Author Magdaléna Platzová and translator Alex Zu…
Author Magdaléna Platzová and translator Alex Zucker discuss Life After Kafka in Air/Light.
Author Magdaléna Platzová and translator Alex Zucker discuss Life After Kafka in Air/Light.
“The sound of snow falling on snow. The sound of a pencil moving across paper. The sound of walking. Of a child talking to herself under her breath. Of water—as it bubbles up from a spring or laps against rocks. These more than anything else make up the would-be soundtrack of To & Fro. These together with silence, the infinite variety of silences we come to know if we attend closely to the world’s signs and wonders.
But music is a wonder too.
Some music, then –”
Read more about and listen to Leah’s playlist for To & Fro at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “all about sharing the love for music, literature, and popular culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Download the reading group guide.
Norman Lock shares the story behind The Caricaturist and his American Novels cycle with Foreword Reviews.
Watch Leah Hager Cohen discuss her novel To & Fro in the “Petit Foreword” series and listen to her interview on the Association of Jewish Libraries Nice Jewish Books podcast.
Watch Melissa Pritchard discuss Flight of the Wild Swan on PBS’s Arizona Horizon and listen to her talk about the novel on NurseDot Podcast, KMET’s Moments with Marianne, and KJZZ’s The Show.
“You can’t be your own therapist, dice can’t shake themselves, and at the desk you can’t always dig yourself out of a mental hole. But you can go to the kitchen and make another sandwich and press play. Play (the fun kind or not) is exactly what you need, even if that’s not what the button actually says. It’s just an arrow, pointing right. Where it’s really pointing is: somewhere else—which is where you want your thoughts (sometimes your whole mindset) to go. That is music’s great gift to a writer. . . . For me, writing Trondheim, each of the following songs was model, permission, catalyst, encouragement.”
Read more about and listen to Cormac’s playlist for Trondheim at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “all about sharing the love for music, literature, and popular culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Read an adapted excerpt from Trondheim in Harper’s Magazine and discover how Cormac James found his way into the novel at Granta.
Listen to Jerome Charyn discuss his novel Ravage & Son on the Virtual Memories Show, New Books Network, Too Jewish Radio, and Leonard Lopate at Large.
We at Bellevue Literary Press are saddened by the news of Bill Glassley’s death while traveling to his beloved Greenland to continue his research there. A geologist whose commitment to wilderness preservation informed his lyrical writing and profound humanism, he was always thoughtful, cheerful, and considerate of all of us who worked with him on his prizewinning book, A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice. We feel honored to have known him and will miss him terribly.
—Erika Goldman, Bellevue Literary Press Publisher and Editorial Director
Watch Dana Sachs discuss All Else Failed at McNally Jackson Books and hear more from her about the book on Bookstack, Chris Voss Show, Curious Man, Keen On, Leonard Lopate at Large, Stand Up! with Pete Dominick, and What Matters Most.
Melissa Pritchard shares more of the story behind Flight of the Wild Swan with Book Q&As, ASU News, and The Local; delves into Florence Nightingale’s legacy at The Conversation; and explores the parallel lives of Leo Tolstoy and Florence Nightingale at Literary Hub.
Read an excerpt from Flight of the Wild Swan and find rich resources for your book club discussions of the novel at BookBrowse.
Listen to Ulf Danielsson discuss The World Itself on the Avid Reader and Chris Voss Show.
Watch Jo Firestone and guest performers Ariel Kavoussi, Nadia Pinder, and Maeve Higgins present Your Hearts, Your Scars at the Center for Fiction, and enjoy a special celebration of Adina Talve-Goodman and her book at Central Reform Congregation (via Left Bank Books).
Eduardo Halfon talks about Canción and how his entire body of work functions as a “novela en marcha—an ongoing novel” at Asymptote.
Andrew Krivak discusses his inspirations for Like the Appearance of Horses and the previous novels of the Dardan Trilogy in the Brodart “Tell Me More” series and with the Somerville Arts Council, Image, Fiction Writers Review, Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, and on Keen On and WBUR Here & Now.
Preview Like the Appearance of Horses at Shelf Unbound and Literary Hub, and find rich resources for your book club discussions at Reading Group Choices.
Watch author Edgard Telles Ribeiro and translator Kim M. Hastings read from the title novella of The Impostor for the Big Other Book Awards.
Watch Norman Lock read from The Ice Harp for the Big Other Book Awards.
Read an excerpt from The Caricaturist in Shelf Unbound.
Listen to Norman Lock discuss Voices in the Dead House and his American Novels series on Carl Rollyson’s A Life in Biography podcast.
Watch Norman Lock read from Voices in the Dead House for the Big Other Book Awards.
Watch Jerome Charyn in conversation with Jay Neugeboren about Ravage & Son at The Mysterious Bookshop.
Discover the story behind Ravage & Son at the Jewish Book Council and through interviews with Jerome Charyn at PopMatters, Reader’s Entertainment Magazine, and Book Q&As.
Read excerpts from Juan José Millás’s new novel Let No One Sleep at Shelf Unbound and the Literary Hub.
Preview Ravage & Son in Evergreen Review and The Forward.
Go behind the scenes of the humanitarian aid effort in the All Else Failed book trailer, read the Editors’ Choice Award adapted excerpt in Scoundrel Time, and find Dana Sach’s op-eds related to migration and the book at Gateway Journalism Review, Charlotte Readers, and in the Wall Street Journal.
Read Alex Zucker’s notes on translating Life After Kafka at Literary Hub.
Preview Life After Kafka in Air/Light (introduced by David Ulin).
Leah Hager Cohen shares more of the story behind To & Fro at Literary Hub and the Jewish Book Council’s Paper Brigade Daily.
National Book Awards News! Congratulations to Natalie Hodges, whose Uncommon Measure is on the National Book Awards Longlist for Nonfiction and to author Shahriar Mandanipour and translator Sara Khalili, whose Seasons of Purgatory is on the National Book Awards Longlist for Translated Literature!
Watch Frederic Tuten in conversation about The Bar at Twilight at McNally Jackson Books and read more about his life and work in the East Hampton Star, Washington Independent Review of Books, and Cleveland Review of Books.
Watch Siobhan Phillips in conversation about her debut novel Benefit in the Charis Circle reading series and read an interview with her at Book Q&As.
John Rolfe Gardiner discusses his literary career and shares the stories behind North of Ordinary with Potomac Review and One Story.
Download the reading group guide.
Uncommon Measure is a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” selection and Poets & Writers “Page One” notable new book of the season. Hear more from Natalie Hodges on NPR All Things Considered and listen to her read from the book at Poets & Writers.
“Incurable is a word Charcot used: ‘The great asylum,’ he wrote, ‘as you are surely aware, contains a population of over 5,000 people, including a great number of incurables who are admitted for life. . . . In other words, we are in possession of a kind of living pathological museum, the resources of which are considerable.’ That word incurable has a flip side—as in, aren’t we all incurable when it comes to mortality? When it comes to desire? Here’s a playlist of music by women who are that flipside of incurable in their music, and often in their lives—brave, renegade, spilling over.”
Read more about and listen to Maud’s playlist for City of Incurable Women at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Publishers Weekly shares the story behind City of Incurable Women and discusses the novel with author Maud Casey.
Listen to editors Hannah Tinti and Sarika Talve-Goodman discuss Your Hearts, Your Scars and the life and work of Adina Talve-Goodman on St. Louis Public Radio.
Read excerpts from Your Hearts, Your Scars in Bellevue Literary Review, Infusion Nurses Society’s INSider magazine, Tablet Magazine, Shelf Unbound, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub.
Read Jo Firestone’s essay about grieving the loss of Adina Talve-Goodman in the New York Times and more about the author’s legacy from writer and bookseller Arvin Ramgoolam in Anomaly and from Girls Write Now.
Shahriar Mandanipour and Sara Khalili discuss Seasons of Purgatory with Shelf Unbound and in the “National Book Award Interviews” series at Words Without Borders.
Read more interviews with Shahriar Mandanipour in Assignment Magazine.
Read a story from Seasons of Purgatory in Joyland Magazine.
