![]() ![]() The idea was to write a fictional book about a hermaphrodite, and I wanted it to be medically accurate - to be a story of a real hermaphrodite, rather than a fanciful creature like Tiresias or Orlando who could shift in a paragraph to avail myself of the mythological connections without making the character a myth.' I didn't set out to write about the Greek-American experience or originally to write a family saga at all. It's autobiographical at the level of family detail or almost insignificant fact. 'The story I am telling is very far from my own experience, so the only way I felt I could make it credible for me was to borrow from a certain amount of history and personal fact. So it seems appropriate to begin by asking how much of the novel is autobiographical. (He was awarded a grant to write in Berlin for a year and they haven't yet got round to leaving.) The café makes a fleeting appearance in Middlesex, whose hero, like Eugenides, is a Greek-American raised in Detroit and now living in Berlin. I met Jeffrey Eugenides in Café Einstein in Berlin, the city in which he has lived for the past three years with his wife, an artist, and their four-year-old daughter. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() She’s driven to make a difference-for her country and for herself. Then comes the opportunity: go undercover as a spy in the French Resistance to help steal critical intelligence that could ultimately turn the tide of the war.ĭispatched behind enemy lines and in constant danger, Anna is filled with adrenaline, passion, and fear. ![]() But the more Anna learns about the organization’s secret missions, the more she longs to be stationed abroad. Everything changes when she’s recruited into the Office of Strategic Services by family friend and legendary WWI hero Major General William Donovan.ĭonovan has faith in her-and in all his “glorious amateurs” who are becoming Anna’s fast friends: Maggie, Anna’s down-to-earth mentor Irene, who’s struggling to find support from her husband for her clandestine life and Julia, a cheerful OSS liaison. Goodreads: Anna Cavanaugh is a restless young widow and brilliant French teacher at a private school in Washington, DC. ![]() ![]() ![]() Soon he’s getting calls about Mr Orange and, despite his mum’s best efforts, finds himself having to finish something his brother Andre appears to have started. When he goes to visit her grandmother and give his condolences, he leaves with Sonya’s Blackberry. Marlon’s convinced that the boys who spoke to Sonya a few minutes before her death have something to do with all of this. Not only that but just before they embarked, she convinced Marlon to pocket her stash of pills. Things take a turn for the worst when Sonya gets on the ghost train alive but is dead before they’ve reached the other end of the track. When Sonya Wilson, seventeen, blonde, gorgeous, comes knocking at his door, he’s not asking why, he’s down the local fair taking ecstacy with her and riding the ghost train, despite all his promises to his mum that he’d stay home, work hard and definitely not find himself in the sort of trouble his older brother Andre did. ![]() Sixteen-year-old Marlon Sunday is, by his own admission, ‘Not cool enough, not clever enough, not street boy enough for anyone to take notice.’ He reads non-fiction about the brain and listens to old funk records. Drug-Toting Gangboy ‘Kills’ Innocent Girl, with pictures of us both underneath for compare and contrast. ![]() The papers would be quick to pick up on it, probably scanning Facebook for a photo already. And me, I was the Hackney youth with the gangboy brother. ![]() ![]() ![]() When researching the plot for AT THE DROP OF A HAT, I felt the need to go to London, a hardship I know. ![]() In my most recent book, the research component of writing was where I expended most of my energy. I love playing with my imaginary friends, wracking my brain to come up with twisty turny plots, and tinkering with words and using them in ways no one has thought to before, or at least, I try to do all of those things. WHAT'S ON MY MIND: I recently had a reader ask me "Why do you do what you do?" Meaning, I think, what in my crazy addled head ever made me think that writing was a good way to make a living? Quite simply, all of it. Today's is a really good one as I'm giving away a signed AT THE DROP OF A HAT as well as signed books by Kate Carlisle and Eva Gates. And, yes, there will be cupcakes and chocolates!ĬONTESTS: To make it simpler, I now have a Wednesday Giveaway every (yes, you guessed it) Wednesday on my facebook page. Joining me will be one of my fave women's fiction writers Beth Kendrick. ![]() ![]() Next up will be DARK CHOCOLATE DEMISE the seventh cupcake bakery mystery out on April 7th!!ĮVENTS: Come be my Valentine! I will be signing AT THE DROP OF A HAT on Feb 14th at the Poisoned Pen at 2 pm. BOOK NEWS: AT THE DROP OF A HAT the third London hat shop mystery was released on Feb 3rd!!! Always exciting to celebrate a book birthday. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Young Tait might look like fresh fish to his new fellow inmates, but his forebears are of stronger stuff: his grandfather, known as Saint Tait, hanged for murdering his family all of them, except his daughter, who would grow up to birth Tait the younger. The title story is an ironic rumination on sin - or, if you prefer, "sin" - within the walls and bars of a prison. My review could be double its length, such is my admiration for Barker and these tales! Invention, boldness, terror, eroticism, and yes, self-knowledge await. ![]() This is metaphor made flesh at its finest, most realized, most satisfying. As the volumes went on, Barker’s strengths as a writer grew the long stories here - the longest of any volume in Blood, each over 50 pages - allow some of his strongest, most evocative prose to shine and features some of his most thematically potent imaginings. Like its companion The Inhuman Condition, which was originally simply titled Books of Blood Volume IV in the UK, Volume V was retitled after one of its stories when published in the US in hardcover in 1986 and a Pocket Books paperback in 1988 it became In the Flesh (with cover art by Jim Warren). ![]() ![]() She teaches penmanship to third graders, makes wreaths for the Society for Ladies of Perpetual Health, walked dogs, and replaced bedding plants for the elderly ladies of her neighborhood.