Amy Edelman’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

Amy Edelman‘s first novel, Manless in Montclair, is based on her real-life experiences re-entering the dating scene after the death of her first husband—even the part where the protagonist becomes the subject of a Daily News profile. Originally, she tried writing it as a memoir. “When my publisher initially asked me how the memoir would end, I said I had no idea,” she says on her website. “So she suggested writing it as fiction so I could make it end however I wanted it to… in reality, what ended up happening was even less believable than the fiction.” For this holiday season, she has a straight-up memoir she recommends highly.

Oh, and she’s also got tips for suriving the holidays while single, too.

If you know someone who hasn’t already bought and/or read it, The Glass Castle would make a fantastic holiday gift.

By turns inspiring and heart-wrenching, it is a story out of step with our high-def, flat screen tv-in-every-room times. Jeannette Walls, who we first meet at age three, tells of a childhood where food, a roof, and responsible parents are in scarce supply. But, while her family may be poor, she and her siblings grow up in a world rich in imagination, books, art, and possibility.

I read parts of the book to my ten year-old and suggested my thirteen year-old read it as well. At a time when many people—old and young alike—are encouraged to think about what material things they want for the holidays, it’s inspiring to read about someone who got by—and, indeed, flourished—with so little.

6 December 2007 | gift ideas, guest authors |

Valerie Martin’s Holiday Gift Suggestion

Valerie Martin is perhaps best known as the author of such novels as Mary Reilly and the Orange Prize-winning Property; longtime Beatrice readers might also recall her essay on Chekhov, which I published last year to recognize her short story collection, The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, when she was reading from it in New York. By sheer coincidence, she’s in town again and will be reading from her most recently published book, Trespass, tonight at the Housing Works Café as part of an all-star lineup of contributors to Akashic’s New Orleans Noir anthology that also includes Joshua Clark, Tom Adcock, Julie Smith and Kim Sykes.

I wouldn’t give a work of fiction to anyone I didn’t know well. Since I don’t know your friends and family, I’ll suggest two great non-fiction books, both recently out in paperback that should satisfy all sorts of folks. The first is The Bedside Book of Birds, edited by Graeme Gibson. Even non bird-lovers will find much to remark upon in this varied and lavishly illustrated collection. Poems, stories, myths, lore, old engravings, paintings, photos, all are gathered edifyingly under such headings as “Then the Birds Attacked—Avian Defense and Flying Nightmares” and “A Bird in the House—Sinister Auspices.” In fact, even avid bird haters will find much to mull upon in this sometimes humorous, sometimes sad and touching, always fascinating volume. Put this old-fashioned miscellany by the bed and drift away to dreams of flight and feathers.

My second choice, for all your friends and relatives who think they should have been, might be, want to be, or are writers (and that, I’ve no doubt, is most of them), is Gay Talese’s brilliant A Writer’s Life. With care and narrative cunning Talese tells the story of a writer (himself) who sets out to investigate three very different stories and never finishes even one of them. Cheerfully Talese recollects how he got to these projects and how they finally got to him. Anyone who has ever struggled with an unwieldy sentence will find this book both a joy and a terror; a witty, exhaustive, and deeply cautionary tale for us all.

(Note: Trespass is published through Nan Talese’s imprint at Doubleday.)

3 December 2007 | gift ideas, guest authors |