Book review: Ron Charles reviews ‘The Lake Shore Limited,’ by Sue Miller: I didn’t much like Sue Miller’s first novel, The Good Mother. “But what did she EXPECT would happen?” I kept asking myself. “What was she thinking?” As a result, I haven’t read any of Miller’s subsequent novels. But Ron Charles’s review of Miller’s […]
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Book Review – ‘Get Real,’ by Donald E. Westlake – Review – NYTimes.com: The New York Times offers a review of Donald Westlake’s final novel: After watching a bare-chested dentist trekking through the jungle by torchlight to shake a spear at a sunburned accountant in a loincloth, you might think television reality shows were beyond
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Nova Scotia News – TheChronicleHerald.ca: In Nova Scotia’s The Chronicle Herald, Judith Meyrick reviews Magic Island: The Fictions of L. M. Montgomery by Elizabeth Waterston. Montgomery was the author of Anne of Green Gables and several subsequent best-selling novels. Montgomery kept journals and scrapbooks passionately and meticulously, preserving for us a picture of her daily
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Maisel, Eric. A Writer’s SpaceAvon, MA: Adams Media, 2008ISBN 1-59869-460-X Recommended In this little (5.5 in. wide by 6.25 in. tall) book Maisel, a therapist and creativity coach, uses the metaphor of space “to communicate how you can get a grip on your writing life and transform yourself from an occasional writer to a regular
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Hood, Ann. Comfort: A Journey Through GriefNew York: Norton, 2008ISBN 978-0-393-06456-8 Highly Recommended When Ann Hood’s five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly in 2002 from a virulent form of strep, everyone tried to comfort Ann with platitudes like “She’s in a better place” or “Time heals.” But Hood did not find these cliches comforting. And everyone
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Introductory Notes Natalie Goldberg grew up on Long Island, New York. She studied Buddhism with a teacher in Minnesota for 17 years. At about the same time that she began her Zen studies she also began writing and painting, and those three activities have coalesced into an active philosophy of living creatively. Natalie Goldberg has
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Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Disturbances in the Field New York: Counterpoint, 1983 ISBN 1-58243-332-1 Highly Recommended We hear a lot about nutritionally dense foods these days. Foods that are nutritionally dense provide high nutritional value in proportion to the calories they contain; they are the opposite of junk food, which delivers high calories with
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In ‘Bright Shiny Morning,’ James Frey Presents Little Pieces of Los Angeles in His Way – New York Times New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin writes about James Frey’s new novel: He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one
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O’Farrell, Maggie. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox New York: Harcourt, 2006 ISBN 978-0-15-101411-8 Blackstone Audiobooks, narrated by Anne Flosnik Recommended This novel is about family stories–in this case, the truths that don’t get told and the lies that spring up to fill the void–and how those stories reverberate through generations. Iris Lockhart
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Offill, Jenny, and Elissa Schappell, eds. The Friend Who Got Away New York: Doubleday, 2005Hardcover, 294 pagesISBN 978-0-385-51186-5 Recommended We’re stuck with our families, but we get to choose our friends. And although it’s hard to pin down the formula for creating friendship, we all know the magic of friendship when we’re lucky enough to find
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