T. L. Toma discusses the psychological borders of his novel Look at Us with Review Americana.
Watch Ulf Danielsson’s TEDx Talk “Why the World is for Real”
Patricia Hanlon, author of Swimming to the Top of the Tide, talks to Poets & Writers about experiencing New England’s wild salt marshes as a swimmer, writer, and painter, and to the Gloucester Daily Times about her open water swimming adventures through all four seasons.
Download the reading group guide.
Watch Jordi Nopca in conversation about Come On Up at the PEN World Voices festival and Toronto Public Library.
Watch translator Mara Faye Lethem read from Come On Up for the Big Other Book Awards.
Download the reading group guide.
“Her Here is about two women, Elena and Ella, one in search of the other. It’s also about travel as adventure and escape, about fleeing the self and being faced with it. Many of the songs below capture the vivid joy and sadness of being always on the move, of wanting to disappear, to escape exposure. Some call up the terror of going too far, of losing track of home.”
Read more about and listen to Amanda’s playlist for Her Here at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Tune in to NPR’s Marginalia for a fascinating interview with Andrew Krivak about his novel The Bear; take a hike with the author up Mt. Monadnock, the mountain that inspired the novel, on WBUR; and learn more about his hopes for the conversations The Bear will spark as an NEA Big Read selection.
Looking for a great book club novel? Klaus Modick’s Moss is a Reading Group Choices “Editors’ Pick” selection!
David Herman discusses translating Moss and the exciting ecofictional adventure the novel has in store for its readers at Barzakh Magazine.
Mikhail Iossel discusses Love Like Water, Love Like Fire with Fiction Writers Review.
Read excerpts from Swimming to the Top of the Tide at the Literary Hub and Artists & Climate Change.
Download the reading group guide.
Watch Norman Lock read from Tooth of the Covenant for the Big Other Book Awards and preview the novel at Big Other.
Watch Amanda Dennis in conversation with Rachel Donadio about Her Here at the American Library in Paris.
Read a lovely exchange of letters between Amanda Dennis and Ayşegül Savaş about reading, writing, and their debut novels at Music & Literature.
Amanda Dennis discusses the inspiration behind Her Here at the Literary Hub and talks about the novel with Shelf Unbound (pp. 68 – 72), the First Pages Prize, American University of Paris, and Gates Cambridge.
Explore rich resources for your book club discussions about Her Here at Reading Group Choices.
Read an excerpt from Her Here in Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Natalie Hodges discusses the story (and science) behind Uncommon Measure with Michael Pollan at Chaucer’s Books, on the Back From Broken, Creative Process and Delving In podcasts, and with the Harvard Gazette and Brazos Bookstore.
Read an excerpt from Benefit in Shelf Unbound (pp 48-49).
Download the reading group guide.
Find resources for your book club discussions about Your Hearts, Your Scars at Reading Group Choices.
Find resources for your book club discussions about Uncommon Measure at Reading Group Choices.
Watch Maud Casey in conversation about City of Incurable Women with American Library in Paris Book Award Administrator Rachel Donadio; with Anne Hoffman in the Psychiatry and the Arts seminar series of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine, and with Emily Mitchell at Lost City Books.
Preview stories from The Bar at Twilight in BOMB Magazine and at the Literary Hub.
Read a story from Frederic Tuten’s The Bar at Twilight in BOMB Magazine.
Read a story from Frederic Tuten’s The Bar at Twilight in BOMB Magazine.
“A good portion of the novel takes place during World War II, when [J.D.] Salinger, a member of the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps, experienced horror after horror. . . . The Andrews Sisters appear as disembodied creatures in Sergeant Salinger. Sonny, as Salinger was called, had to identify each of the Andrews Sisters at a checkpoint in “The Green Hell” of the Hürtgen Forest, or he might have been arrested as a German spy. He rattles off their names—‘Patty, Laverne, and Maxene’—and gets through the checkpoint unscathed.”
Read more about and listen to Jerome’s playlist for Sergeant Salinger at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The following pieces constitute a highlight reel of the music I reference in each of the five chapters in Uncommon Measure—essentially, my personal playlist* and a set of program notes for the book. The recordings I have chosen are by no means the “definitive” ones; rather, they are the performances and interpretations that continue to inflect the way I play, love, and listen to classical music.
*Find a longer playlist on Spotify or click the links below to listen to individual pieces
Chapter One “Untrainment”
“La campanella” from Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 2, Op. 7. III: Allegro spiritoso (Rondo alla campanella) (1826; arr. early 1900s for violin and piano by Fritz Kreisler)
Niccolò Paganini, 1782–1840
Recording: Ivry Gitlis with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Stanislaw Wislocki. October 2, 1966, Paris.
The great lore surrounding Paganini, of course, is that he sold his soul to the Devil in order to play so damned well. An illustration from the late 1820s, by the Viennese artist Johann Peter Lyser, shows him fiddling and stamping inside a runic circle, surrounded by a dancing host of shadows dead and undead, his flashing eyes and floating hair befitting the demon-lover from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” A critic in the French journal L’Entracte proclaimed him a “Satan onstage, Satan knock-kneed, bandy-legged, double-jointed, twisted. . . . Fall to the knees of Satan and worship him.” In a 2007 article in Current Musicology, the violinist and musicologist Maiko Kawabata—citing L’Entracte, Lyser, and others—compiles a list of monikers by which Paganini was known throughout Europe during his lifetime: sorcerer, charlatan, wizard, der hexensohn, Faustus, Mephistopheles, Satan, Zamiel.
Paganini composed frequently in the form of theme and variation, of which rondos like “La campanella” represent their own more specific form. Variant sections revolve around a fixed theme whose inevitable, eternally approaching return fills the listener with a kind of holy dread. Rondos were, I think, ideal for the buildups of unbearable tension that caused audience members to cry out and occasionally collapse during Paganini’s performances, effects that only fed rumors of his demonic powers. Each successive variation is an opportunity for a more daring, more terrible exhibition of the violinist’s skill than the last, while the recurrent summoning of the theme renders the music simultaneously familiar and strange—incantatory, talismanic, chthonic.
The myth of Paganini survives in a persistent modern fascination with his character, particularly in film and, in the American playwright Don Nigro’s 1995 play Paganini, on the stage. “Variation upon variation,” Nigro’s Paganini cries, “but which variation leads to salvation and which to damnation? Music is a question for which there is no answer.” For sheer cool-headed style, I recommend this 1966 performance of “La campanella” by Ivry Gitlis, one of the towering violinists of the twentieth century, with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra.
Chapter Two “A Sixth Sense: Notes on Improvisation”
“Wilder Reiter (The Wild Horseman)”, from Album für die Jugend, Op. 68 (1848)
Robert Schumann, 1810–1856
Recordings: Luba Edlina, Schumann: Album for the Young, 1999; Gabriela Montero’s improvisation at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, January 27, 2020.
It touched me to learn, while researching these notes, that 19th-century Europe had its own version of the Suzuki Method (if not so much in organized practice, then at least in spirit): the philosophy that to teach children music is to nurture them toward becoming virtuous people and moral citizens, toward living well and with love. Inspired by Rousseau’s 1762 treatise Emile, or On Education and its emphasis on both the child’s imagination and his independence—his “best right of all”—a new wave of German philosophers and pedagogues began to argue for the incorporation of music into childhood education, essential to Rousseau’s project of “mak[ing] a loving and feeling being—to perfect reason by sentiment.”
Among those influenced was the composer Robert Schumann, who in 1848 published a collection of children’s pieces entitled Album für die Jugend (Album for the Young). Conceived in part as a birthday present for his eldest daughter, Marie, the album is unique in that the pieces are written not just for children to play, but, as the scholar Lora Deahl notes in an essay for College Music Symposium, “from the perspective of a child” (emphasis mine). The eighth piece in the album, for example—a brief tune, at once playful and somber, entitled “The Wild Horseman”—is riddled with surprising and off-kilter accents meant to mimic the ride, as Deahl puts it, of “a child on a hobbyhorse, knocking recklessly against the legs of chairs and tables.” Schumann, a father of eight, wrote that the Album was of special personal significance to him because its scenes “were taken directly from my family life.”
