tiny Reparations) In this devastating debut, generational trauma has riven a Black Texas family, but the death of their matriarch may give the family a final chance to tell unvarnished truths to each other and maybe, finally, heal. Latoya Watkins’ impassioned prose brings to life her complex characters and their heavy internal struggles, as well as the flawed, but overwhelming, love they feel for one another. –MO Rasheed Newson, My Government Means to Kill Me (Flatiron) You don’t want to miss My Government Means to Kill Me, the debut novel from Rasheed Newson, producer and writer of such acclaimed series as Bel-Air, The Chi, and Narcos. His novel is a powerful story about Trey, a young, gay, Black man in 1980s New York City as he comes of age personally and politically. Newson’s writing is crisp and clear, witty and engrossing—the kind of prose that pulls you in so quickly you’ll miss your subway stop (and I did). Do you like footnotes? If so, then this is the book for you: extremely thoughtful and clever on narrative, thematic, and formal levels, unfolding meaning in every possible place, My Government Means to Kill Me is a tour-de-force. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know (William Morrow) In Katie Gutierrez’s powerhouse debut, a woman with two husbands loses one to the violence of the other, and a true crime writer uncovers shocking secrets decades after. I love this book more than Delores “Lore” Rivera loves both her families and now you have to read this book to understand what I mean. –MO Dwyer Murphy, An Honest Living (Viking) If Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc smoked pot, or if Michael Connelly was from Paris, their books might read a little something like Dwyer Murphy’s absurdly entertaining and extremely literary debut, An Honest Living. A lawyer is hired by an old man’s younger wife to find out if he’s been selling off her book collection. Actually, someone pretending to be the wife hired the lawyer, and now the real wife is trying to solve two mysteries—who would bother to impersonate her, and why did her husband send her a box of rare books and pamphlets just before his untimely demise? Those who enjoy New York settings and forays into the world of rare books will particularly enjoy this rollicking yet literary read. –MO Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle (Zando) This is the lesbian Sasquatch novel you’ve always wanted. A group of finalists for a Bachelor-style show head to a remote British Columbian island to film the final episodes of the contest. While there, they encounter a female Bigfoot and her coterie of admirers, and those that do not admire her (as they properly should) are torn limb from limb because this is the most badass book imaginable. Patricia is the Sasquatch, by the way. The publisher describes it as “viciously funny” but I thought it was also kinda sweet. I’d give Patricia a cuddle. –MO Joey Hartstone, The Local (Doubleday) In this small town legal thriller that also happens to feel very noir, a federal judge in a tiny Texas community has managed to make his court a hub of intellectual property law that draws lawsuits from across the nation. Each big city law firm finds, to the dismay of its pressed and tailored lawyers, that it needs a local attorney to sway the jury in favor of any case. That’s where the sleezy sleuth of The Local comes in, cashing in and boozing away his winnings until the murder of the judge, who also happens to be his father figure, sends him on the long, sober path to the truth. –MO Adam White, The Midcoast (Hogarth) The Midcoast is the story of the rise and fall of the astonishingly-upwardly-mobile Thatch family, told from the perspective of their old friend Andrew. Now, the Thatches are wealthy, powerful, and accused of a horrific crime, and all Andrew can do is try to reconcile the people they are now with the people he once were. The novel is set in the tiny seaside town of Damariscotta, Maine, which makes the whole affair feel more personal; this is a story about friends, and neighbors, and the strangers who secretly live among them. Both cozy and chilling! –OR Conner Habib, Hawk Mountain (Norton) A supremely tense debut, Conner Habib’s Hawk Mountain channels Patricia Highsmith by way of Hitchcock, with a chance encounter on a beach that throws two men—one of them a long ago bully, the other the bullied—into a present-day collision. Habib builds the sense of dread with slow, carefully meted out notes of obsession and intuition. –DM Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling (Knopf) Leila Mottley is a name to pay attention to. An Oakland Youth Laureate, and still only 19, Mottley has written the next great Oakland novel: her debut, called Nightcrawling. Nightcrawling is the gritty story of a life lived in poverty and desperation: teenager Kiara and her brother are on their own since their single mother had a breakdown, the rent on their tiny apartment has just doubled, and Kiara is forced into sex work to make ends meet. At an age when she should be experiencing the luxury of finding out who she is, and all the self-involvement that is part of coming-of age, she is forced to be the breadwinner and matriarch of her family, all the while coming into contact with the vile and corrupt police force, and trying to escape the cycles of poverty and survive in a country that offers no roadmap for how to do so. Mottley ties the story of Kiara’s urgent experience of race and class in America to a universal understanding of the way we use and abuse Black women, the fine line they must toe to be the perfect citizen, what it means to live in such a flawed society. Love for Oakland seeps through these page: loving the idea of it, loving what it is supposed to be, while having to reckon with the complexity of what it is now, a city with a notoriously violent and broken police force, a city of high-speed gentrification, a city pushing out those who made it what it was. Holding both sides of this coin and being able to tell of it is its own piece of artistry, let alone everything else that occurs in this fiery novel. Nightcrawling will make you desperate, it will make you awed, it will make you read anything that Mottley should ever choose to write.​ –Julia Hass, LitHub contributing editor View the full article

Hello to my fellow empaths (a term defined by researchers as ‘the opposite of psychopaths’). As a group, we’re benefited and handicapped by our sensitivity to other people’s feelings. It’s what keeps us from torturing and killing humans and other animals—it’s also what might stop us from becoming CEOs, surgeons, and military generals, professions that require their practitioners to do things like sabotage colleagues, cut open brains with steady hands, and easily weigh the cost-benefit analysis of murdering x-number of civilians to wipe out one prolific terrorist cell. As Paul Frick, a psychologist at Louisiana State University, puts it, “They don’t care if someone is mad at them. They don’t care if they hurt someone’s feelings. If they can get what they want without being cruel, that’s often easier, but at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever works best.” As someone who cares way too much what other people feel, female psychopathy, in particular has always fascinated me. The idea of another woman skating through life without any shame brings both admiration and a touch of jealousy. Wouldn’t it be nice to never feel afraid? To feel beautiful, brilliant and successful at all times? To not care what other people think, because you think you know best? Of course, empathy proves preferable in the long run. Psychopaths love being loved, but cannot think of other people as anything more than possessions. They operate on pure self-interest at the expense of emotional connections—and while aloneness doesn’t necessarily strike them with a sense of deprivation (they love themselves too much to ever feel truly lonely), trading places with them would rip away the joy, warmth and love that make our empath lives worth living. In her book, Confessions of a Sociopath, female psychopath M.E. Thomas—who prefers the term “sociopath,” a phrase used to describe “pro-social” psychopaths (i.e., people who use their psychopathic traits for self-advancement, without ever breaking the law)—describes her capacity for human connection like this: “I’ve allowed myself to be tamed by people in order to have longer-lasting relationships, but the animalistic urge to destroy is always bubbling underneath the surface.” My first true crime book, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, is not about psychopaths. (Morgan Geyser, the primary assailant in the Slenderman case, was 12 years-old at the time of her crime, and suffered from undiagnosed, early-onset childhood schizophrenia. Her co-defendant, Anissa Weier, was also 12 and dealing with a mental illness. The State of Wisconsin prosecuted both little girls as adults. Slenderman provides the first full account of the case.) But in my spare time, I almost exclusively read books—both fiction and nonfiction—about female psychopaths. My fellow crime fanatics know that people commit grisly acts of violence for all sorts of reasons—greed, desperation, fear. But some do it simply because they like to watch people suffer. These are, in some ways, the most interesting kinds of criminals. But only from a distance. The following list comprises some of the most chilling stories I’ve ever read about female psychopaths. Some are true. Some are not. But they’re all unforgettable. I won’t bother with individual trigger warnings. Suffice it to say that every single title is, in its own unique way, truly upsetting. What Lies Between Us: A Novel By John Marrs Nina and her mother, Maggie, share a house. And without giving anything away, their living arrangements can only be described as “hauntingly weird.” From page one, we sense that Maggie’s entire life is ruled by guilt—that she has mysteriously wronged Nina in unforgivable ways. The truth, of course, is much more complicated. This book kept me guessing until the very end. As in most of John Marrs’ writing, the twists and turns are suspenseful and shocking, grounded in universal human experiences that are taken to their most violent and extreme conclusions. (In this case, the thorny bond between mothers and daughters, and the lengths to which one would go to protect her child, are twisted into a rollercoaster ride of a “whodunit”—it’s not always clear which woman is the psychopath.) For horror fans that appreciate the darkest, most stomach-churning thrillers, I cannot recommend this book enough. Good Me Bad Me: A Novel By Ali Land Milly’s Mom is not like other Moms… She’s a serial killer. After finding the courage to turn in her mother to the police, Milly escapes to live with the perfect foster family. But dark details from her old life back still haunt her. Dark urges plague her, too. Despite her best intentions, Milly’s horrifying past slowly creeps into the present. Preparing to act as a witness at her mother’s criminal trial not only triggers Milly’s PTSD, but also raises uncomfortable questions about Milly’s role in her mother’s killing spree. Was Milly really just a passive victim in her mother’s house of horrors? Or did she participate in the game? Is it possible to be a victim, and a perpetrator? Ali Land’s masterful debut raises these and other groundbreaking questions about the fine line between nature and nurture. With a monster for a mother, can Milly ever truly outgrow the evil she experienced as a child? Or does that same evil live inside of her, too? Good Me Bad Me is an addictive, voice-driven psychological thriller, and a must-read. But not for the faint of heart. If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood By Gregg Olsen Female psychopath Shelly Knotek brought in boarders who never left her house—and in a grisly twist, she not only tortured her victims, she also brainwashed them into torturing themselves. All the while, Shelly was raising three daughters: Nikki, Sami and Tori. The sisters survived their upbringing, and after more than a decade, they shared their unbelievable true story with the brilliant, best-selling author, Gregg Olsen. This startling gem of a book is equal parts horrifying and empowering. It outlines Shelly’s horrifying crimes in minute detail. But in the end, it’s really a story about the unwavering bond of sisterhood. That’s really all I can say about it. I just love it so much. Then She Was Gone: A Novel By Lisa Jewell Lisa Jewell is prolific as hell and always manages to produce some new treasure. This book in particular acted as my personal gateway into her entire literary canon—because of it, I’ve read everything else she has ever written. Then She Was Gone tells the strikingly macabre story of 15-year-old Ellie Mack’s disappearance. It’s a gripping mystery told through multiple perspectives, full of richly-drawn female characters. (One of them is very scary.) Ten years after Ellie’s disappearance, her mother Laurel struggles to find closure and seize what life she has left. She starts dating a man named Floyd. But his daughter eerily resembles Ellie, which makes it hard to start over. What follows is a thrill ride of secrets, lies and evil deeds. As we get to the bottom of what really happened to Ellie, each new dramatic twist is surpassed by the next, leading to a shocking conclusion that is, in its own way, also beautiful. Small Sacrifices By Ann Rule If you’re reading this, you probably already know that Ann Rule is the queen and king of true crime. Her book, The Stranger Beside Me is one of the best books ever written, in any genre. Small Sacrifices, her sixth true crime book, is a creative masterpiece about Diane Downs, who shot her three young children, then brought them to the hospital, claiming a maniac (other than herself) had done it. The book explores the various forces in Downs’ life that gave her a motive to murder, and traces law enforcement’s epic quest to prosecute Downs (this was 1983, so DNA was not an option), who was beautiful, captivating, and courted the press to tell her own manipulative version of the story (“They took my kids away!”). It’s a fascinating tale and, as always, Rule is in her element when telling it. Mother’s Day: The Shocking Story of a Mother Who Murdered Her Two Daughters with The Help of Her Own Sons by Dennis McDougal In 1985, Theresa Cross stuffed her injured adult daughter into a 2×2 storage locker. “After three days,” the jacket description reads, “the knocking, kicking, and cries stopped.” Mother’s Day unveils the nuanced criminal profile of a powerfully charismatic Mom, with a grisly imagination, who managed to persuade her own sons to commit familicide. Were they psychopaths too, or simply brainwashed pawns in their mother’s game? Read to find out. *** View the full article

