You Don't Look Like You Have Fangs

"That's funny, you don't look like you have fangs," said Pat Cummings as she sat down by me at a conference we both attended last fall. This may not be a conventional salutation, but I knew where it was coming from. As the current face of Kirkus Reviews in the children's-literature world, I represent a publication that has a reputation for cruel (if you’re an author), honest (if you're a review reader) reviews. When many authors think of Kirkus, they probably imagine someone with fangs, horns and a barbed tail.

"You should come ...

Read the full post >

Back Story: Publishing an E-book? There’s an App for That!

With e-books estimated to now be comprising almost one-fourth of all book sales, just about every publishing house, writer and aspiring writer is considering their e-book publication options.

Though I’ve had 10 works of fiction and non-fiction published, the task of bringing my most recent book into the digital age seemed like a daunting challenge. Our non-profit The Nobelity Project had just published a coffee table book that expanded the story of my film Building Hope. The movie is a SXSW award winner, which tells the story of our partnership to build the first high school in a rural ...

Read the full post >

War, Away From the Front Line

At the periphery of war, lingering emotional casualties and conflicts go largely unrecorded. Masha Hamilton, a former Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, knows this firsthand. In her fifth novel, What Changes Everything, the current Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul skips the harrowing details of bombs and body counts in favor of addressing psychological wounds that can be more permanent.

Todd Barbery, an American working with a humanitarian organization in modern-day Afghanistan is kidnapped, not long after he has promised his wife, Clarissa, that he will soon return home. The event ...

Read the full post >

Matter-of-Fact Yet Slightly Off

When Tom Drury and I meet on the Upper East Side, we can’t find any place to sit. I’d forgotten about the lunch rush and most places are too busy and loud to accommodate us. After following Drury for a block, he finally finds a dark, empty bar that meets his specifications. We settle into a burgundy booth in the back, where a skylight lets in wan afternoon light that barely penetrates the darkness below. The place has the same vaguely unsettling air as Drury’s books.

Drury’s fiction is perhaps best described as uncanny. The world ...

Read the full post >

First Daughter Turns First-Time Self-Publisher

As the author of eight previous titles–under such imprints as HarperCollins, Plume and Putnam–Patti Davis (The Way I See It, The Long Goodbye) has a notable track record in publishing. Yet, for the past 12 years even she, the daughter of the 40th President of the United States, has struggled to get her latest book, Till Human Voices Wake Us, to the reading public.

“Fiction is hard to get published these days. But fiction was always hard for me to get published,” Davis confesses from her home in Santa Monica. She wields the same light voice and unpredictable ...

Read the full post >

What Went Wrong

George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America is a story about change and language: the disappearance of the jobs, social structures, and securities that sustained older generations, and the way we talk about that loss. The book follows three central characters—Dean Price, a struggling energy entrepreneur in North Carolina; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker turned activist in Youngstown, Ohio, and Jeff Connaughton, a D.C. lawyer and lobbyist. Interlaced with their evolving stories are biographies of places—Tampa, Silicon Valley, Wall Street—and of celebrities, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z. All are connected by ...

Read the full post >

In Memoriam: Bernard Waber, 1921-2013

Bernard Waber died on Thursday, May 16^th at the age of 91. The author of over 40 children’s books, he is probably best-known for series of books about Lyle the crocodile that began with The House on East 88th Street. In a brief essay he wrote about his career, Waber remembered that

My own early efforts at drawing were mostly confined to the laborious copying of

photographs of film stars and other celebrities. I received respectable grades in art classes

during my school years but doubt I thought it seriously indicated a career direction.

Perhaps art seemed too ...

Read the full post >

Putting Ghosts to Rest

Emma Brockes, an English journalist, was raised an only child in a small village where, she writes in her new book, She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me, people moved in "incremental steps through increasingly boring sets of circumstances." If hers was an overtly British upbringing, it was also charmed, graced by the presence of her energetic, enigmatic South African mother, Paula. Intent on starting a new life, Paula immigrated to England in 1960, leaving behind her parents and seven siblings. Such a move was not uncommon for ambitious South Africans, and before long she found ...

Read the full post >

What's Essential

“That house on the hill. That girl. Children are like bombs that will one day go off.”

These brief sentences, written soon after turning in her first book for publication, inspired Gail Godwin’s Flora, finally brought to life after many years hidden in a notebook.  Godwin is not the same writer she was when she started out nearly 45 years ago. For one, she’s not afraid to refashion a book anymore. “It used to kill me when I had to drop a book, but sometimes I found that I could pick out pieces of it and ...

Read the full post >

In Memoriam: Liesel Moak Skorpen, 1935-2013

I have reached the age when I habitually read the obituaries; reading of lives well-lived pleases me, and fortunately there are more of those than the other in my local paper. One name in particular caught my eye this past Sunday: Elizabeth Frackelton Moak Skorpen. When your last name is Smith, just about any other surname is cooler than yours, and this surely was one to conjure with. But it also rang a faint bell.

Reading along, I learned that she was familiarly known as Liesel, and the ringing became a little stronger. Then I came to this bit: “Liesel ...