More than a century and a half later, the pianist Gabriela Montero would riff on “The Wild Horseman”—a piece she first learned as a child—to illustrate how, for her, “improvisation was always just a way to narrate life,” crucial to her development not only as an artist but as a human being. You can listen to Montero’s improvisation on this theme at the Radcliffe Institute here (her performance begins at 15:36). For the original piece (and the complete album), I recommend the Ukrainian pianist Luba Edlina’s 1999 recording.
Chapter Three “Symmetry Breaking”
Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 (1904, revised 1905)
Jean Sibelius, 1865–1957
Recording: Jascha Heifetz with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Walter Hendl, 1960.
“My tragedy,” wrote the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius of his early musical ambitions, “was that I wanted to be a celebrated violinist at any price. Since the age of fifteen I played my violin practically from morning to night.” It wasn’t until his mid-twenties, however, a decade after he first began studying the instrument, that Sibelius “had to admit that I had begun my training for the exacting career of a virtuoso too late.” His violin concerto—the only concerto he ever wrote, for any instrument—has thus been widely interpreted as his valediction to a former self. It is a brutal piece, angry, melancholic, unrelenting; wracked with suffering, suffused with tenderness, relieved only occasionally from itself in moments when the fever of its intensity breaks into a dull chordal throb, an ache from beyond. I remember in particular how difficult it is to save enough bow for the long notes in each of the three movements: the strength and restraint required to hold the intensity of the phrase without choking the tone; the locus of tension in the gut, the burning stillness somewhere in the back of the upper right arm.
When I first learned Sibelius’s concerto in high school, for conservatory auditions, I was as frightened by its backstory as I was moved by it. It seemed to me a bad omen, an embodiment of the future I was fighting against, the ghosts of anticipation that moved in my periphery as I played: the double-octave shifts I missed more often than not, the extra noise that, try as I might to silence it, cluttered a difficult bow change in the opening melody.
I didn’t realize until much later, when I was no longer practicing violin in the same way, that the labor that goes into playing the piece—the relentless physical struggle required both to learn and to perform it—is perhaps essential to the music’s emotional power, not to mention its meaning for the generations of violinists who continue to grapple with it. I also think of an anecdote from Erik Tawaststjerna’s 1976 biography of Sibelius, describing his failed audition for the Vienna Philharmonic in 1891, when he was twenty-five years old: “When he got back to his room, Sibelius broke down and wept. Afterwards he sat at the piano and began to practice scales.”
The conflict between Jascha Heifetz’s yearning melodic phrasing and the uncompromising tempi carried forward by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in their 1960 collaboration with the iconic violinist, captures this struggle with particular poignance.
Chapter Four “Chaconne”
“Ciaccona” from Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 (~1720)
Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685-1750
Recordings: Rachel Podger, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, 1999; Sergey Khachatryan, Bach: Sonatas & Partitas, 2010.
Because the chapter itself revolves around both the Chaconne and the larger work to which it belongs, I will focus here, briefly, on a detail of that magnum opus, the six sonatas and partitas for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach. The original manuscript is titled, in Italian, as per convention, Sei Solo a Violino senza Basso accompagnato, six solos for violin without bass accompaniment. But there is a mistake in the Italian grammar, one by which Bach himself speaks directly to the performer—in other words, no mistake at all. “Six solos” should be sei soli in Italian, not sei solo, which, translated, means “you are alone.” In German, Bach’s native tongue, its sense is even stronger: sei solo is a command, the singular imperative form of the verb sein, to be. In a score practically devoid of articulations, explicit tempi, and even dynamic markings for the performer to lay a course by, Bach’s singular instruction to both player and listener is, simply, to be alone. His violin sonatas and partitas, perhaps like all of his music, simultaneously remind us of our lonely condition and challenge us to face it, dwell in it, rise to meet it as we are.
I mention in the book that there are as many interpretations of the Chaconne as there are violinists, and every violinist, too, will play and listen to it differently at various stages of their life. Two particular recordings meant more to me during the process of writing Uncommon Measure than any others. One is a historical performance by the violinist Rachel Podger, from her 1999 Bach album, on a gut-stringed, Baroque-style instrument whose shadowy resonance somehow captures the lilt and curve of cathedral walls. The other, a 2010 recording by the young Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan, harnesses the full power of a modern violin and bow and bristles with verve and energy, raw and clarion in its cry of rage and sorrow.
Chapter Five “The Still Point of the Turning World”
“Café 1930” from Histoire du Tango (1986)
Astor Piazzolla, 1921–1992
Recording: Augustin Hadelich and Pablo Sáinz-Villegas, Histoire du Tango, 2013.
With the structural rhyme of its alternating A–B–A sections and its dual preoccupation with love and time, tango is to classical music as the sonnet is to English poetry: a highly formal expression of desire, a long tradition with a wistful sense of its past. That profound self-consciousness, both sad and celebratory, finds its most explicit outlet in Astor Piazzolla’s 1986 masterpiece “Histoire du Tango,” whose four interlocking movements trace the evolution of tango music from the brothels of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires to the modern-day concert hall. And yet tango, unlike the traditional sonnet, has always been about far more than courtship. It is Argentina’s “street language,” or cayengue, in the words of the pianist Pablo Ziegler, who performed with Piazzolla’s tango Quintet from 1978 to 1988: “Defying and exhibitionist, the authentic tango expresses mugre (filth) and roña (fight). . . . Piazzolla has very sophisticated compositions, and at the same time, they are mugrosas. Such mugre can be felt, in spite of the intricacy with which those tangos were written or whether the language was contemporary, impressionist or expressionist.”
Indeed, Piazzolla is credited above all other composers with transforming tango into concert music: he almost single-handedly developed the style of nuevo tango, which infuses tango’s traditional forms with the full-bodied warmth of chamber music, the electric shiver of jazz. But Ziegler is right that all of Piazzolla’s works retain a shadow—indeed more than a shadow—of the blood and grittiness that make tango, well, tango. The second movement of “Histoire,” for example—the violet-hued “Café 1930,” whose opening murmur conjures the luminous windows and black cobblestones of a rainy Parisian afternoon—expresses its mugre in the form of brief accelerated passages that, like a temper momentarily lost, lurch toward explosive ardor with an intensity that dissipates as quickly as it blooms.
Originally composed for flute and guitar, “Histoire” is commonly performed by violinists in combination with other instruments, usually guitar, piano, or piano and cello. My favorite recording—for its mugre, roña, beauty, grief—is the 2013 album by the German-Italian violinist Augustin Hadelich and the Spanish guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas.
Watch Lisa Olstein in conversation about her brilliant lyric essay Pain Studies with Eula Biss in a Women & Children First virtual event and with Paul Lisicky on the VBC Rekindled program.
Jerome Charyn talks to the Literary Hub about the books that inspired his new novel Cesare and with Stay Thirsty Magazine about the way history shapes all his work.
Read an excerpt from American Follies at Big Other.
Read a story from Mikhail Iossel’s Love Like Water, Love Like Fire at the Literary Hub and preview more in the New Yorker.
Watch Eduardo Halfon read from Canción for the Big Other Book Awards, listen to him discuss the book on the Keen On and Beyond the Zero podcasts, and read excerpts in the New York Review of Books, Tablet Magazine, and Evergreen Review.
Maud Casey talks about City of Incurable Women at Book Q&As and with the Georgia Review, Five Points: A Journal of Literature & Art, Maryland Today, and BOMB Magazine.
Download the Feast Day of the Cannibals reading group guide.
Download The Wreckage of Eden reading group guide.
Download the A Fugitive in Walden Woods reading group guide.
Download The Port-Wine Stain reading group guide.
Download the American Meteor reading group guide.
Download The Boy in His Winter reading group guide.
We at Bellevue Literary Press mourn the passing of Meredith Tax, our beloved friend and author of A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State. Her commitment throughout her life to women’s rights, most recently with her work with Kurdish women, was central to her writing, and her political engagement was propelled by unflagging belief and infused with joy. She was an ongoing source of inspiration to us and many others.
—Gloria Jacobs, Bellevue Literary Press President of the Board of Directors and Erika Goldman, Bellevue Literary Press Publisher and Editorial Director
Listen to Lisa Olstein discuss Pain Studies on the State of Us podcast and read interviews with her about the book in Sightlines Magazine, New Delta Review, and Synapsis.
