September 18, 2025

September’s rush of writing and bookish events continues unabated. We had a small meeting on Wednesday (I messed up the Zoom link). So, I hope this update will help the people who couldn’t join us feel better… The Mark Twain House in Hartford is running an event of interest to writers this Friday. Join  in-person…

October 18, 2021

Pamela Stockwell is a fellow member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, which is not for writers who are women, but those who write in the womens’ fiction genre. Her debut novel, A Boundless Place, launches this Thursday, and the premise is fascinating. In 1969, a twenty-four-year-old widow, Violet, wants only to hide from life….

July 31, 2019

I’ve always admired crime and mystery writers. Their ability to mislead the reader, and the way they place clues and red herrings through the manuscript, has always fascinated me. Although I love to read these books, I almost never guess who the murderer is, which is what keeps me reading. Elissa Grodin’s latest novel, A…

March 6, 2016

Linda Legters’ debut novel, Connected Underneath, is unusual in several respects. Its chief protagonist, Persephone, is a confused teenager whose life becomes even more complicated when her tattooing habit, which she pays for with sex, gets in the way of her love for her best friend, Krista. Meanwhile, Celeste, a wheelchair-bound young woman who lives…

February 28, 2016

To paraphrase the Bard, some people are born writers, some become writers, and others have writing thrust upon them. I suspect today’s author, Barbara W. Klein, falls into the last category, since it was her family that persuaded her to write this book. It bears the unusual title of a glub glub and a shake…

December 7, 2015

Kate Manning’s second novel, My Notorious Life, was six years in the making, and it was worth the wait, so far as I’m concerned. It’s the story of Axie Muldoon, an orphaned child from the streets of 1870’s New York, who makes good, in one sense, only to find that there’s a man determined to…

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