The title came to me first. Love in the Time of Serial Killers. I was reading another true crime book – probably not The Phantom Prince by Ted Bundy’s ex, but it’s thematic so let’s go with that one – and I thought, how the hell are you supposed to fall for someone when the threat of this is out there? Turns out that a character obsessed with true crime is kind of the ideal romance novel protagonist. For one, they are ready to bring the drama. In Tessa Bailey’s My Killer Vacation, for example, Taylor Bassey is an elementary school teacher who is also a die-hard true crime podcast listener. So when she comes across a dead body in her Cape Cod vacation rental, she is ready to tackle what could be the crime of the century as far as she’s concerned. “Dammit,” she thinks at one point, “I knew I was getting in too deep with my true crime podcasts. Now everything is a life or death situation.” That extremism extends to her relationship with bounty hunter Myles Sumner once he shows up on the scene. The chemistry between them is immediately dialed up to 11 and the fun, romp-y murder mystery-romance that ensues has the energy of a true crime TikTok analyzing the latest trending case. A fixation on true crime can also be an effective way to keep someone at a distance. In Christina Lauren’s My Favorite Half-Night Stand, Millie Morris is a professor specializing in female serial killers, and she definitely wields that knowledge to “test” people, or put up a barrier, or distract them from her own vulnerability. In one hilarious scene, she leaves a message on a potential date’s answering machine: “I’m not sure if you remember me or not – we saw Girl on the Train together at the dollar theater last summer? You kept insisting that the new wife couldn’t be the killer because she was a mother, and I argued that forty-two percent of children killed by a parent are killed by the mother, alone or with an accomplice. Um, anyway, I have this thing in June and I was wondering if you’d like to be my date.” What an absolute baller move, quoting murder statistics as a lead-up to asking someone out! Her best friend, Reid Campbell, who just happens to be listening, and also happens to be the titular “half-night stand” that she’s trying to pretend didn’t mean anything, is there to call her out on it. He’s there to call her out on all her avoidant behavior throughout the whole book, which she masks behind a tough persona of someone who’s well-versed in the darkest sides of humanity. The second book in Roni Loren’s Say Everything series, What If You & Me, deals explicitly with this dynamic. Andi Lockley is a horror novelist and true crime podcaster whose entire career has been built off telling scary fictional stories and warning people about the scary stuff that can happen in real life. In her case, she has very real PTSD arising from her own experiences with violence. So when her sexy neighbor Hill Dawson comes to her aid one night, she’s still wary – “just because someone was a neighbor didn’t mean they were someone worth knowing, someone worth trusting.” The most beautiful part of Andi and Hill’s relationship journey is the way they do come to trust each other, the way they communicate their needs and limits as they work through their individual traumas. At one point, Andi compares horror stories and love stories to each other, saying that both can involve obsession, being at someone’s else’s mercy. “Both involve death,” she says, and it may sound extreme, but it’s not. There is a metaphorical death that comes with the death of a dream, the end of a relationship. The person craving the cathartic end to a horror movie where everything is okay can be the same person craving the happily ever after in a romance, too. Alexis Hall’s Murder Most Actual is more cozy mystery than romance per se, but the relationship between not-so-happily-married Liza and Hanna is a crucial storyline. Liza is another true crime podcaster, a career that has caused some tension with Hanna, who works in finance and doesn’t understand why Liza would be drawn to her work. When the couple takes a last-ditch, let’s-save-the-relationship-with-a-romantic-getaway trip to a Scottish castle, Liza’s career becomes all-too-relevant as their fellow guests turn up murdered one by one. The parallels between analyzing a crime scene and analyzing a relationship are sharply funny, with Liza ruminating at one point about how relationships need forensics to figure them out. “You should be able to send arguments off to a lab and get a little report back saying, ‘this happened because your mother-in-law is an unbearable snob,’ or ‘Trace DNA evidence shows that you definitely did say you were going to be back late this evening and your wife just didn’t hear you because she never pays attention.” I would absolutely want the same person zooming in on the Gabby Petito video footage to be the one to help me analyze a crush’s Instagram feed. Wouldn’t you? Phoebe Walsh, the main character in Love in the Time of Serial Killers, exhibits all the signs of a true crime obsessive falling in love. She tweaks window blinds to spy on her neighbor, justifying it as the necessary keeping tabs on a suspicious guy. She resorts to quoting from her doctoral dissertation when she wants to keep him at a distance, scare him off by talking about In Cold Blood again. She tells anyone who will listen that she’s onto him, that she won’t be taken in, when she’s already in so deep that she doesn’t want to admit it even to herself. In romance, characters just want to feel safe and cared for. So how do you fall in love in a time of serial killers, of Ted Bundy and Dear John and guys who f*ck with cats? You try to remember that there are good people in the world, and you try to find them. (And, probably, you flip through your true crime library every once in a while, just to make sure there aren’t any red flags you might’ve missed.) *** View the full article

The frontier of the American West has dominated the cultural consciousness on this continent for centuries, dating back to the earliest era of colonial settlement during which the threshold between the familiar and the wild was drawn along what would now be considered the east coast. As colonial expansion has moved ever westward, exploring and transforming these territories has become emblematic of something indelible in the American experience—confronting the unknown, the dangerous, and the terrifying. The earliest figures to participate in this effort did so during a time of ubiquitous religious observance. Their most fundamental beliefs were challenged by the unpredictability and desperation encountered by those attempting to make a life in a new and wildly dangerous environment. The mania that gripped Salem in the late 17th Century would mark the beginning of something of a tradition. A collision brewed between the deeply held beliefs and fears born from the pious and superstitious soil of the old world and the constant, ambient fear inherent to living in the new. The iconic literature and theater that has told this story, including most famously Arthur Miller’s THE CRUCIBLE, explores that anxiety and terror. Newer additions to this specific ‘canon’ would include Robert Eggers’ THE WITCH, which similarly submerges the viewer into this strange stew where characters must navigate the settling of an untamed environment while facing their darkest, most unspoken fears. The stories of Lewis and Clark, Fremont and Kit Carson brought home tales of not just the perils and dangers of the natural world, but new and terrifying lore, mythology and nightmares that would become associated with these territories. Creatures like the wendigo and the skinwalker would go on to not only inspire folk tales, literature and film including 2022’s ANTLERS by Scott Cooper, but even further as genuine cultural artifacts in the form of the conspiracy theories that surround “Skinwalker Ranch”, both examples of generational horror content being inspired by this same expansion. Perhaps the most terrifying manifestation of horror in the American west, however, is that which has and continues to unfold between iconic figures from the American West, from gunslingers like To Horn and Wyatt Earp to bank robbers like Jesse James. These men were violent, often sociopathic murderers who left a wake of bloodshed and grief behind their often short and horrific lives. The entries into the canon of western literature are too many to mention, though examples like Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN stand out as not only a western classic but one which crucially and ruthlessly examines the monsters that men can become. Contemporary film has similarly explored this carnage, a recent example being BONE TOMAHAWK by Craig Zahler – a piece that is every bit a horror movie while also being adequately representative of the kind of violence and fear one could routinely face when living on the frontier. Taylor Sheridan’s “Frontier Trilogy” perfectly explore the ways in which the hypnotic spell of this environment remains capable of producing the worst of all behaviors. Similarly, both RESERVATION BLUES and INDIAN KILLER by Sherman Alexie explore the kind of violence and misbehavior manifesting in the modern world within the cultural wake of the abuse and subjugation experienced by Native Americans in the west. While these books do not belong in the “horror” genre, they delve into cultural wounds and trauma born of a chapter (or several) in our history that can only be described as horrifying. Our present era, still fraught with the constant presence of dangers posed by the natural world in an age of climate change, is no less terrifying. The American West remains a persistently dangerous place, and a persistently fertile territory for fiction. *** View the full article

It’s time for another edition of Stuff We Like! I’m sharing some of my perennial travel favorites, plus new items that help make travel in COVID-times a little bit easier. Want to see? Just click that image above or click right here, and come shop with us! And if you’d like to browse some more, we have a complete Stuff We Like archive, including past Gift Guides and other posts of our favorite items. View the full article