The tenth anniversary edition of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Tinkers is an Indie Next List for Reading Groups selection! Discover more about the independent booksellers and other literary champions who “made Tinkers happen” in Bookselling This Week.
Join the Asymptote Book Club discussion about Juan José Millás’s “spectacularly surreal and cerebral” novel From the Shadows and read more about Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn’s co-translation process.
Lisa Olstein talks to Elizabeth McCracken about taking a poet’s approach to research and the eclectic sources informing Pain Studies at The Rumpus.
I was quite intimidated by Gerry Weissmann, who was three years ahead of me when I became a resident on the New York University Medical Service in 1970. That feeling persisted, so it was with some trepidation, in 1992, that I asked him to suggest a publisher for a book I had just written (my first). The title was to be A User-Friendly Field Guide to the Subject of Acid-Base Disorders through the Magic of Ion Transport. While I held my breath, Gerry said, “Needs a better title . . . Acid and Basics,” and without missing a beat, he recommended an editor, who then bought my book to be published by Oxford University Press.
That was the beginning of a relationship that included, most importantly, his recommendation that I seek the help of Erika Goldman in finding a publisher for a novel based on the life of Lawrence J. Henderson. That meeting with Erika ultimately led to the creation of Bellevue Literary Press.
He was generous with his praise, when he felt it was warranted, and very supportive of my work. Just two weeks before he died, I consulted him for a reference to a quote by Lewis Thomas. He replied within an hour with both the answer and a Weissmannian quip.
His intelligence and wit will not be matched.
—Jerome Lowenstein
Listen to Varley O’Connor share the fascinating historical true story behind her novel The Welsh Fasting Girl on Biblio Radio and read more from her interview at Heights Libraries.
IN MEMORIAM: It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Gerald Weissmann (August 7, 1930 – July 10, 2019), four of whose remarkable essay collections we had the honor of publishing: The Fevers of Reason, Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter, Mortal and Immortal DNA, and Galileo’s Gout. His extraordinary erudition and keen wit graced everything he wrote. His dedication to engaging “the two cultures” of the arts and the sciences in fruitful, even revelatory, dialogue epitomized our mission and served as a constant source of inspiration.
View the Pain Studies-inspired comic collaboration between Lisa Olstein and artist Lauren Haldeman at Poetry Northwest.
Read excerpts from Pain Studies at Post45 and the Literary Hub.
Listen to Norman Lock read from and discuss Feast Day of the Cannibals, the sixth book of his American Novels series, on Jamming Their Transmission.
Huzzah! Juan José Millás’s novel From the Shadows, translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn and Thomas Bunstead, is a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year, Thrillist Best Book of the Year, and World Literature Today Notable Translation of the Year; Will Eaves’s novel Murmur is a Wall Street Journal Distinctive Novel of the Year, and an Advocate and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year; and Norman Lock’s Feast Day of the Cannibals is an Advocate Best LGBTQ Novel of the Year!
“Features one of the most memorable closets since C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Publishers Weekly interviews “Writer to Watch” Juan José Millás about his North American debut novel From the Shadows.
Designer Tree Abraham discusses the evolution of the From the Shadows cover art with Spine Magazine.
Read an excerpt from Feast Day of the Cannibals at Big Other.
Find out which questions drove Andrew Krivak to write The Bear at Powell’s Books, whether he believes the novel foretells our future at Dragonfly.eco, and how his abiding love for literature and nature informs all of his work in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.
Explore rich resources for your book club discussions about The Bear at Bookbrowse, Reading Group Choices, and hoopla.
The Bear is an NEA Big Read selection, LibraryReads Pick, Apple Books Best of the Month selection, and Buzz Books by Publishers Lunch selection. Discover the origins of this powerful story in Library Journal.
“Songs about the end of the world are either too gloomy, too playful, or too political, and The Bear is not any of these. Rather, what I’ve tried to do is present a range of new music I came across while I was writing The Bear, music that came to me in a kind of obliquity, which is to say, when I least expected it and really needed it.”
Read more about and listen to Andrew’s playlist for The Bear at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Read excerpts from The Bear at the Literary Hub and in Fordham Magazine.
Find an excerpt from Jerome Charyn’s novel Sergeant Salinger in “Salinger and the Art of ‘Jewish Zen’” at the Jewish Book Council.
Before he wrote the novel Sergeant Salinger, Jerome Charyn attempted to discover the man behind the myth in a Forward magazine cover story, “J.D. Salinger: The Lost Bar Mitzvah Boy.”
Check out the opening section of Will Eaves’s award–winning novel Murmur at the Literary Hub and read more from him about the novel in the Guardian and Stay Thirsty Magazine.
Richard Wiley talks about Tacoma Stories and some of the city’s famous daughters (Rebecca Welles), infamous sons (Ted Bundy), and legendary watering holes with the Tacoma News Tribune, Stay Thirsty Magazine, and Desert Companion Magazine.
Read an excerpt from Tacoma Stories in Shelf Unbound magazine.
Jeffrey J. Kripal talks about The Flip, consciousness, the uncanny, and the notable scientists and intellectuals who have come to see our world in a different way on BBC Arts & Ideas.
Jeffrey J. Kripal discusses The Flip—and the role that both science and the humanities can play in understanding consciousness—with Reading Religion, at Rice University, and on MeaningofLife.tv.
“Who Gets to Use Black English?” John McWhorter, author of Talking Back, Talking Black, writes about African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the Atlantic and discusses his op-ed on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show.
Paul Harding shares his reflections about Tinkers and its extraordinary backstory with New York magazine’s Vulture and at the Literary Hub, and discusses writing about God and faith on the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast.
Read an excerpt from Jerome Charyn’s In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song at the Literary Hub and find interviews with him about the collection in Publishers Weekly and Stay Thirsty Magazine.
Read an excerpt from Bessora and Barroux’s graphic novel Alpha in PEN America’s “Illustrated PEN” series and view a gallery of images in the Guardian.
The Pulitzer Prizes commemorates the tenth anniversary of Tinkers with author Paul Harding’s exclusive introduction to the opening pages of the novel.
“Tinkers Turns 10—And Stays Remarkable” Publishers Weekly celebrates the tenth anniversary edition of Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Shelf Awareness “rediscovers” the novel.
Looking for the best books of the year? William E. Glassley’s A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year; Eduardo Halfon’s novel Mourning is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, Smithsonian magazine Favorite Book of the Year, and more!; Diane DeSanders’ debut novel Hap and Hazard and the End of the World is a Lone Star Literary Life Top Twenty Texas Book of the Year; and Bessora and Barroux’s graphic novel Alpha: Abidjan to Paris is a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, School Library Journal Best Adult Book 4 Teens, and Comics Journal Best Comic of the Year!
Eduardo Halfon discusses Mourning with co-translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, in a conversation moderated by Edward Lewis Wallant Award judge Avinoam Patt, in the Mass Review.
Norman Lock discusses The Wreckage of Eden with Publishers Weekly.
Blurring the line between fact and fiction, Eduardo Halfon shares family photographs and an annotated excerpt from Mourning in “A Yom Kippur Scene (With Footnotes)” on the Jewish Book Council’s “ProsenPeople” blog.
Congratulations to Jonathan D. Moreno, author of Impromptu Man, Mind Wars, and The Body Politic, on receiving the 2018 American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award!
William E. Glassley talks about A Wilder Time on the Science Magazine podcast, with Stay Thirsty Magazine, and at Book Q&As.
“How a Letter from Einstein Saved a Scientist from Nazi Germany” Read an excerpt from Gerald Weissmann’s The Fevers of Reason: New and Selected Essays at the Literary Hub.
Watch Bessora discuss her graphic novel Alpha on the BBC’s Authors Live and find out more about the book’s origins in this interview with Bessora and translator Sarah Ardizzone.
Listen to Will Eaves discuss Murmur and tune in to actor Blake Ritson’s dramatic reading from the novel at the BBC.
Read an interview with Will Eaves about Murmur.
Tune into a terrific conversation between debut novelist Diane DeSanders, author of Hap and Hazard and the End of the World, and Bellevue Literary Press publisher Erika Goldman in the General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen’s Labor, Literature and Landmark lecture series.
