“I’ve Always Been a Sucker for a Good Story”
It’s been a little over two years since I began my sideline in literary event hosting with a reception for Adam Langer upon the publication of Ellington Boulevard. Yesterday I was sent a URL for the promotional trailer for his next novel, The Thieves of Manhattan, which is coming out this summer, and I couldn’t wait to share it with you. Any of you who followed my career at GalleyCat, or are simply aware of certain scandals within the publishing industry over the last four years, will be rather amused by the central conceit.
Let’s put it this way: The novel has blurbs from Laura Albert and Clifford Irving—I’ve got the galley on my desk, and even though pub date is still three months off, it’s moved about six slots up my to-do list.
6 April 2010 | read this |
Read This: Resistance, Book 1
I confess to a lack of objectivity when it comes to Resistance, Book 1, as the artist on the graphic novel, Leland Purvis, is a good friend. But I would have been impressed with this story even without that personal connection—you know how Alan Furst has, in novel after novel, crafted masterful dramas out of the years leading up to the Second World War and the early phases of the conflict, before the United States joined the fray? Carla Jablonski is working the same territory here, and like Furst, she understands that covert operations usually isn’t a sleek or glamorous field, but a series of small actions performed by ordinary people—in this story, even the children of the Tessier family are drawn into the underground movement against the occupying German forces.
Leland uses young Paul’s sketchbook as an effective tool for conveying many of the story’s emotional subtexts, but his compositions also underscore the tensions of the Tessier childrens’ big mission, reminding the reader that it isn’t an adventure but a matter of life and death. Resistance is the first volume in a trilogy; I’m very much looking forward to seeing where the story goes in subsequent volumes, whether Jablonski stays with the Tessiers or shifts focus to other members of the resistance movement.
8 March 2010 | read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