If You're Going To Do It, Do It Right! My dad would tell me all the time "If you're going to do it, do it right!" He also shared other pearls of wisdom about doing it right the first time, believing in myself, and so on. I share these ideals with my children quite often and could give a million examples of how it's important to do things right. I'm sure you can think of your own examples as well. For example, a book that is expertly written and edited but the cover was thrown together and isn't at all eye catching. A story that starts out strong but the end is rushed and feels incomplete, etc... You're thinking of a scenario, right? Now doesn't it make you wonder why? Why did someone get just so far and leave out _______________, or in the case of my children - why did they wash the outside of the tractor window but no the inside? It wouldn't have taken much more time or effort to do it right. What stopped them? With my children, I can have those conversations and we can work together to do better next time or to rectify the situation. In the case of an author or a book, I don't always have the opportunity to have those conversations. Sometimes we can only guess as to why someone did something without doing it right. I believe every interaction is an opportunity for learning. What can we learn from another author who we feel could have done better? What can we learn from an author who does everything right? Doing it right goes hand in hand with attention to detail. Attention to detail is often heightened/improved with help from others. For example, the tractor window in the picture above - I took this picture because the sunset was glorious, but I shared the photo with the daughter who washed the windows (on only one side). She hadn't really thought about washing the inside because in reality the outside gets so much dirtier. Sharing my perspective helped her see how she could improve to do it right the next time. In the case of our own writing - being part of a critique group or at least asking for the help of another author can help bring us similar insight. The other author isn't quite so close to the project and can see those details we might overlook. They can offer us their suggestions on cover artwork or dialogue. They can show us where maybe we rushed through the final few scenes and how that left them feeling. It's always valuable to look at our work through the eyes of another. They're going to catch those details and help us make sure we are doing it right. Another time, I'll write an article about accepting that feedback - because that can also be a daunting task from time to time - but for today... let's concentrate on doing things right. As my daddy would say: "If You're Going To Do It, Do It Right!" As our time together comes to an end, let me ask you: * What is something you've done recently you wish you had done better? -Can you go back and right that wrong? * What's a favorite quote you heard as a child that you carry with you into your writing career? -Why is this quote important to you? Share your answers as a comment on this post! Hugs, ~Crystal About Today's Author: Crystal is a foodie, farmer, and friend! She has 6 children and lots of special young people who call her "mom" even if she isn't 'their' mom! She starts each day sipping coffee and milking cows with the love of her life and occasionally ends the day with a glass of wine. Crystal is raising kids and cattle while juggling cleaning jobs, bartending shifts, music gigs, her job as office manager and she escapes reality a few hours each week riding horses, paddle boarding, kayaking, and/or reading books (not all simultaneously)! And who knows, she may start blogging again sometime soon: http://bringonlemons.blogspot.com/ In the meantime, you can find her posting pics of food, cattle, and more on Instagram and Facebook! (C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Enter the Quarterly Writing Contests. Open Now![url={url}]View the full article[/url]

James Merrill with wisteria in Charlottesville, 1976. Photograph by Rachel Jacoff. In French the word merle means blackbird, a dark bird of the thrush family. A blackbird’s song marks its territory. The male has black feathers and a yellow beak. It is in the same genus as the meadowlark. Forty years after first meeting James Merrill at my teacher David Kalstone’s Chelsea apartment, I am sitting at his desk in Stonington, Connecticut, with his large Petit Larousse open before me. Searching for the meanings of our names in French, I am distracted by a blackbird perched on the windowsill, drinking a little dew and then swaying on a nearby branch. It speaks in polished, rudimentary tones with a slow tempo. Merrill’s big desk is in a small room—in an apartment of small rooms—behind a hinged bookcase that creates a very private space. Still, I can hear a train whistle, a foghorn, halyard lines clinking against the masts of sloops anchored in the harbor, church chimes, and bits of conversation from villagers below on Water Street. These must be the sounds Merrill heard, too, while working. He was an early riser and liked to give the first hours of the day to his poems, which reflect, mirrorlike, so many of my own feelings. Mirrors are also a motif in his poems—mirrors that remember us across the years, reflecting our beauty and dissolution alike. It has taken me some days to sit at his desk. Mirror in the Merrill House. Photograph by Henri Cole. In French, my name means collar, and I think immediately of the metaphysical poet George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” published in 1633, a poem in which the fervid speaker seeks more freedom in his life. It is a poem of strong feeling, almost like a rant. Like his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Merrill loved Herbert’s poems and could quote them by heart. During my twenties and thirties, perhaps there was no living poet I admired more than Merrill, and I am drawn still to this American poet, who was said to be writing even while needing oxygen on the night before his death more than twenty-five years ago. Long ago, in the eighties and nineties, Merrill and I shared an editor, Harry Ford, who seemed unconcerned that publishing poetry can be a money-losing proposition and gave our books his distinctive typographical cover designs. When he took me on, I was his youngest poet, as Merrill had been years before. Though Harry had found Merrill’s First Poems “ornate,” he loved his second book, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, and eagerly published it. This put Merrill on the map of American poetry, if there is such a map hanging in a long hall somewhere in America. In 1995, when Merrill died unexpectedly in Arizona while vacationing, his body was flown to New York City, where Kathleen Ford, Harry’s wife, was asked to identify it. She told me, “Its solidness befitted the great poet he was.” Photograph by Henri Cole. Sometimes I think Merrill is misunderstood as a technically masterful, unemotional poet. This is what was once said about his friend Elizabeth Bishop, too. Because he is so often described as elegant, I wonder if this is code for homosexual, for this is how my work is sometimes described also. Long ago, Merrill told me that he was grateful for the neglect of his early work, because when the praise came later in his life, it came abundantly, for this visionary author of The Changing Light at Sandover. This was his complex, epic poem, one which seemed authorized by Dante, with its guide figure, Ephraim, standing in for Virgil, with its conversations with “the other side,” with its occasional terza rima, with its repeated theme of stars, and with an epigraph from Paradiso XV: “You believe the truth, for the lesser and the great / of this life gaze into the mirror / in which, before you think, you display your thought.” In Stonington, I am pretending not to be a guest as I climb the steep and narrow studio stairs to water Merrill’s ancient jade plant. It appears to thrive even in neglect, like a poet in middle age. Is it true that a jade plant brings financial good luck? Is it true that an extract from its succulent leaves can be used to treat wounds? Is it true that the jade is a tree of friendship, something Merrill had a marvelous gift for? Dining room table. Photograph by Henri Cole. Each day I walk around the village. Sometimes Gigi, a friend of my youth, accompanies me. Her family has lived in Stonington for six generations. When she was a teenager, she met Merrill because her grandparents lived across from him on Water Street. He read Gigi’s first poems before she went off to study writing at Iowa, and she gave him vegetables grown in her backyard garden. As a young woman, she married a local artist and teacher, who later died at sea while lobstering. She once lived in a little house without central heat over on Gold Street. The village was different then, with its noble houses falling down and laundry hanging out on lines to dry. Now the homes have been refurbished. The artists and the Portuguese fishermen have been replaced by wealthy summer people, but there is still a fishing and lobstering fleet. On Saturday mornings, I accompany Penny, a new village friend, to the farmers market on the other side of the railroad tracks, where we buy fresh bread, local vegetables, and a basket of white peaches to share. Because Penny is a patient listener, the pretty cheesemonger tells her the story of her life, while angry bees fly around and explore the little mountains of pungent cheeses. Every evening a small group of villagers swims from DuBois Beach to the breakwater. I am afraid of the jellyfish and stand alone on the shore to watch the swimmers until their arms and legs disappear into the chop of dark water. James Merrill and Rachel Jacoff. Photograph courtesy of Rachel Jacoff. Ever since Hurricane Henri, the tropical cyclone that made landfall in late August, the blue sky has sparkled without a cloud. All day I listen to seagulls, who have so much to say as they circle around the harbor. I am relieved not to be visited by the restless, lonely spirits that frequented Merrill’s Ouija board. Later today, I am meeting Jonathan for a BLT. We’ll sit on a park bench near the library and talk about his new book on Bishop. He’ll show me his signed first edition of Geography III, and I will feel covetous. Then Sibby, a villager, will introduce me to her goats, her hens, and her aggressive, polyamorous rooster, whose comb will turn pale a few days later, a fatal sign. Then I’ll have a drink with the village warden, Jeff, the mayor of the borough, and his wife, Lynn, who will dig up a gorgeous autumn fern from their yard for me to plant at Merrill’s grave. “What would Merrill think of my being here?” I ask my friend Rachel, a retired Dante specialist who knew him. “He would be so delighted,” she insists. In his too short, peripatetic life—like Bishop, he died at sixty-eight—he frequently loaned his homes to his friends, as he did to Rachel during a sabbatical in the eighties. In his will, Merrill left the three-story building at 107 Water Street, including his penthouse apartment, to the Stonington Village Improvement Association, which conceived of the one-month writers’ residency program that brought me here. I imagine Merrill folding his clothes in the basement laundry room like me, and walking to the post office to mail his postcards, and putting an avocado pit in a glass of water to start its rooting. He kept no garden, but he was “earth’s no less.” The Perényi’s front door. Photograph by Henri Cole. At a handsome house on Main Street, I visit the ashes of my poetry teacher David Kalstone, who was a brother-like friend of Merrill’s from the sixties. David died of AIDS in 1986, when he was only fifty-three. That was the year I came out to my parents. I don’t know how I survived that dark decade. David’s illness was mercifully brief—pneumonia, the dimming of his mind, and confinement to bed. Like many, he was cared for by friends and had no formal funeral. Some of his ashes were emptied “into the black, starlit water of the Grand Canal” in Venice, as Merrill told those gathered later at a memorial. Some more of his ashes were taken in a dinghy out into the tidal river just east of Stonington and emptied underwater. In an unpublished diary, which was preserved along with his papers, Merrill describes “a ‘man-sized’ cloud of white, dispersing, attended by a purple-&-white jellyfish acolyte.” A last teaspoon was sprinkled with lilies of the valley under an old apple tree in the writer Eleanor Perényi’s garden. There was a reading of the Sidneys’ translation of the twenty-third Psalm: “Thus thus shall all my days be fede, / This mercy is so sure / It shall endure.” Though the apple tree is gone, a horse chestnut reaches happily toward the sunlight today. Perényi’s son, Peter, and his wife, Sharon, who live there now, serve me a slice of coffee cake with a cappuccino on their back porch. While we talk about the past, Libby, their handsome rescue dog—part Great Pyrenees, part Anatolian shepherd—sits at my feet. Unusual mushrooms like “shameless phalluses,” known as stinkhorns grow around the garden. If eaten when young, they are said to be crisp and crunchy with a radishy taste. Their caps are coated in a dark, olive-green slime and crowned with a small white ring. Shameless phalluses. Photograph by Henri Cole. Soon after David’s death, Merrill composed a quatrain in his diary: “Beloved friend, the sky + sea / of Stonington’s your limit? No: / To Heaven fly, to Venice flow. / Home-free, home-free.” And there are these sorrowful sentences: “Every ½ hour I just break into sobs—sounds I’ve never before heard come out of me. No quarrel ever. No tension. Pure fun & communion. A 2nd self I could reach by telephone, or walking into the next room … there are no more where they came from, the friends of one’s heart.” The poet Adrienne Rich wrote to J. D. McClatchy, who’d helped care for David: “When I first knew David he was a graduate student at Harvard and I was a divided woman poet/faculty wife with 3 young children … He and Randall Jarrell were the first critics to encourage what I was doing in the 1960’s when many who had approved my earlier work were getting uneasy.” Unlike other critics of the day, David didn’t think the generation preceding Rich and Merrill’s was “the last word, the ultimate canon.” David Kalstone in his apartment reading. Photograph courtesy of Rachel Jacoff. Some years after David died, I visited Merrill in Key West, where he then spent his winters. We sat at the back of his house in a big sunny room with cedar walls. John Malcolm Brinnin—the biographer, critic, and poet—was there. Both men wore Birkenstock sandals, and Merrill sat in a big bamboo chair that was a birthday gift from the poet Mona Van Duyn. They were talking about their elderly mothers—Merrill’s was 92 and Brinnin’s 102. When Brinnin recounted how on his mother’s hundredth birthday she’d asked, “What’s birthday?” and there was silence. After all, they were elderly, too. Merrill invited me to lunch at a small Spanish restaurant with only a handful of tables that was tucked away on a back street. It was unchanged from “Elizabeth’s time,” he told me. In 1938, Elizabeth Bishop had bought a house in Key West at 624 White Street, with her friend Louise Crane. In her journal, she writes about the lime tree in her yard, in whose “cool shadow” love was nurtured and betrayed. We shared an order of rice and beans with plantains, and for dessert, we divided a serving of flan, which he slid off the plate with his fingers and then licked them. On a tiny shelf over the door to the kitchen, there was a display of large dusty santos—ornamental figures from the Christmas crèche—and I remembered Merrill’s poem “Santo”: Francisco on his shelf, Wreathed in dusty wax Roses, for weeks and weeks Hadn’t been himself— Making no day come true By answering a prayer Just dully standing there … Merrill said this poem expressed “in miniature the whole self-revising nature of the Sandover books, where no ‘truth’ is allowed to rot under a single, final aspect.” After Merrill paid for our lunch, he calculated to the penny what the tip should be and left this exact amount. Then we walked to the library, where he hoped to find an English-French dictionary at the used-book sale to help him translate a sonnet by the French poet, novelist, dramatist, freethinker, and occultist Victor Hugo. Today I can find no translation of Hugo in his Collected Poems and I wonder which sonnet it was. It was Merrill’s sonnet sequence “The Broken Home” that first made me a fan of his work. The poem appeared in his breakthrough volume, Nights and Days, published when he was only forty. It is composed of seven sonnets about his relationship with his wealthy, energetic father, Charles E. Merrill, a founding partner of the investment firm of Merrill Lynch. The poem is a meditative lyric, but narrative, too, with psychological intensity. As there are in some of Bishop’s poems, there are discreet references to the poet’s homosexuality. The poem’s sonnets are not strict—each is linked to another by a theme or image. Because each sonnet presents a self-contained scene, the poem expands and contracts like the reader breathing, feeling, and thinking. It begins with the speaker alone on the street observing a little family framed by a window. Then, later, “in a room on the floor below,” Merrill lights a candle and speaks to the flame: “Tell me, tongue of fire, / that you and I are as real / At least as the people upstairs.” The word real reappears, because the solitary speaker longs to be as real as the little family he sees in the window. James Merrill’s embroidered child’s chair. Photograph by Henri Cole. Some years before my visit to Key West, Merrill had flown to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and been diagnosed with ARC or AIDS-related complex, though this was something he remained silent about for the rest of his life, telling only a few friends. Merrill was not a poet of grievances, but in his diary he opens up: “The state of my health has made me stop drinking (or all but) + smoking (entirely) and kept me harder at work, I think, than I’d have been otherwise.” “Art is a not-at-all reluctant alternative to life.” “My days are numbered. But so are everyone’s, if only in retrospect … Thousands of people are in my exact position, only they haven’t thought (or wished) to take a blood test. I know that I shall (unless a miracle cure emerges) be dead in 3 years, more or less.” Though Merrill described his illness as “bearable,” he wrote that it was nevertheless “appalling to live in a present whose future … has been so frostbitten.” He reminded himself to reread the lines 8–14 on page 304 of his Changing Light at Sandover: Ah, it’s grim. Yet what to ask Of death but that it come wearing a mask We’ve seen before; to die of complications Invited by the way we live. Bad habits, Overloaded fuses, the foreknown Stroke or tumor—these we call our own And face with poise. This was written before the modern drugs for treating HIV. I say modern, though forty years later there is still no miracle vaccine or cure. James Merrill’s dictionary. Photograph by Henri Cole. During my stay in Key West, I borrowed Merrill’s bicycle and rode across town while he exercised on his cross-country skiing machine. I rode through the vast cemetery and found Bishop’s house, which was hidden by a jungle of trees and potted plants. Its unpretentiousness pleased me—its wide-open shutters and front door, motor scooter parked in the yard, and comforter hanging from a second-floor window. Merrill wrote in his diary: “EB more present in later poems. The figures walking up and down the icy beach … we stand back from them … we see more of the human condition mimed out for us than ever previously.” Certainly, this is true of one of Merrill’s last poems, “Christmas Tree,” in which he sees himself and his destiny in a tree brought down from “the cold sighing mountain” to be “wound in jewels” and kept warm for a short time, with a “primitive IV” behind it “to keep the show going,” before it is left out on the “cold street”—just “needles and bone”—to be “plowed back into the Earth for lives to come.” Elsewhere in his diary, Merrill writes, “Life is so like Chekhov—the characters + motives all sweetness, the plot deadly nightshade.” Merrill wanted me to see his Key West study and he was amused when I feigned indifference. It was a small space with a single bed at one end and a narrow desk beside a window at the other. The room was divided by tall bookshelves, and when I told him it reminded me of a student’s dorm room, he was pleased. He showed me the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary that had once belonged to Auden, in which he still hoped to discover marginalia. The small office’s modesty made me remember something the poetry critic Helen Vendler once said to me about Merrill: “He could have chosen anything, but despite enormous wealth and good looks, he chose poetry.” David Jackson and James Merrill’s graves. Photograph by Henri Cole. Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Blizzard, and a memoir, Orphic Paris. A selected sonnets is forthcoming. James Merrill diaries quoted courtesy of the James Merrill Papers, Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, Washington Universities Libraries. Copyright to the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University. Adrienne Rich letter to J. D. McClatchy (dated January 6, 1987) quoted courtesy of the Adrienne Rich Literary Estate. Copyright Adrienne Rich Literary Estate, 2022. 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The Siren of Sussex The Siren of Sussex by Mimi Matthews is $1.99! Thank you to everyone who let us know about this sale! This is book one in Matthews’ new series, The Belles of London. The description definitely piques my interest, but I feel like Matthews books don’t get as sexy for me as I want them. Victorian high society’s most daring equestrienne finds love and an unexpected ally in her fight for independence in the strong arms of London’s most sought after and devastatingly handsome half-Indian tailor. Evelyn Maltravers understands exactly how little she’s worth on the marriage mart. As an incurable bluestocking from a family tumbling swiftly toward ruin, she knows she’ll never make a match in a ballroom. Her only hope is to distinguish herself by making the biggest splash in the one sphere she excels: on horseback. In haute couture. But to truly capture London’s attention she’ll need a habit-maker who’s not afraid to take risks with his designs—and with his heart. Half-Indian tailor Ahmad Malik has always had a talent for making women beautiful, inching his way toward recognition by designing riding habits for Rotten Row’s infamous Pretty Horsebreakers—but no one compares to Evelyn. Her unbridled spirit enchants him, awakening a depth of feeling he never thought possible. But pushing boundaries comes at a cost and not everyone is pleased to welcome Evelyn and Ahmad into fashionable society. With obstacles spanning between them, the indomitable pair must decide which hurdles they can jump and what matters most: making their mark or following their hearts? Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Awakening The Awakening by Nora Roberts is $2.99! This is book one is what I believe to be her latest series and looks to be a blend of contemporary fantasy and romance. I was eh on the Chronicles of One series, but still bought this one in hardcover when it came out. Have you read it? In the realm of Talamh, a teenage warrior named Keegan emerges from a lake holding a sword—representing both power and the terrifying responsibility to protect the Fey. In another realm known as Philadelphia, a young woman has just discovered she possesses a treasure of her own… When Breen Kelly was a girl, her father would tell her stories of magical places. Now she’s an anxious twentysomething mired in student debt and working a job she hates. But one day she stumbles upon a shocking discovery: her mother has been hiding an investment account in her name. It has been funded by her long-lost father—and it’s worth nearly four million dollars. This newfound fortune would be life-changing for anyone. But little does Breen know that when she uses some of the money to journey to Ireland, it will unlock mysteries she couldn’t have imagined. Here, she will begin to understand why she kept seeing that silver-haired, elusive man, why she imagined his voice in her head saying Come home, Breen Siobhan. It’s time you came home. Why she dreamed of dragons. And where her true destiny lies—through a portal in Galway that takes her to a land of faeries and mermaids, to a man named Keegan, and to the courage in her own heart that will guide her through a powerful, dangerous destiny… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Way You Make Me Feel RECOMMENDED: The Way You Make Me Feel by Maurene Goo is $2.99! Jen Prokop, co-host of Fated Mates, squeed about this in a guest review: There’s so much to recommend this book to anyone who enjoys great YA. There’s a pleasing complexity and closure to Clara’s story, but The Way You Make Me Feel doesn’t feel like a book that’s been sanitized of all its rough edges to please an adult audience. From the author of I Believe in a Thing Called Love, a laugh-out-loud story of love, new friendships, and one unique food truck. Clara Shin lives for pranks and disruption. When she takes one joke too far, her dad sentences her to a summer working on his food truck, the KoBra, alongside her uptight classmate Rose Carver. Not the carefree summer Clara had imagined. But maybe Rose isn’t so bad. Maybe the boy named Hamlet (yes, Hamlet) crushing on her is pretty cute. Maybe Clara actually feels invested in her dad’s business. What if taking this summer seriously means that Clara has to leave her old self behind? With Maurene Goo’s signature warmth and humor, The Way You Make Me Feel is a relatable story of falling in love and finding yourself in the places you’d never thought to look. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Spellbound Spellbound by Allie Therin is $1.99! This is a gay fantasy historical romance with a dash of mystery. Most readers loved the writing, while others wished the execution were better. Reviews also mention that this one has closed door/off the page sex scenes. To save Manhattan, they’ll have to save each other first… 1925 New York Arthur Kenzie’s life’s work is protecting the world from the supernatural relics that could destroy it. When an amulet with the power to control the tides is shipped to New York, he must intercept it before it can be used to devastating effects. This time, in order to succeed, he needs a powerful psychometric…and the only one available has sworn off his abilities altogether. Rory Brodigan’s gift comes with great risk. To protect himself, he’s become a recluse, redirecting his magic to find counterfeit antiques. But with the city’s fate hanging in the balance, he can’t force himself to say no. Being with Arthur is dangerous, but Rory’s ever-growing attraction to him begins to make him brave. And as Arthur coaxes him out of seclusion, a magical and emotional bond begins to form. One that proves impossible to break—even when Arthur sacrifices himself to keep Rory safe and Rory must risk everything to save him. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