Diane DeSanders discusses the inspirations for her debut novel, Hap and Hazard and the End of the World, with Powell’s Books, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Lone Star Literary Life, and on KMSU’s Weekly Reader Radio Show.
Congratulations to Wolf Season, a Firecracker Award Finalist and National Reading Group Month “Great Group Read” selected by the Women’s National Book Association. Find additional resources for the novel—including an interview, excerpt, reviews, discussion questions, and more—at BookBrowse.
Watch Helen Benedict talk about Wolf Season on the WGBH News segment “Bringing War’s Reality Home: Talking Fiction With Writer Helen Benedict.”
Read Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Chronicle of Higher Education feature, “Visions of the Impossible,” which is the basis for The Flip.
Rose-Lynn Fisher shares the story behind (and images from) The Topography of Tears with NPR, Southwest: The Magazine, LA Weekly, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, and Angelus magazine. Enjoy more from the book at the Marginalian and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Watch Jeffrey J. Kripal’s TEDx Talk on science, religion, and paradoxical ways of thinking.
John McWhorter talks about Talking Back, Talking Black in the Talks at Google series and on C-SPAN’s Book TV, WNYC’s All Things Considered, Tablet magazine’s Unorthodox podcast, Slate’s Lexicon Valley podcast, and the Mixed Experience podcast. He also discusses the book in the Heleo Conversations series and with Columbia Magazine, Columbia College Today, and Literary Ashland.
Congratulations to our International DUBLIN Literary Award longlisted novel The Attempt and Housatonic Book Award Finalist A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.
Read an interview with Nicholas Fox Weber about Freud’s Trip to Orvieto and his own adventures in psychoanalysis in the Vienna Psychoanalyst.
Read more from Mourning in an excerpt introduced by director Jonas Mekas at Electric Literature, in a deleted scene at Stay Thirty Magazine, where Eduardo Halfon also participates in the One Hundred Words project, and in BOMB magazine.
Discover the remarkable story behind A Wilder Time in Pasatiempo and watch William E. Glassley discuss his sojourns in Greenland in “Wilderness and the Geography of Hope.”
Find a wealth of resources for your book club and classroom at The Alpha Book.
Download the reading group guide.
Read an excerpt from A Wilder Time at Longreads and find out which five books William E. Glassley recommends on “fieldwork in wild places.”
Download the reading group guide.
Norman Lock shares the story behind A Fugitive in Walden Woods with Snowflakes in a Blizzard.
Enjoy a long-form review of Jerzy: A Novel in the New Yorker, then read an excerpt from it and interviews with author Jerome Charyn in Stay Thirsty Magazine and Comics Grinder.
Peter LaSalle discusses the influence of Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones on Sleeping Mask: Fictions at Beatrice and makes the case for the short story as “tour de force,” gifting readers “the feeling of having been transported somewhere new and important via the whirlwind of the words” at TSP: The official blog of The Story Prize.
Richard Wiley discusses writing and his novel Bob Stevenson with the Tacoma Weekly.
Congratulations to Jerome Charyn, whose A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century has been named to the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award Short List and the PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist, and is a Firecracker Award Finalist.
Dr. Vilcek receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2013.
“I’m thrilled and honored by this recognition, and to be named among this group that has contributed so much to humanity.” —Dr. Vilcek
Bellevue Literary Press board member and research professor at NYU School of Medicine Jan Vilcek holds 46 U.S. patents and is co-inventor of Remicade, an anti-inflammatory drug that has improved the health of millions of people worldwide. In a new addition to his list of accolades, Dr. Vilcek has been selected as a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, which honors leaders in academic invention whose discoveries have made a significant impact on quality of life. We are immensely grateful to Dr. Vilcek for his service on our board and congratulate him on this latest honor for the extraordinary contributions he has made to the arts and science communities.
Helen Benedict discusses her novel Wolf Season and the challenges of writing about women and war on KPFA’s Bookwaves on Cover to Cover, KMSU’s Weekly Reader Radio Show, and Woodstock Booktalk Radio, and with Publishers Weekly, The Common, Stay Thirsty Magazine, Neworld Review, Michigan Daily, West Side Spirit, HuffPost, Read Her Like an Open Book, Snowflakes in a Blizzard, authors Caroline Leavitt and Katey Schultz, Powell’s Books, and the Columbia Journalism School.
The Kansas City Public Library and Kansas City Star have selected Helen Benedict’s novel Wolf Season for the “FYI Book Club.” Join the discussion, read an excerpt from the novel, and find an interview with the author in the Kansas City Star.
Helen Benedict talks about war literature with authors David Abrams, Cara Hoffman, Matt Gallagher, and Dalia Sofer in the “Life During Wartime” panel at the Center for Fiction, and with authors Seth Brady Tucker, Jesse Goolsby, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, and Samuel Snoek-Brown in the “Duty and Dilemma: 100 Years of Writing About War” AWP Roundtable.
Read an in-depth interview with Paul Harding about his work at the Millions and listen to Christopher Lydon’s interviews with him about Tinkers and Enon on WBUR Open Source.
Helen Benedict shares her recommendations for the “Best Contemporary Iraqi Writing About War” with the Literary Hub, where her novel Wolf Season is also “Making News.”
Helen Benedict discusses issues facing sexual abuse victims with Michel Martin on NPR’s All Things Considered and offers a short list of actionable items “to make #MeToo stick this time” at CNN.
Watch Paul Harding discuss the story behind Tinkers on PBS NewsHour.
Listen to Paul Harding and BLP publisher Erika Goldman discuss the Pulitzer Prize win on NPR Weekend Edition.
Watch Magdaléna Platzová discuss The Attempt with translator Alex Zucker in the European Voices series.
Read about the dramatic Tinkers “Cinderella story” in the New York Times and elsewhere.
The Measure of Darkness has received the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction! The novel has also been selected as a “Great Group Read” by the Women’s National Book Association, which celebrates National Reading Group Month through its publication of an annual “amazing list of books perfect for discussion and conversation in any book club.”
Congratulations to Bellevue Literary Press board member Jan Vilcek, who has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, which honors leaders in academic invention whose discoveries have made a significant impact on quality of life. Dr. Vilcek is also the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Congratulations to our 2017 Firecracker Award Finalists: Liam Durcan’s novel The Measure of Darkness, Norman Lock’s novel The Port-Wine Stain, and Jerome Charyn’s A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century!
Congratulations to our PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography longlisted title A Loaded Gun, our Julia Ward Howe Award Finalist Starlight Detectives, and our Firecracker Award Finalists American Meteor and A Solemn Pleasure.
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In honor of the Pulitzer Prize centennial celebrations, Paul Harding, author of Tinkers (2010 winner for Fiction), and David Oshinsky, author of Polio: An American Story (2006 winner for History), sat down to discuss the responsibility of the writer in treating questions of medical science, and the power of authorial imagination to evoke the lived experience of illness in fiction and nonfiction. This conversation was supported by the Pulitzer Prize Campfire Initiative and hosted by the NYU Center for the Humanities.
Meredith Tax speaks with the American Scholar, Publishers Weekly, Lilith, Rising Up With Sonali, Keeping Democracy Alive, Indypendent, and Joy of Resistance about her book A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.
Listen to Paul Harding read from Tinkers on KQED Writers’ Block.
Ploughshares shines their “Indie Spotlight” on Bellevue Literary Press, while Publisher and Editorial Director Erika Goldman joins the 1888 Center’s The How The Why podcast to discuss BLP’s unique mission.
Listen to Jerome Charyn, author of Jerzy: A Novel, and Tom Teicholz, author of Being There: Journalism 1978-2000, discuss the life and legacy of Jerzy Kosinski on Rare Bird Radio.
Tune in to the Diane Rehm Show “Readers’ Review” book club discussion about Tinkers.
Brian Booker shares the stories behind his debut collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For? with the Rumpus and One Story.
Watch neurologist and novelist Liam Durcan discuss The Measure of Darkness here and read more interviews with him in the Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette.
Jerome Charyn talks to the Brooklyn Rail and Late Night Library about A Loaded Gun, his lifelong fascination with Emily Dickinson, and the art of biography.