Read the full post >

There Will Be Blood…and Aliens

Any notion of friendly alien encounters is chucked to the fire with Rick Yancey’s new young-adult sci-fi thriller, The 5th Wave. A looming spaceship appears in the sky. It sits; it waits. Humans sit; they wait. Nothing much happens—no Others asking to be taken to our leader, just eerie quiet. Then, through four waves of extermination (elimination of electricity; tsunamis; plague; snipers), the Others strategically annihilate their only threat: humans. It becomes clear that these aliens aren’t on a close-encounter tour of goodwill; they mean to claim Earth as their own. As the Others hasten toward victory ...

Read the full post >

Brash Outsider, Honest Insider

In his heyday in the ’70s and ’80s, Jimmy Connors was cast—and he didn’t exactly protest—as the bad boy of tennis. Brash and cocky, he would dramatically argue with line judges and his fellow players. He didn’t like to hang out in the locker room after matches to chitchat with his colleagues. Connors grew up in downtrodden East St. Louis and made his way to the top of tennis through a mixture of grit, talent and unrelenting work. His new memoir is titled The Outsider, a title that’s perfectly apt but stresses the defiant aspects ...

Read the full post >

Publishing His Generation’s Story, Himself

What do you call a man who has written episodes of beloved television shows, such as The Jeffersons, M.A.S.H., Cheers, The Simpsons, Frasier, as well as created his own sitcom and written a big studio comedy starring Tom Hanks?

The answer: successful. You may have never heard of him—and he might self-deprecatingly disagree—but Ken Levine is an extremely successful writer and one who has been more than happy to use the benefits of self-publishing to his advantage.

Growing up in Los Angeles during the '60s, Levine got his start writing news briefs for local radio ...

Read the full post >

The Most Surprising Things I Learned Writing The Price of Justice

Laurence Leamer's The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption is out this month. A book Kirkus' critic referred to as "a well-constructed... eye-opening story about the relations among politics, business and justice," The Price of Justice is a fast-paced nonfiction legal thriller that tracks the corruption and mayhem that happened in West Virginia coal country in the 1990s and 2000s. We asked Leamer to provide a list of the most surprising things he learned while writing the book. - Ed.

1)    I had no idea how hard lawyers work and all that goes into the preparation ...

Read the full post >

Acquired Taste

“Since when did you become a food queen?”

Thus spoke legendary movie critic Pauline Kael to Raymond Sokolov on the occasion of his appointment as the New York Times food editor, replacing Craig Claiborne. The year was 1971. A passion for food was still a social liability. Nobody knew the name Paul Bocuse or Michel Guérard, nouvelle cuisine hadn’t been invented, and there wasn’t one Sichuan restaurant to speak of in New York City. Sokolov bore witness to these unprecedented developments, writing reviews, recipes and an account of taste-testing brand-name dog foods with his pet. He was ...

Read the full post >

Resisting Little Boxes: The Soul of Walter Mosley

In 2007’s Blonde Faith, Los Angeles PI Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins drove off a cliff, like Sherlock Holmes plunging down Reichenbach Falls, and for much the same reason. “I wasn’t interested in where we were going,” admits Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries. “It didn’t feel to me like I was being creative. I wasn’t happy with [Easy’s] future. I didn’t think I could do this to him.”

So six years passed, leaving Easy’s fate unknown, and the writer moved on to other projects. But just as Holmes returned for more adventures ...

Read the full post >

Late American Bloomer

Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower is a balance of intense character studies and a window into a rapidly changing world. Set before, during and after World War II in Sydney, Australia, The Watch Tower begins when sisters Clare and Laura Vaizey are forced to leave boarding school because their father has died. Clare is only nine, but Laura is in her late teens and gets a job in a cardboard box factory. Soon after, their detached mother announces she’s returning to her native England. Fearing poverty, Laura winds up marrying her boss, Felix Shaw, more than 20 years ...

Read the full post >

You Can’t Tell It All

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson is anticipating this month’s publication of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, the final installment of his acclaimed Liberation Trilogy, partly because of the opportunity it’s sure to give him to resume valuable interactions with fans of his books, when he notes how often they–and in this case one gentleman from Texas in particular–actually aid in his writing.

“Governor Rick Perry, with whom I probably don’t have a whole lot in common, other than the fact that he is a reader of military history, called ...

Read the full post >

Hope Merchants and Dream Chasers

When I call A. Igoni Barrett on the phone, he’s in Lagos, Nigeria—not because he’s visiting his native country but because, unlike most successful Nigerian writers, he still lives there.  “The stories I want to tell are Nigerian,” he says.  “By leaving, I suspect I’d lose something important.”

Barrett has won prizes and been anthologized in the West, and his already acclaimed short story collection Love Is Power or Something Like That (which Kirkus starred) will be released in the States this month. But this doesn’t mean the author makes it easy on American readers ...

Read the full post >

A City Under Siege

Near the end of Boston’s picturesque Freedom Trail lies a towering monument to the battle of Bunker Hill, visited by thousands of tourists each year. How many of them, when contemplating the 1775 battle, picture Boston under siege, a “vision of Moses: a bush burning but not consumed”? Writing in 1776, Reverend Samuel Cooper used these last words to describe the city around the time of the early Revolutionary conflicts. They also appear in an epigraph to Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution, an account of the prerevolutionary tension in and around ...

Read the full post >