Anuradha Roy. Photograph by Gala Sicart. I met the novelist Anuradha Roy in Delhi in the mid-nineties, when she was an editor at Oxford University Press and I had just published my first book. Not long after that, she moved to a Himalayan town to set up Permanent Black, now India’s premier intellectual publisher, with her husband, Rukun Advani. She also began to write fiction. Her fifth novel, The Earthspinner, which was released in the United States this summer, is about the war on reason and on imagination in a world consumed by political fanaticism. Though I don’t remember what was said in our first meeting, I can recall a certain hopefulness in the air—there was a lot of that about, among publishers and writers, in India in the nineties. Writing in English was ceasing to be the furtive and poorly paid endeavor it long had been. There were greater opportunities to publish; new literary periodicals and networks of promotion seemed to be creating the infrastructure for more vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of that decade, helped by the prominence of Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy abroad, was that Indian writing in English was “arriving,” no less resoundingly than was India’s embrace of consumer capitalism at the end of history. One measure of this apparent progress was the respectful international attention such work elicited. Granta and The New Yorker devoted issues to Indian writing in 1997, the fiftieth year of India’s independence from British colonialism. In 2022, there is something very forlorn about the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence. Murderous Hindu supremacists rule the country, and lynch mobs—physical and digital—police its cultural and intellectual life. Educated Indians spend much of their time and energy trying to emigrate. Literature remains, for a tiny minority, the means to cognition in the darkness, and literary festivals project, briefly, the illusion of a community. But every writer seems terribly alone with herself. The sense of a meaningful shared space and a common language, the possibility of a broad literary flourishing—many of those fragile shoots of the nineties have been trampled into the ground by the ferocious invaders of private as well as public spheres. Over twenty-five years of radical transformations, Anuradha and I have kept intermittently in touch. While emailing in recent months, I began to wonder if other readers should be invited to reflect on the fate of writers in India today. What follows is a conversation that explores some of the historical uniqueness of this fate. Dear Anuradha, There is a line in your wonderful new novel about how ordinary days can explode in places like India, leaving us to collect the shattered pieces for the rest of our lives (I am paraphrasing; I don’t have my copy with me at present). I was struck by it, partly because not enough has been said about the writer or artist in India who has to work amidst these shocks—of history, I was going to add, but the destruction of human lives and of possibilities in India is often too commonplace and routine to rise to the status of history. In recent years, I have become more curious about writers who worked under such extraordinary pressures—the Russians after their revolution, Germans during the early years of Nazism, Spanish artists during and after the civil war, South African writers under apartheid. What was experienced in these cases is something that has never been experienced to the same degree by writers and artists in the UK or the U.S.—the marginalization of art as well as dissent; the abrupt shrinking or loss of audiences and local patronage; threats of expulsion and exile, if not assassination. How do you calibrate your own relationship with a ruined public sphere as a writer (and citizen)? I remember J. M. Coetzee complaining about the obligation to address political themes in his fiction while he was living in South Africa. Do you feel any such imperative? I ask also because your new novel, though set largely in the eighties, is alert to the multiple transformations of India in the last three decades. You’re right—we open the newspaper every day to some fresh horror. Terrible acts of violence are not even reported any longer, and if they are, they are forgotten the next day, or replaced by some other appalling public crime. I say “public crime” because these are now outdoor performances uploaded for general viewing by vigilante groups supposedly working for a Hindu cause: protecting “their” cows, caste, women, and so on. Not only is the destruction of human lives and possibilities in India commonplace and routine, it is now well recognized as being sanctioned by the state—which does not so much turn a blind eye to vigilante violence as actively encourage it, and which ices the hatred cake by punishing the victims instead of the perpetrators. We have long been used to mobs that melt away into the shadows. The new development is that they no longer melt away; on the contrary, they become internet stars for especially vicious hate speech. In this situation, the kind of books we publish at Permanent Black and the kind of books I write seem to me like faint shouts in an aggressive cacophony that drowns out reasoned debate and dissent. We are completely marginal to the mainstream discourse, which is clamorous, angry, and often abusive. In Germany, a hundred years ago, this was the initial stage of a fascist process. India is far more diverse, populous, and difficult to control centrally, so there is some hope. I am relieved that you can see hope. I am less optimistic, perhaps because I am not as exposed to everyday Indian realities as you are. I worry that unlike Germany, which plunged into vicious philistinism after a century of unprecedented achievement in the arts and philosophy, India has moved straight from a pre-Gutenberg culture to the garish modernity of smartphone screens. The divide between a minority of writers and artists dedicated to a slow culture of reflection and creation and a majority prone to hectic consumption of politics as well as entertainment feels much starker. “A slow culture of reflection” … that phrase fills me with an overwhelming sense of loss. Over the years we have come to feel that we don’t matter, that what we write and publish doesn’t matter. This is a new feeling. With intellectual endeavor there is now a sense of futility about what we do—the sense that we are not likely to contribute through our kind of writing and publishing to an intellectual or a cultural stream that will shape or influence attitudes. The new anti-intellectual tide is too powerful and hostile for us to resist, at least within the future that we are able to foresee. We are thoroughly antiquated and irrelevant—the books, the music, the art, the political values of secularism and equality that we still hold on to, are despised as markers of elite privilege. We are seen as traitors to the nationalist fervor within which the inspiration comes not from Tagore, Ambedkar, Gandhi, or Nehru but from ideologues like Savarkar … In my college years in Calcutta we were certain revolution would come from the left—who could have foretold that the Indian version of the Bolshevik would be a religious majoritarian intent on wiping out everything that stands in his way? It’s quite striking how the Stalinist method of imposing a new era through architecture is mirrored by our government, which is transforming the heart of Delhi through demolitions of historic buildings and landscapes. There are many similarities. The persecution of writers, artists, and their families—for example in the life of Anna Akhmatova—is a sobering parallel for people in our line of work. Yes, I have been thinking, too, of the fate of Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, and Latin American writers. But I wonder if our situation is also tormentingly different. In almost every case of an exiled or persecuted writer, the forces pressing down on him or her were clearly identified, whether as fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, or the regimes of apartheid, murder, and torture in South Africa and Latin America. India, on the other hand, is formally and widely considered a democracy, not to mention a rising economic power. Much moral prestige still accrues to it in the eyes of many readers in the West—readers who will pick up our books without an inkling of the circumstances in which they have been written and the subjects with which they are indirectly or directly concerned. (There was no such abyss of ignorance separating the refugees of Nazism from their readers in the U.S. and UK.) Even those Hindu supremacists who despoil that democracy every day are careful to claim democratic sanction, and the global prestige of people like Mahatma Gandhi, before the world at large. In other words, no new critical vocabulary has emerged to take into account the radically altered themes and conditions of Indian writing in English. It is also true that Indian writers and artists have not exactly been driven into exile like, say, M. F. Husain. They continue to write, except they are under continuous pressure from a hostile state and a volatile mobocracy; looking up for brighter horizons they see an indifferent market, a shrinking readership in India, and an uninformed readership in the West. I think that this is a historically unique mode of marginality. You describe the situation with accuracy and insight, and I know you understand exactly how dispiriting our knowledge of our own irrelevance is. And yet, despite our cultural irrelevance, because the shadow armies of vigilantism are so far-reaching and so unpredictable one is never entirely forgotten either, and never off the radar. We are constantly afraid for many of our authors and friends as well as for ourselves. As a writer, you enter into this strange dilemma—you want your book to be read, yet you don’t want it attracting attention, or, at any rate, the wrong kind of attention. We are perpetually in turmoil—a state of debate, worry, anger, and confusion of the kind that writers in most parts of the West don’t have to face. Formally there is no censorship of written work, but the atmosphere of constant anxiety within a whole community of reading and writing people, a sense of there being violence in the air we breathe, is equally undermining. How can we respond as solitary writers to this situation of simultaneously being engulfed and being inconsequential? As you say of Coetzee, to what extent do the conditions oblige you to write about what is happening around you? For a long time I told myself my usefulness lay in doing my own work. But was this true or was it merely a way of legitimizing my desire to somehow carry on living only as I knew how? I tried, in All the Lives We Never Lived, to find answers to some of these questions, or at least to ask the questions. In that book, the Second World War profoundly changes the course of life for several of the characters. As in our present, people find themselves trapped in baffling, violent political events that can and do destroy them. Drawing on historical parallels was a way for me to reflect on my present, to do the only thing I think a writer can effectively and truly do in a fraught political situation of imminent censorship and physical danger: to respond to it through writing about it, for as long as the conditions allow this at all. I have come across social media chats between well-known writers of Indian origin who live abroad in which they condemn the so-called silence of Indian intellectuals about what is going on here. I want to ask them if they have any idea what unbelievable risks journalists and writers in India are taking. Perhaps from a distance it is less easy to really feel the proximity of political prisoners who are locked up with the key thrown away. You have to keep writing, but you have to be intelligent about it. I was recently reading Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, a rich and lively account of the early existentialists in Europe, especially France, and their methods of dodging