Pascale Kramer discusses her novel Autopsy of a Father and the subject of “fear” with fellow women writers at the Red Ink series, via the Literary Hub.
Read an excerpt from Pascale Kramer’s novel Autopsy of a Father in the Brooklyn Rail.
Congratulations to Pascale Kramer, author of The Child and Autopsy of a Father, who received the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature, awarded for the her entire body of work by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture.
View slideshows from Rose-Lynn Fisher’s The Topography of Tears project in the New Yorker, TIME for Kids, and LensCulture, and photo essays from the series on WNYC’s Studio 360 and in Smithsonian magazine.
Read more about The Topography of Tears project in Wired, Broadly, Gizmodo, and Medical Daily.
Robert Lopez talks about Good People with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, Barrelhouse magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Late Night Library, About.com, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and on the Weekly Reader.
Find out how Rose-Lynn Fisher’s The Topography of Tears inspired the cinematography in First They Killed My Father in British Cinematographer and read about Darquer’s “Tears and Lace” haute couture line, which was also inspired by The Topography of Tears project, at Lingerie Francaise.
I have been writing since the late sixties and though my writing has taken many forms—history, novels, essays, book reviews, pamphlets, leaflets, songs—all of it has been shaped by my determination not to oversimplify or hide behind irony, but to write about women and politics in a voice that reaches beyond intellect to feeling.
My most recent publication, Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, calls for a politics based on human rights, a politics complex enough to oppose Western invasions and fight bigoted attacks on Muslims, and at the same time be unafraid to act in solidarity with movements in the Global South that fight the Islamist oppression of women, religious minorities, gays, and freethinkers. In it, I applied the method I developed for my first book, The Rising of the Women, combining storytelling, close reading of sources, and a search for patterns—an approach I am also using in A Road Unforeseen, this time for current history.
When civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, and Assad viciously attacked his own people, I watched in horror, but I was not surprised that the Islamic State took off like wildfire, for I could see no force with sufficient political strength and enough military experience to stop them. This remained true until the summer of 2014, when Daesh swept down upon the Yazidis, a Kurdish minority in Sinjar, promising genocide and sex slavery. The vaunted Iraqi peshmerga had agreed to defend the Yazidis, but melted away when the time came. Out of nowhere came a miraculous rescue—Syrian and Turkish Kurds, including special women’s militias, who cut a passage through the Sinjar mountains to get the Yazidi out, fighting Daesh as they went.
They came from the Rojava cantons, a place I had never heard of. Racing to learn all I could about Rojava, I realized its people were putting core feminist, ecological, and cooperative ideas into practice, based on pluralism and separation between religion and the state, with a bottom-up democratic form of governance, with at least 40% of every organization being women, and co-leadership positions in everything, one male, one female—all in the middle of a fight to the death with Daesh and other Islamist militias, while under siege and unable to even get medical supplies because Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan had closed their borders.
For twenty years or more, my colleagues and I had been saying that only unity between leftwing movements and feminists could provide enough strength to take on both a rising tide of fundamentalism and an increasingly oppressive form of globalized capitalism. Because poor women in the Global South are the real “wretched of the earth,” we said, any movement for transformation had to make their needs central. But no leftwing movement I ever saw took up the challenge until Rojava. As I came to understand what they were trying to do, I knew their experiment was vitally important to all of us, and that I must help them get their story out, so they could get the support they need to survive.
A Road Unforeseen is a feminist reading of the war against Daesh, whose rule by rape and genocide is so akin to an adult-film version of Mordor that I felt the title had to come from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring: “We must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be.”
“Like the songs of our day, those of the nineteenth century had much to do with current events, whether the hanging of a notorious criminal or a political campaign. Conventions and stump speeches, camp meetings and revivals were likely to conclude in an impassioned singalong. Printed on broadsides and sheet music, lyrics were fresh as newspaper headlines.”
Read more about and listen to Norman’s playlist for Voices in the Dead House at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, Norman Lock, author of, most recently, the American Novels series, and Romanian visual artist Constantin Severin, founder of the Archetypal Expressionism movement, explore ecstatic visions, healing the world through metaphoric language, and the ways their work seeks to “quote” the past for the purpose of enriching the present.
Tune in to Science Friday to hear Ira Flatow and Colin Ellard discuss psychogeography and read an excerpt from Places of the Heart, then listen in on more interviews with Colin Ellard on NPR’s Here & Now and Rudy Maxa’s World.
Eduardo Halfon discusses Guatemalan politics and protest movements with Linda Wertheimer on NPR Weekend Edition and tells the harrowing story behind his need to leave the country in the Guardian.
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, Cormac James, author of the novel The Surfacing, and Philip Hoare—whose nonfiction works such as The Whale and The Sea Inside blur the line between literary and natural history—ruminate on the ever-evolving relationship between man and nature, and how that relationship is enriched through literature and science.
A Solemn Pleasure is being called “altogether magnificent” (Marginalian), a “best book for writers” (Poets & Writers), a “best book about books” (Literary Hub), a book that will help graduates change the world (Foreword Reviews), and one that “may be the handbook of the modern writer” (Brookline Booksmith Small Press Book Club).
Download the reading group guide.
Congratulations to Sharona Muir, whose first novel, Invisible Beasts, is a Dublin Literary Award Longlist selection and an Orion Book Award Finalist!
We are a nation given over to consumption. The predilection for novelty is everywhere present, not excepting in our art and our literature. For much of my writing life, I believed that the works of the past belonged there. Romantic novels by Hawthorne and Melville or naturalistic ones by Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were to be endured in pursuit of a degree (even if sometimes secretly enjoyed). Once having been examined on past literary achievements, I hurriedly put them behind me in favor of fiction produced by Modernists and Postmodernists. I tended to judge art and literature by its novelty and its stylistic beauties (never mind their worth).
Late in my career, I have taken up the thread dropped forty years ago and am attending to the stories of the American past—that is, of course, how it has come to be known (how it is always coming to be known by successive generations of readers) by its literature. Through my American novels, I hope to understand, a little, the present American era by what came before and shaped its thought, beliefs, prejudices, virtues, vices, and emotional undertow. I want to believe that I am serving a purpose higher than aesthetics, which also has its place in my writing. I love to fashion beautiful sentences, but I hope that they are expressive of the state of my feelings about the world around me and of the truth, as I grasp it, of that elusive world, acknowledging that it is only an approximation.
The literature of the past conferred on readers and writers a larger view. It seems to me that this amplitude of time and space encouraged a corresponding amplitude of theme and purpose. In general, nineteenth-century literature was not small nor did it consider ethical, political, social issues outside the jurisdiction of fiction. It is precisely this old-fashioned grandeur of thought, moral intent, spaciousness, and comprehensiveness—in its breathtaking view of a continent being made and remade—that I hope to emulate in my American novels. Such an ambition is certainly presumptuous, but, with his or her every sentence composed with the intention that it be read, the writer presumes.
*The books of Norman Lock’s The American Novels series include The Boy in His Winter (2014), American Meteor (2015), The Port-Wine Stain (2016), A Fugitive in Walden Woods (2017), The Wreckage of Eden (2018), Feast Day of the Cannibals (2019), American Follies (2020), Tooth of the Covenant (2021), Voices in the Dead House (2022), The Ice Harp (2023), and The Caricaturist (2024).
Download the reading group guide.
Download the reading group guide.
Download the reading group guide.
Brian Booker discusses “taking characters for a ride” at TSP: The official blog of The Story Prize.
Find out what haunts Brian Booker about Dan Chaon’s story “Here’s a Little Something to Remember Me By” at Beatrice.
Read an excerpt from Are You Here For What I’m Here For? in Shelf Unbound magazine.
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, Michael Coffey, author of the short story collection The Business of Naming Things, and Mark Epstein, M.D., a psychiatrist and author known for exploring the interplay of Buddhism and psychotherapy, discuss the life and work of Samuel Beckett, emotional experiences that surpass language, and literature as a means toward self-discovery and mindfulness.
Listen to Liam Durcan talk about The Measure of Darkness on CBC All in a Weekend.