īlue meets Gansey, Noah, Ronan, and Adam when the boys go to Nino's during her shift. ![]() No one knows where he went, or if he wanted to leave.īlue works multiple jobs to earn money for her future and freedom. Her father disappeared right when she was born. Because of this, she has avoided boys and dating for most of her life. Gansey also compared her to "the table at Starbucks everyone wanted." Her whole life, she has been told by her family that if she kisses her true love, he will die. ![]() ![]() Blue comes from a family of psychics and is the only resident in her house to lack this ability. When the people in her house are doing readings, she often attends them, as she makes things "loud and gives off extra energy." She is described as being a sort of magnet for the supernatural, and the magnifying glass that focuses the sun. ![]() ![]() It is simply not that interesting to listen to someone talk about their dog, even if that someone is Eileen Myles. Much of Myles’ work is intentionally messy, but I have often found sharpness and humor in her large blocks of run-on-sentence text. Afterglow’s been blurbed prestigiously, but I found it to be quite a mess of a book. Eileen Myles is the author of more than twenty books, including Afterglow (a dog memoir), Inferno (a poet’s novel), Chelsea Girls, and Cool For You. The subject of Afterglow is a dog named Rosie, now deceased, with whom Myles shared her itinerant life, and describes using odd, associative framing devices, including a dream puppet show and a letter from her dog’s lawyer. Afterglow: (a dog memoir) - Kindle edition by Myles, Eileen. Punk poet Eileen Myles, on their dog memoir: 'We were regarded as an unruly pair' Emma Brockes Lauded by Lena Dunham and the basis of a character in TV show Transparent, the poet discusses. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Afterglow: (a dog memoir). Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. But I suppose even our idols screw up sometimes, and alas, she has done This Thing. Afterglow: (a dog memoir) - Kindle edition by Myles, Eileen. ![]() And honestly, I expect better from Myles, who is a human institution of punk-rock ethos and unruly prose poetry, beloved by every avant-leaning professional woman writer I know. ![]() I just did not expect Eileen Myles, arbiter of gender-fucking literary cool, to be one of them. This is no vantage point from which to write a book, though I fear many people have. ![]() ![]() ![]() I do not think they are really the same as the crocodiles on the Whorl, although it may be that every animal of the kind is entitled to the name, like "bird." They seemed indolent as Nadi herself when they basked on the banks in the sunlight, but their doubly forked blue tongues flicked in and out like flames. ![]() There were crocodiles in it, or at least what we called crocodiles, sleek and shining emerald lizards with eight legs and jaws like traps. Our lazy southern river always smiled, and sometimes laughed aloud, showing a froth of white lace underskirt where it tumbled over rocks. Or perhaps it is simply that the noises of the town keep me from hearing the river. I do not think this is the same river we had in the south. It is not a big wall I have seen others much higher but it goes all the way around, except where the river comes in and goes out. I have never seen a whole town with a wall before. ![]() Strange how much a quire of writing paper can mean to a man who has made such quantities of it. Besides, the man who owns the shop would give me more ink if I asked for it, I feel certain. I have paper again, and there is still a lot of ink in the little bottle. ![]() ![]() If Penelope chooses one from amongst them, it will plunge Ithaca into bloody civil war. Between Penelope’s many suitors, a cold war of dubious alliances and hidden knives reigns, as everyone waits for the balance of power to tip one way or another. īut no one man is strong enough to claim Odysseus’ empty throne – not yet. But now, years on, speculation is mounting that husband is dead, and suitors are starting to knock at her door. ![]() Whilst he lived, her position was secure. Penelope was barely into womanhood when she wed Odysseus. ![]() None of them have returned, and the women have been left behind to run the kingdom. ![]() Seventeen years ago, king Odysseus sailed to war with Troy, taking with him every man of fighting age from the island of Ithaca. Synopsis: ‘The greatest power we woman can own, is that we take in secret. ![]() ![]() ![]() We end our conversation discussing whether some of the current criticisms of Churchill, such as the allegation that he masterminded genocide in India, really hold weight. ![]() We also discuss why Churchill was one of the few leaders to foresee the threat that Hitler posed. Andrew then explains how Churchill also became one of the 20th century’s great historians and how his appreciation of history and sentimental outlook colored his worldview and shaped his leadership. Andrew then discusses Churchill’s military career, why Winston was so eager to see action on the frontlines, and how he parlayed those experiences into becoming the world’s highest paid journalist by his mid-twenties. ![]() We then shift to the life of Churchill, beginning with a childhood in which young Winston often felt neglected. His name is Andrew Roberts, he’s a journalist and historian, and we begin our conversation discussing why he thought another Churchill biography was needed. My guest today seeks to answer that question in his biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. When we seek an example of great leadership, one man who often comes to mind is Winston Churchill - the iconic, visionary prime minister, who guided his country through war and stood firmly for his beliefs and impervious to his critics. But how did Winston become the legendary British Bulldog? ![]() |