censorship and execution during the German occupation felt familiar. I was somehow reassured and calmed by the knowledge that even writers like Sartre, who were resolute members of the Resistance, took care in their published works or in the theater to say what they needed to and to carry on saying it without walking into the monster’s maw. It was amusing to read of a member of their group, Jean Paulhan, who left brief anticollaborationist poems lying around in cafés and other places, signed only with his initials. One of the people from whom I have always drawn inspiration is Satyajit Ray. He gave an interview in the eighties in which he described much the same thing. When the interviewer interrogated him about the seeming lack of “politics” in his films, he responded: In a fantasy like The Kingdom of Diamonds, you can be forthright, but if you’re dealing with contemporary characters, you can be articulate only up to a point, because of censorship. You simply cannot attack the party in power. … What can you do? You are aware of the problems and you deal with them, but you also know the limit, the constraints beyond which you just cannot go. … It is very easy to attack certain targets like the establishment. You are attacking people who don’t care. The establishment will remain totally untouched by what you’re saying. So what is the point? Films cannot change society. They never have. Show me a film that changed society or brought about any change. What you say about The Earthspinner being alert to political transformations is true, but look at it this way: if I had set it in the present, if I had switched things around and had a Muslim man fall in love with a Hindu woman—I don’t have to spell out how the love jihad squads would have responded. Like Ray in The Kingdom of Diamonds, I try to write what I want and ensure the book won’t be burned. I’ve set Earthspinner in the past; I’ve tackled the question of religious hatred by a slightly circuitous route. Sleeping on Jupiter, my third novel, which is about the abuse of children by a god-man, is set in a fictional temple town and a fictional ashram, and these are its capes of invisibility. There is a reason for that. Nothing like Caelainn Hogan’s Republic of Shame, an investigative book about how the Catholic Church in Ireland destroyed the lives of women and children, could be published in present-day India. All the Lives We Never Lived deals with political questions that are charged even today, but it is set in the previous century. The historical novel was also the favored fallback of novelists who were cornered by the Nazis and Bolsheviks, like the Estonian Jaan Kross, who was unlucky enough to fall foul of both and who set his novels of dissent in the distant past to escape both sets of censors. So did the Catalan Joan Sales, whose classic of the Spanish Civil War was banned for years by Franco’s regime. The irony is that writers in India who are at odds with Hindu nationalism have to count their blessings that they are in a situation that is not yet as bad as Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia. As a novelist, you are concerned primarily with individual experience. As an artist, you are concerned, too, with form, quality of style, the texture of prose, and the rhythms of paragraphs and sentences. Indeed, these are the major concerns of most writers of literary fiction in the West: the emphasis on formalism allows fiction writing, or at least a certain mode of fiction writing, to be “taught,” while disruptive facts of violence and injustice are kept at bay. The current trend of autofiction, for instance, in which the sole referent is the author and his or her immediate affective experiences, speaks of a deeper retreat into subjectivity. But it is harder to deny in a country like India that the author and her characters are embedded in concrete, highly complex social settings and under severe pressures of ideology. I think it becomes even harder to suppress that knowledge during the kind of trauma the country is undergoing right now—which brings me back to the issue, raised by Coetzee, of the likely overdetermination of your themes by extreme political adversity. I know what you mean. For me it’s a balancing act, but I think this can also give our fiction its urgency and strength. I’ve tried to write, in the new novel, about what I wanted to write: artists making art and ordinary people falling in love in the midst of political turmoil. But The Earthspinner is also deeply concerned with ceramics and dogs, both things close to my heart, and this choice of subjects is my way of fighting the overdetermination of themes that Coetzee complains about. I don’t see my fiction as a whole as political—I see my work as containing political threads. To me, The Earthspinner is not only about rising fanaticism but is also the story of two potters, of adolescent confusions, of our widespread indifference to the animal world. In these quieter and more personal threads of the book there are small power struggles going on, too, which for the people involved in them are as consequential as any war. The political is implicit in these domestic conflicts, but usually not recognized by readers as such. People read what they want to read, however, and nowadays readers do seem to respond to the most glaringly political aspects of my work, though the obligation to do so is in their head, not mine. I notice this particularly when I meet Western journalists—very few of them ask me about the craft of fiction. Their questions are almost invariably about caste, religion, women, and contemporary Indian politics. This may be because they haven’t read the books, or haven’t read them as I myself intended them to be read, but it certainly has something to do with the obligation they want to heap on every writer from a non-Western country—to be a kind of artistically articulate native informant. Of course we know it isn’t possible to separate politics, or the political threads of everyday life, from fiction—the fact is that writing is inevitably political, and the whole shape and force of a narrative makes clear the politics within it. We also know that it is not only writing but how we ordinarily live that is a political act, and right now, in our country, living itself is a hard thing to pull off. What sustains me, I think, is that I have a sense of mountains hidden by clouds. When I say that, I am thinking of the view from my window at home in the Himalayas: you can see the lower green hills every day, close-up, but on some days the farther-off blue ones reveal themselves, and on clear winter days the white peaks appear, floating in the sky. There are still—despite the political sickness—things for us in India to rejoice in. The horror is dominant but the glory is around in fragments. As anywhere, when we are hemmed in and harassed from all sides, we try to keep these other things in view, and we carve out shells for ourselves, to keep the world at arm’s length even as we try to make a difference. Pankaj Mishra is a novelist and essayist. His most recent book is Run and Hide: A Novel. View the full article

Who wouldn’t love to win a prestigious award? The National Book Award. The Booker Prize. The PEN/Faulkner. The Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Pulitzer and Nobel. Few authors will achieve that level of recognition, but there are many “smaller” awards that are far more accessible. And if you win one of them, you still get to call yourself an “award-winning author,” right? Hmm. Let’s talk about it. First, some facts. These “facts” are not meant to imply that award contests are a scam or that one shouldn’t enter them. Rather, they’re meant to offer a realistic context in which each of us can make informed decisions that suit our individual goals, budget, and vision. Fact #1. While the “big” awards may include a monetary prize for the winning author, the majority of smaller awards do not—instead, the author must spend money to enter. Entry fees range from $60-95 per title, although the actual cost can be much higher if you enter multiple categories, since each has a separate fee. More about that below. It’s not unethical to charge a submission fee. There are overhead costs to the host organization, including the staff time it takes to process the thousands of entries that each program receives, but it’s good to be prepared. Some organizations offer an “early bird” discount. Others, like the Lambda Literary Award for LBGTQ authors, have different submission fees for authors with large publishers and those with small or independent publishers. Fact #2. Awards operate in different ways, including who can apply. While some contests (like the National Book Award) are open to all authors, regardless of publishing path, others (like the Booker) will not allow authors to submit their own work; only publishers may submit, which means that self-published authors are excluded. There are also regional awards, limited by where you live, as well as awards for specific genres such as science fiction, romance novels, Christian fiction, and so on. In general, the wider the eligibility net, the more competition and the greater the prestige; thus, national and international awards tend to viewed as more significant than local or regional ones. Many contests are specifically for “indie authors”—authors who have published with a small, university, or hybrid press, or have self-published. Titles from the large publishing houses are not eligible. “Small press” usually means fewer than forty titles a year, no advance paid to the author, and possibly a print-on-demand arrangement. However, these distinctions vary. The Nautilus Awards, for instance, separates books by “large” and small” publisher, regardless of whether the press is independent or traditional. Thus, a Nautilus win by an indie author with a “large” publisher means that she has competed against authors from the Big Four. Fact #3. Awards can be a big business. This is especially true for the independent book award programs, which also solicit winners with offers to purchase seals or stickers for their books, and to “take advantage” of special advertising opportunities to increase their visibility. These promotions can be aggressive and hard to resist. Among the best-known of these independent awards are: Best Indie Book Award Eric Hoffer Award Foreword INDIES Book of the Year IBPA Ben Franklin Awards Independent Publisher Book Awards, also known as the IPPYs National Indie Excellence Awards Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Readers Favorite Awards There are certainly others (such as the American Book Fest, Chanticleer, and International Book Awards); the list above is not meant to imply that all other awards are less legitimate. For sure, there are a lot of awards aimed at independent authors. Having observed this phenomenon up-close—personally, and through conversations with other authors—I’d say that it’s because indie authors are a good fit for these contests. We’re used to taking book promotion into our own hands, since we don’t expect a big publishing house to do that for us. We’re also looking for ways to increase our status, and have accepted that we’ll have to spend our own money to do so. The question is how to discriminate and spend that money wisely. We want to know: Which awards are “worth” applying for? How many award contests should I enter? Should I focus on “high prestige” awards, or awards that I think I have a chance of winning? Do these awards really matter? Like nearly everything in the publishing business, the “answers” are subjective. It depends on the kind of book you’ve written, your goals, budget, and priorities. With that in mind, let’s continue unpacking the subject. How do these contests work? Each contest has its protocols. Some require hard copies; others will accept digital versions or ARCs (pre-publication galleys). The most important thing to follow the instructions exactly. The postmark, the number of copies, the registration form. Failure to do so can be cause for elimination. As noted above, some contests have only a few categories (like the Sarton Award for Women’s Fiction). Typically, however, there are many categories to choose from, and an author is free to enter her book into as many categories as she wishes. The IPPY Awards, for instance, have 90 categories, plus fiction and nonfiction awards in 12 regional categories, plus 10 categories specifically for e-books. The National Indie Excellence Awards have even more categories. It’s rare to find a description of what these categories mean to the judges, however, or details about what they’re looking for. The Next Generation Indie Book Awards does provide a short description of each category, as well as links to “similar categories.” However, that’s still just a description and not a set of specific criteria. In general, authors are not given any details up-front, so it’s difficult to know how your