Listen to Magdaléna Platzová discuss Aaron’s Leap on Trafika Europe Radio and with Words Without Borders.
Meredith Tax writes about the women fighting ISIS in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Nation, openDemocracy, Indypendent, and Dissent magazine.
Watch Meredith Tax discuss Rojava and A Road Unforeseen, with Carne Ross and Debbie Bookchin, at the Left Forum (beginning at approx. 15:30 min. mark).
Read an excerpt from Meredith Tax’s A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State in the Utne Reader.
Preview Aaron’s Leap in A Public Space magazine.
Discover more about the women of Rojava and the guerilla fighters of Kurdistan on cover photographer Joey L.’s website.
Watch John McWhorter’s TED Talk “Txtng is killing language. JK!!!”
The New York Public Library, Oakland Public Library, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Bookish all agree—Robert Lopez’s Good People should be on your reading list.
Tune in at NPR.org for interviews with John McWhorter.
Find stories from Good People in Shelf Unbound magazine, Autre Magazine, and on the Storyville app.
Read John McWhorter’s latest dispatches on linguistics at The Atlantic.
Robert Lopez discusses his approach to story writing at TSP: The official blog of The Story Prize.
Michael Coffey talks about The Business of Naming Things on NCPR News and Library Journal’s Barbara Hoffert tells Kojo Nnamdi Show listeners why the short story collection should be on everyone’s reading list.
Read “Woodpecker Pie for Christmas,” a new short story by Robert Lopez, in the Inlander.
Arthur L. Caplan: People think of you as someone who writes about ethics: ethics of weapons, ethics of national security. What made you decide to take on your dad in book form?
Jonathan D. Moreno: Part of it was the fortieth year since he disappeared. He was eighty-four years old when he died. I was seven when he was seventy. The second reason is that it was an opportunity to write a biography about someone I didn’t know because his most vigorous years happened before I came along. But at the same time, I did know him for twenty-two years. So I had a funny advantage in that respect in writing about him. Also, it struck me that this was a guy who did so much that shaped our time. And in seeing the surprising connections in his ideas from improvisational theatre, to psychotherapy, to social networking, to social media, you view all of those parts of our culture in a different way. Continue reading…
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, Jonathan D. Moreno, author of Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network, speaks to actor John Pankow who plays television executive Merc Lapidus on the Showtime/BBC series Episodes. Together they examine the psychological petri dish of group theater and the ways it grew to influence science and life offstage.
Read more from Colin Ellard’s Places of the Heart in Slate and Aeon magazine, and embark on a virtual walking tour of New York with Colin in a 5-parts series from Pulse of the Planet: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5.
Find out what it’s like to participate in Colin Ellard’s walking tours/research projects, “exploring the relationship between psychology and urban design using the tools of neuroscience,” in the Toronto Star.
From Mumbai to Lake Victoria: Colin Ellard talks about the places that have left an “indelible emotional mark” on CBC Arts; discusses the psychological cost of boring places with New York magazine; investigates the psychology of scary places with CHCH-TV; and writes about the Pokémon Go craze and brain health at Quartz.
Jonathan D. Moreno discusses Impromptu Man and the life and contributions of J.L. Moreno on WHYY’s Radio Times and on Medscape Close-Up.
Listen to Colin Ellard discuss “how your city’s streets affect your mental health” on HuffPost Live; the science behind psychogeography on ABC Radio National’s Sunday Extra; the “psychology behind urban politeness” on Monocle magazine’s The Urbanist; our environment’s effect on physical and mental health on HumanLab; and the importance of library design with the Ontario Library Association’s Open Shelf.
Congratulations to Mary Cappello, author of Awkward: A Detour, who is a recipient of the American Academy Berlin Prize!
Melissa Pritchard discusses A Solemn Pleasure on PBS’s Arizona Horizon and shares the stories behind the essays on TrojanVision News.
Gregory Spatz discusses the discovery of the HMS Erebus and his Franklin expedition-inspired novel Inukshuk with Doug Dorst at the Brooklyn Rail.
Read excerpts from Monastery in Shelf Unbound (p. 34); White Review; Words Without Borders; and on the PEN American Center website.
Q: I think we all sense that there is an invisible world around us, but through Sophie’s eyes and the magic of fiction, you allow readers to “see” it. Why is this “seeing” so important?
A: The problems facing humanity’s relationship with nature can seem impossible: the bees we rely on for pollination are dying; the fish we eat are dwindling; pandemics are on the rise; so are the oceans; and species are going extinct en masse. In this time, we need to see through new eyes. We need “consilience”—E.O. Wilson’s term for the unity of knowledge: art, science, and the humanities working together, toward a more harmonious culture. Maybe, too, we need to think a bit crazy, follow Folly. In the words of Sophie, the narrator of Invisible Beasts, “we need to see the beasts that we don’t see.” Continue reading…
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, Sharona Muir, author of the highly acclaimed debut novel Invisible Beasts, speaks to Christof Koch, Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and author of numerous books, about our scientific understanding of consciousness and subjectivity in relation to art and culture. As their thinking pushes beyond the realm of modern humans, they relate these topics to prehistoric man and the animal kingdom.
Alan Hirshfeld discusses Starlight Detectives on Science for the People and reveals the stories behind “10 astronomers [including two extraordinary women] you’ve (probably) never heard of” at BBC History Magazine.
Listen to librarian extraordinaire and “NPR’s go-to books guru” Nancy Pearl discuss Understories with Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition and with Steve Scher on KUOW’s The Record; and watch her describe how her “favorite collection of short stories in recent memory” is part of a new tradition of “elastic realism” in contemporary literature.
Q: Throughout his travels in Israel, the secular narrator of Monastery is challenged about his commitment to his Jewish heritage by a number of characters, including the casually devout Tamara, his ultra-orthodox brother-in-law-to-be, and a nationalistic cab driver. Why are their questions such a struggle for him?
A: I think only a Jew questions his sense of Jewishness. A Catholic doesn’t question why he’s a Catholic. A Muslim doesn’t question why he’s a Muslim. They either are or aren’t. But us Jews, inherently, neurotically, question our identity as Jews, we struggle to figure out what it means to be a Jew. I don’t know why exactly. As if, to exist, we need a struggle, any struggle, even one that is imaginary. It’s like the waiter in a deli who goes up to a table of old Jewish men finishing their meal, and asks, “Is anything alright?” Continue reading…
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, David C. Cassidy, author of Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb, and best–selling science writer Dava Sobel discuss the “quantum leap of creative imagination” it took to make the transition into writing historical science drama. Staged readings of their first plays—Cassidy’s Farm Hall, about captured German nuclear scientists at the end of World War II, and Sobel’s And the Sun Stood Still, about Nicolaus Copernicus—were presented before meetings of the American Physical Society.
At Slate, Jonathan D. Moreno explains how J.L. Moreno’s 1930s experiments at Sing Sing and the New York State Training School for Girls ultimately led to today’s group therapy and social networking practices.
Read an excerpt from Impromptu Man and an interview with Jonathan D. Moreno in the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Jonathan D. Moreno shares the story behind Impromptu Man, his biography of his father, the influential psychiatrist and psychodrama founder J.L. Moreno, with Psychology Today and the journal Zeitschrift für Psychodrama und Soziometrie.
Cormac James talks about The Surfacing with the Irish Examiner, shares his favorite books and authors with the Irish Times, and tells the Scotland Sunday Herald why he uses the pen name “Cormac James.”
Read an excerpt from from Norman Lock’s American Meteor in Green Mountains Review.
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, Mary Cappello, author of the memoir Awkward: A Detour, explores the divergence between literary and psychiatric narratives of disease with Dr. Christine Montross, a practicing psychiatrist and poet. Together, they delve into the disconcerting pleasures of poetry and the mysterious unknowability of the mind. Continue reading…
Cormac James writes about the story behind The Surfacing at the Irish Times and discusses it on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.
Find out why Publishers Weekly calls author Sharona Muir “A Literary Game Changer” in their “First Fiction: Anticipated Debuts” feature story; view artist Kristen Radtke’s beautiful graphic review of Invisible Beasts; and tune in to the PW Radio podcast to listen to the author discuss her work.