book will be evaluated. Without being able to target your submissions by matching book-to-criteria, some authors opt to “go wide” and enter a lot of categories. Clearly, the more categories you enter, the more chances you have to win something—especially if some of the categories are very specific. It’s easier to be a gold medalist in Great Lakes Regional Fiction, for instance, than in a very broad category like “Popular fiction” or “Literary Fiction.” At the same time, the cost for entering multiple categories can escalate quickly. The number of “winners” varies from program to program. Sometimes there is a gold, silver, and bronze medalist in each category. Sometimes there are “honorable mentions” or a “runner-up;” there may also be long and short lists of “finalists.” The more “winners,” the greater the number of happy authors—who are likely to publicize the program through their own self-promotion. After all, who can resist sharing the exciting news that one is now an “award-winning author?” As with most contests, if you don’t win, you’re unlikely to know why. The only contest I’m aware of that shares its rubric (and your score) is the IBPA Ben Franklin, but that’s after-the-fact, to explain why you lost points and, as a result, did not receive an award—which can be for elements like the type font and the quality of the paper, even if you received perfect scores on plot, characterization, and writing. How can I decide which contests to enter? The answer depends on the relationship between the awards you would love to win, the awards you think you might win, how much you’re willing to spend, and your tolerance for (possibly) not-winning at all. Here are some questions that may help you work out that equation. Fit. If there is a contest that interests you, look at the books that won in your category over the past few years. Are they “like” yours, in some way? Can you see your book next to them? Have you read (or heard of) any of them? If not, look them up on Amazon. That may provide insight into what the judges like. Categories. If your book doesn’t really fit into any of the categories, don’t try to make it fit. Better to pass on that award and try another. The host website. What is your impression of the sponsoring organization? Is the mission clear? Does the website make extravagant promises? How easy is it to navigate? Can you explore the categories before registering your book, or only after you’ve committed (and paid)? Your budget. How much/what proportion of all your overall marketing budget do you want to allocate for these award submissions? Would you rather spread that amount over several award programs, or focus on one or two that you really like (and, perhaps, apply in multiple categories)? Your goals and expectations. How important is it to you, to win an award? How would you feel if you didn’t win anything? Remember: The same book that was passed over in one contest may very well be a medalist in another. There’s no way to know the reason— judges with different tastes or sensibilities, the competition for that particular award at that particular season, a close-call that you’ll never know about. If you don’t win, don’t take it personally. Move on. Remember, too, that you don’t have to enter every contest at the same time. Many of the contests are open to books published over a three-year span. Thus, if your book is published in 2022, you can submit for a particular award in 2022, 2023, or 2024. You can even submit a second time, if it’s an award you’d really like to have. Some contests have very long lead times, while others close only weeks before the winners are announced. Some people like to submit early, even with an uncorrected ARC, in the hope of being able to include the award in their launch material. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for waiting so you can (if you’re lucky) have fresh news to announce later. Winning an award, even a year or more after publication date, can give your book renewed visibility and spark a new burst of interest. And now for the big question: does it matter? There’s no way to tease out the specific element that makes someone click on buy now. It could be the recommendation of a trusted friend. The cover, title, and/or similarity to other books they’ve enjoyed. “Seeing it everywhere.” I did some research on this question a few years ago, and I’m guessing that things haven’t changed very much. My instinct is that an award in itself (unless it’s one of the awards noted in the first paragraph) won’t do the trick. More likely, it’s a combination of factors. Awards, trade reviews, and endorsements are all ways of establishing credibility. You might not need all of them. More may not be more, for a potential reader, especially when it comes to lesser-known awards. The other question is whether these awards matter to you. Whether they do or don’t, whether you win or don’t win, it’s important to remember that these awards are not the final determinant of your worth as a human being or your talent as a writer. They are one thing. That’s all. And yes, in the spirit of transparency, I do describe myself as an “award-winning author.” I’ve won medals in highly-competitive contests and categories, and I’m proud of that. But I consider it just one element among many, and will always believe that what really matters to me is whether my work touches and enhances the lives of actual readers. What’s your experience? When you decide to buy a book from an author whose work is new to you, does “award-winning” make a difference? Do you think the label “award-winning” is applied too loosely and should have stricter criteria? About Barbara Linn ProbstBarbara’s (she/her) debut novel QUEEN OF THE OWLS (April 2020) was a medalist in popular fiction from the Independent Publishers Association, first runner-up for the Eric Hoffer Award, and short-listed for the $2500 Grand Prize. Her second novel THE SOUND BETWEEN THE NOTES (April 2021) was the recipient of a Kirkus starred review, where it was lauded as "a tour de force" and selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2021. It was also awarded the Sarton Gold Medal in Contemporary Fiction, as well as the Silver Medal in Fiction from the Nautilus Book Awards. Her third novel, THE COLOR OF ICE, will launch in October 2022. Barbara has a PhD in Clinical Social Work and has been a therapist, teacher, researcher, and advocate for out-of-the-box kids and their families. When not writing, she’s a serious amateur pianist. Learn more on her website. Web | Facebook | More Posts [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

A family room adorned with couch and a coffee table, the aftermath of a disturbing sequence of torture so fresh the blood is still pooling into the fibers of the rug. The body left behind is that of a child, his father dripping wet of sweat and tears crumbled on the floor. The silence, most of all, hangs there, punctuated by gentle sobbing. The boy’s body hidden; he’s no longer in pain—the games that culminated in a bag over the child’s head, devolving into suffocation and strangulation… it’s over. It’s all left to the father to deal with. The father looks up and calls out his wife’s name, suspicious of the dead silence. He gazes over at the lit-up hallway and receives no response. The camera is filming the entire aftermath, the two home invaders in white—white gloves, white shirt, white shorts—have since left the room, perhaps left the film. Yet the camera continues to film, and the audience continues to watch. After the anguished 30 seconds that feels like 30 real-time minutes, the father begins to tremble as a golf ball rolls into view. Hold on that shot a little while longer and they return, the two invaders announcing, “Player one, level two.” This is one of many harrowing scenes in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games that effectively folds the entire narrative onto the audience, forcing them into a psychological corner, asking, no… daring them to sit up, take notice, maybe even turn the film off. But they don’t, and it’s because the viewer continues to watch that the invaders and their victims continue their “funny” games. The fact that the invader uses a video game reference, nothing specific, just that the “player” here has decided to enter the next level, further cements this for the astute and perhaps more daring viewers. But it’s also far more than being fearless, it’s about embracing the reasons why something makes you afraid, unsettled, downright terrified. Haneke’s film received a lot of controversy for going this route, with many attendees walking out of the premiere of the original 1997 version of the film at Cannes Film Festival (there’s also a 2007 shot-for-shot remake for US audiences starring Michael Pitt). The film was among a bevy of 90s horror films that pulled back the fourth wall and dabbled with violence and voyeurism. Early found footage films like Man Bites Dog and the Last Broadcast positioned the viewer in the same violent situations they’ve grown accustomed to yet due to breaking that fourth wall and ratcheting up the violence, viewers were put in an uncomfortable position. You don’t write and direct a film like this if you aren’t forging steps into a prevocational direction. You could say I hoped to do the same with Anybody Home?. I was one of those people “walking out” of the proverbial theater when I first watched the 2007 remake. I still remember the visceral disgust I had when I finally pirated it off the Pirate Bay, too poor to buy the DVD, the film wasn’t available to rent anywhere near me. It sounded like yet another experimental film, which I had been devouring, one film a night. Consider it a crash course in understanding unconventional narrative structures. Haneke’s film was among some list that clued me into procuring it. Even after I had downloaded it, the film rested in my to-watch list for weeks. And on a fateful Sunday night, I decided to fire it up, and made it up to the infamous hot/cold fourth-wall breaking scene that culminates with confirmation of animal cruelty by the invaders. At that time, I couldn’t understand why I was so disgusted, just that I was. I promptly disassociated myself from the film. I didn’t delete the video; instead, I looked to “cleanse” with a different film. I fired up a different horror film of the time, 1408, a film adapted from a Stephen King story. Also made to cause unrest, it was a different breed, something familiar. It was almost… funhouse, safe, convenient. The scares were there, sure, but there was no threat of being provoked or… complicit. And yet, there was still abuse, death, trauma in its characters actions, and the same could be said for many a horror story. The most effective horror stories cause a psychological reaction. It’s why for every safe and fun zombie film we have torture porn, for every big-budget film we have movements like the New French Extremity. The extremes are tethered to a sense of provocation that conjure a wanton need to watch, to dare to survive it, fighting back that fight or flight response. It is why people go back to the classics like Psycho, The Exorcist, and The Shining. These films ask its viewers to understand it. Yet in those extremes, we also find that the depraved and the gory, the dark and the disorienting, often steps into a space that blurs the lines, lulling people into the reaction without being mindful of what’s at stake, what exactly is being posited in these gruesome scenes. If the reader is responsible for anything when they encounter horror, it’s to attempt to understand why they are having such a response. Why did you recoil in disgust? Why does your heart race when a young teenager is chased by Jason? Why… why the response, and why so entertained? You could say that we are all responsible for our choices to consume any sort of art or entertainment, yet when it comes to horror, there is also the added caveat of understanding our subconscious reactions of which we are a witness. Your responsibility is to ask why and to keep reading. Why did I back off from Funny Games? It hit me deeply. Seeing the dear dog’s body falling out of the back of the SUV… it made me think of my own pets, or any pets at all. It tapped a nerve that had everything to do with understanding the sheer devotion and loyalty, the kindness and cheerfulness of a pet dog, juxtaposed with the idea that such a kind soul was tortured and killed… it was too much. When I returned to Funny Games, daring to understand, daring myself to make it to the end of the film, it was a few years later. Haneke’s choice to make the viewer complicit struck a chord. I couldn’t shake those moments when Michael Pitt’s unnamed invader turns to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, involving the audience. The final scene, Pitt’s domineering yet subdued character knocking on the front door of yet another unsuspecting house, enacting a repetition of invasion, only to make eye contact with the audience, holding strong, offering a telling smirk. In that moment, there is no longer the camera, only the character and the audience. Funny Games forced me to ask why. Anybody Home? was written to dial deeper into these curiosities, the provocation itself; the family is a family, its members barely anything but their paper-thin tropes. If there’s a character fully defined at all, it’s the invasion itself, perhaps second being the house, the setting of the torture and terror. In designing and writing Anybody Home?, I aimed to force the reader to turn the proverbial lens on themselves, to ask themselves why. We shouldn’t sift through our experiences without an aim to understand. In asking why, we can find as much meaning in the act as we are entertained by it. Numb, indifferent, completely detached: It’s only when we blur everything and devour the story like fast food, like something to provide a flash of satisfaction before moving on, that becomes the most disturbing thing of all. *** View the full article

It truly gives me great pleasure to be able to put a few words to paper to mark the re-issue of The Benson Murder Case, the first mystery novel by S.S. Van Dine, one of America‘s all-time greatest writers of detective fiction. His books may be largely forgotten today, almost a century from the first publication of this book, but undeservedly so. Van Dine should be mentioned in the same breath as other leading golden age authors, such as Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie. His Philo Vance books were phenomenally popular in their day. According to his biographer, John Loughery, in Alias S.S. Van Dine, “Throughout the late twenties, Willard Huntington Wright (S.S. Van Dine) had been one of Scribners‘ best-selling authors. His detective novels, translated into eleven languages, had sold more than a million copies by the end of the decade. With his Van Dyke beard and pearl-handled cane, he was a striking (if enigmatic) figure in New York Society …“ In his “lavish years, Willard could have been a character in a Fitzgerald short story… In his prime, Willard was one of the most interviewed writers in America, and one of the most affluent.“ S.S. Van Dine was born Willard Huntington Wright in 1888 and initially made his name as an art critic. He also reviewed books, being the literary editor of The Los Angeles Times, and published several books under his real name, including a novel, The Man of Promise (1916). Among his non-fiction books are Modern Painting (191) and The Future of Painting (1923). Earlier, in 1913, he had also published a collection of poetry, later saying, in a private letter: “Having repented of my early indiscretions, I have (suppressed) the entire edition, and if by any hook or crook you manage to get a copy of it, it will be because my plans for confiscation were incomplete.“ When Wright turned to crime fiction, under the nom de plume S.S. Van Dine, his true identity remained a secret at first. In a wonderful essay, from 1928, “I Used to Be a Highbrow but Look at Me Now,“ Van Dine explains how he came to writing mysteries. He claims that he began reading detective fiction during a long illness, recovering from a nervous breakdown. “For two years I did little else (than reading detective fiction). I devoured it. I wallowed in it.“ According to the essay, the idea of writing a detective novel took hold of him and he outlined a series of novels, creating his sleuth and working out plots for three books. One of the reasons for not using his real name, he claims, was that, “in America the writing of detective novels is not yet considered a wholly respectable occupation.” The Benson Murder Case was originally published on October 8, 1926 by Charles Scribner‘s Sons and, incidentally, first edition copies have become notoriously elusive. According to Van Dine‘s essay, the “entire first edition of The Benson Murder Case was sold out in a week, and the following month saw two other large editions vanish from the bookstalls.“ He stated that the success of the Philo Vance stories had surpassed his wildest dreams and that the fame of S.S. Van Dine had spread as he never dared hope it would. Indeed, he said that there was something both of romance and irony in the amount of money that his first three detective novels had earned. “Within a year of the time I completed the manuscript of The Benson Murder Case I was free from financial worries and in a position to tack in any direction my fancy dictated.“ In the above-mentioned biography, Loughery states that The Benson Murder Case had “everyone even remotely interested in detective fiction wondering who ‘S.S. Van Dine’ was.” We first meet renowned detective Philo Vance (not the detective‘s real name, according to Van Dine‘s introduction) in The Benson Murder Case. That novel, as well as the other ones, is narrated by a character called Mr. S. S. Van Dine, Mr. Vance‘s “lawyer and almost constant companion, being the only person who possessed a complete record of the facts,“ as stated in the Publisher‘s Note at the beginning of the book. The character Van Dine met Vance at Harvard, where the author also studied. “Vance‘s one passion (if a purely intellectual enthusiasm may be called a passion) was art – not art in its narrow, personal aspects, but in its broader, more universal significance.“ This is how we first get to know Philo Vance, with the author also telling us that he was an authority on various forms of art, as well as a collector. Throughout the series we come to realize that Vance seems to be an expert on almost anything (such as Egyptology, in The Scarab Murder Case), and the author frequently includes detailed footnotes to explain obscure details or fascinations of Vance. “He was a man of unusual culture and brilliance. An aristocrat by birth and instinct … The great majority of those with whom he came in contact regarded him as a snob,“ as stated in Van Dine‘s description of him in the first chapter of the novel. “Perhaps he may best be described as a bored and supercilious, but highly conscious and penetrating, spectator of life.“ Van Dine also describes him as a man of rare personal charm, unusually good-looking. “When I saw John Barrymore recently in Hamlet I was somehow reminded of Vance.“ Van Dine also mentions his slightly English accent and inflection (from his days at Oxford), and he does have an unusual way of speaking: most int‘restin‘ – pos‘tively – don‘t y‘ know … Vance lives in an apartment on East 38th Street in New York, the two top floors of an old mansion, filled “with rare specimens of oriental and occidental, ancient and modern, art“ – apparently including an original Michelangelo drawing. He also spends a lot of time at his favorite club, the Stuyvesant. The Vance novels are New York stories, just like some of the best Ellery Queen novels, truly bringing that magnificent city to life – and the best place to enjoy a Van Dine novel might very well be in a quiet corner of the reading room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, not too far from Vance‘s apartment. Sometimes we actually get the feeling that there was nothing Vance couldn‘t do. According to Van Dine‘s descriptions, he was an expert fencer, had a golf handicap of only three, played championship polo, was “one of the most unerring poker players I have ever seen,“ and had an uncanny knowledge of psychology. Van Dine‘s biographer states that Vance was as famous in his day as Holmes or Poirot, saying: “There was no need for Vance to be likable, Willard explained. That never really mattered. It was enough that he should be memorable.“ The Benson Murder Case deals with the death of stockbroker Alvin Benson, and in the story we meet a number of recurring characters, including the District Attorney of New York County, John F. X. Markham, who was “only an instrument in many of his most famous cases,“ as they were actually solved by Vance, of course. We also meet Sergeant Heath, Dr. Doremus, the medical examiner, and Currie, Vance‘s valet. In Van Dine‘s biography, Loughery notes that the plot of The Benson Murder Case “would have sounded tantalizingly similar to the much-discussed Joseph Elwell murder of 1920. Elwell, a wealthy stockbroker and noted bridge player, had been found shot to death seated in his living room chair in his locked brownstone apartment with no apparent signs of forcible entry. Despite an intensive police investigation, neither the weapon nor Elwell‘s murderer was ever found.“ The tone for the whole series is set early on in The Benson Murder Case when Markham states that the case strikes him as a particularly complex one. “Fancy, now!“ said Vance. “And I thought it extr‘ordin‘rily simple.“ The readers will have to embrace Vance‘s slight arrogance to fully enjoy the series. He really is the ultimate debonair sleuth (even using a monocle, without really needing to) who is much smarter than the official investigators, and not afraid to show it. Van Dine wrote twelve books about Philo Vance, published between 1926 and 1939, the final one posthumously (an outline of a book, rather than a full length novel). The first six are generally considered to be somewhat superior to the latter. In a private letter written in March 1930, Van Dine said: “I have decided to do only six books…however, one never knows exactly what the future holds. Our best plans go awry at times.“ He had said more or less the same in the essay mentioned above, including that he doubted that any writer had more than six good detective-novel ideas in his system. The Philo Vance success story was not limited to book sales. A total of fifteen Philo Vance movies were made, between 1929 and 1947, most of them based on Van Dine‘s books. In January 1928, Van Dine signed an option agreement for The Benson Murder Case with Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation (later Paramount Pictures). The option fee was $1,750, with a further $15,750 payable upon the exercise of the option. The option was indeed exercised and the film released in 1930, starring Hollywood superstar William Powell as Philo Vance. Vance was also referred to in one of the great Christmas movies of the 1940s, The Man Who Came to Dinner (“Philo Vance is now at work!“) and, in 1937, Parker Brothers created S.S. Van Dine‘s Great Detective Game, a board game featuring Philo Vance – a wonderful game to play, although copies are relatively difficult to come by. Van Dine is also known for his Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories, focusing on the fair play between the author and the reader. “The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more – it is a sporting event. And the author must play fair with the reader.“ The rules make for an enjoyable read, although even the best of golden age writers have broken one or more of them. The detective himself should never turn out to be the culprit, says Van Dine, also stating that there “simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.” Willard Huntington Wright – S.S. Van Dine – passed away in New York in April 1939, fifty years of age. His lasting legacy is Philo Vance, and hopefully this re-issue will bring Van Dine‘s work to new generations of readers. Vance really is one of a kind, don‘t y‘ know … –Ragnar Jonasson Featured image: Portrait, Willard Huntington Wright (S.S. Van Dine) Artist Stanton MacDonald-Wright National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution References: Britannica.com, article on S.S. Van Dine Loughery, John, Alias S.S. Van Dine: The Man Who Created Philo Vance, 1992. Option Agreement dated January 24, 1928, between S.S. Van Dine and Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation. Penzler, Otto, Collecting Mystery Fiction #3, S.S. Van Dine, 1999. Van Dine, S.S., I Used to Be a Highbrow but Look at Me Now, re-issue by The Mysterious Bookshop, with an introduction by Otto Penzler. Van Dine, S.S., A letter from Van Dine to Mr. Van Schalsa, March 7, 1930. Van Dine, S.S., A letter (undated) from Willard Huntington Wright, from 225 Fifth Ave., NY. Van Dine, S.S., The Benson Murder Case, 1926. Van Dine, S.S., “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories“ as published in The Winter Murder Case, 1939 (the Rules were originally published in 1928). Ragnar Jonasson is an award winning and bestselling Icelandic author of detective fiction, and an avid reader of golden age crime fiction. His books are published in over thirty territories worldwide and have sold around three million copies. His novel Snowblind was selected as one of the top 100 crime fiction novels of all time by Blackwells, and The Darkness as one of the 100 best crime novels and thrillers since 1945 by the (London) Times. In 2021, he became the first Icelandic author to have an official top ten best-selling novel in the US. His two crime series are being developed for television by CBS Studios and Warner Bros. respectively. View the full article