Norman Lock talks to Scott Simon on NPR Weekend Edition, and with Slice magazine, Construction magazine, and the Playwrights Theatre of NJ about Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and how his own experience during Hurricane Sandy inspired his novel The Boy in His Winter.
Congratulations to David C. Cassidy, author of Beyond Uncertainty and recipient of the 2014 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, awarded by the American Physical Society!
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, Tim Horvath, author of the short story collection Understories, and Mark Changizi, a theoretical cognitive scientist, discuss the evolutionary science behind language and reading, while exploring the brain’s response to written language and music, and the potential for harnessing both in evocative fiction. Continue reading…
In O, The Oprah Magazine, read Melissa Pritchard’s tribute to Ashton Goodman, the young, female US soldier she was embedded with in Afghanistan (from the essay “Finding Ashton”) and her homage to Simon, her beloved Dachshund (from the essay “Doxology”).
Watch Melissa Pritchard discuss her essay about former Sudanese child slave William Mawwin and the extraordinary way their lives came together on the Wilson Center’s Dialogue TV.
“Eighteenth and early nineteenth century music ornaments many of the scenes in Palmerino. . . . Music was as indispensable to Vernon Lee’s intellectual and emotional life as were the books she read and wrote. As she grew older, near total deafness isolated her. Deprived of music and conversation, a remaining consolation was her ability to ‘hear’ music perfectly through il chant interieur, the memory of music.”
Read Melissa’s entire playlist for Palmerino at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In this conversation, Charles L. Bardes, physician and author of Pale Faces: The Masks of Anemia (from the BLP Pathographies series), and critically acclaimed poet Tom Sleigh explore the way myths influenced their psyches, and how the narratives of the gods were transposed onto classrooms and football games and suburban neighborhoods in their early writerly minds. Continue reading…
Tune in to Liam Durcan’s Walrus Talk “Is resilience all in our head?” and read more from him about neurology and the creative process in the Center for Fiction’s SYNTAX/SYNAPSE series.
Welcome to the BLP Conversations series, featuring dialogues between people whose lifework, like BLP’s mission, explores the creative territory at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and has become a testament to how science and the humanities can join forces to educate and inspire. This online series is inspired by E.O. Wilson and Robert Hass, whose talk about the connections between science and the arts was published in our book The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass.
In the first installment of the BLP Conversations series, Austin Ratner, author of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature award–winning novel The Jump Artist, speaks to Joseph E. LeDoux, professor and director of the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU, about the brain-mind and art-science divides. Their conversation traverses the more provocative theories of biology, psychoanalysis, and technology—from emergent properties to Freud to the Singularity. While LeDoux, a neuroscientist, discusses the neurological complexities of fear, Ratner, a trained physician who left the field to focus on writing, comes to terms with his own fear of one day being replaced by a novel-writing robot. Continue reading…
Read excerpts from A Loaded Gun at Longreads and the Literary Hub.
Jerome Charyn explores Emily Dickinson’s tradecraft, imagining the poet as a 21st-century CIA analyst, in an exclusive outtake chapter from A Loaded Gun in Stay Thirsty Magazine.
Watch Jerome Charyn discuss Emily Dickinson at the Harvard Book Store and read a long-ranging interview with him about Emily Dickinson and his own writing life, via the Université de Provence.
Read an interview with Liam Durcan on “Straddling the Worlds of Art and Science.”
Find Jerome Charyn’s latest dispatches about Emily Dickinson on Facebook (SecretLifeOfEmilyDickinson) and Twitter (@EmilySecretLife).
Tune in to the Late Night Conversation podcast to hear our publisher Erika Goldman discuss being a part of the NYU School of Medicine and the nexus of art and science.
A cause for celebration… Tim Horvath’s first collection of short fiction, Understories, has received the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Fiction!
Melissa Pritchard talks about the narrative triptych structure of Palmerino with Connotation Press; explains why libraries have become her writing temples in Superstition Review; and shares stories about the sojourn in Italy that sparked the novel with ASU News.
Tune in to the PBS American Experience documentary Ripley: Believe It or Not to hear Melissa Pritchard discuss Robert LeRoy Ripley, whose strange and wonderful world she researched for the title story of The Odditorium.
Michael Coffey discusses how writing poetry led him to fiction and explains the autobiographical roots of The Business of Naming Things on Late Night Library’s “Late Night Conversation” podcast and with Kirkus Reviews, Shelf Unbound (p. 44), Book Q&As, and in two interviews with Publishers Weekly.
Listen to Norman Lock read from The Boy in His Winter at The Author’s Corner on Public Radio.
“Ransacking memory’s drawers will not suffice; one must consult sources to get the history and the scenography right.” Norman Lock shares his “Research Notes” for The Boy in His Winter with Necessary Fiction.
Read more from Michael Coffey about the search for his biological parents and the way that journey informed the stories within The Business of Naming Things on his website.
Preview The Boy in His Winter in Shelf Unbound (p. 30) and at The Collagist where Lock also delivers an “interview-in-excerpts,” channeling the voice of Huck Finn directly from the novel.
Listen to Norman Lock discuss The American Novels series on A Life in Biography and Jamming Their Transmission, and read a wide-ranging Rumpus interview with him about his work and the ways in which the series is connected to his earlier, fabulist fiction.
Read an excerpt from The Business of Naming Things in BOMB magazine.
Michael Coffey, author of The Business of Naming Things, shares advice for writers at TSP: The official blog of The Story Prize.
Download the reading group guide.
Lynne Jones discusses war and PTSD in Aeon magazine and talks to Kirkus Reviews about Then They Started Shooting.
During her US tour, Michèle Forbes discussed Ghost Moth and the writing life with authors Roxana Robinson, Caroline Leavitt, John Searles, Bernice L. McFadden, and Elizabeth Nunez at a special Strand bookstore event, sponsored by the Women’s National Book Association. Watch the video here.
Read excerpts from Lynne Jones’ field diaries about the Indonesian tsunami in O, The Oprah Magazine.
Sharona Muir talks to the Kenyon Review, Sentinel-Tribune, BGSU News, Unstuck magazine, Rosemary & Reading Glasses, The Qwillery, and WBGU-TV’s Northwest Ohio Journal about creating fiction from science, and shares her “Research Notes” for Invisible Beasts with Necessary Fiction.
Read Sharona Muir’s New York Times op-eds: “Swan Lovers” and “The Crazy Puppy and the Flying Boy.”
Enjoy an excerpt from Invisible Beasts in Nautilus magazine.
“The short story can be a magical thing. It’s a breath, a moment, a captured mood.” To celebrate Short Story Month, Flavorwire asks “contemporary master of the form” and “virtuosic fabulist” Norman Lock to share a story he loves.
“Everything I do is in genuine pursuit of truth and beauty.” Austin Ratner, author of The Jump Artist, talks to the New York Times about giving up a career in medicine to move to Brooklyn and become a fiction writer.
Discover why Kirkus Reviews names Love Among the Particles a “Best Book Out This Week” by reading an excerpt from the collection at The Collagist and interviews with Norman Lock at Slice magazine and TSP: The official blog of The Story Prize.
Norman Lock shares his playlist for Love Among the Particles at Largehearted Boy:
“John Adams’s “The Chairman Dances,” from Nixon in China, which I heard for the first time in 1985, determined, in no small way, the course of my mature work. That sardonic and sensuous foxtrot confirmed for me what Doctorow’s Ragtime had first brought to my attention in the 70s: that one could bring into one’s fictions—a dreaming on paper—persons who had had actual lives, as opposed to persons with equally plausible and often more satisfying imagined ones. (That being said, one can hardly deny that an aspect of real life, in any guise, is always at least partially imagined.) And so, the dancing Chairman Mao, a charming conceit, drew me after him into realms of story-telling that led, first, to A History of the Imagination (FC2, 2004), then Land of the Snow Men (Calamari Press, 2005, in which Captain Scott and his doomed Antarctic explorers waltz on the Ross Ice Shelf), and now—thanks to the good offices of Erika Goldman and the excellent Bellevue Literary Press—Love Among the Particles.”
Continue reading Norman’s playlist at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Read an NPR interview with Eduardo Halfon, then tune in to NPR’s Alt.Latino to hear him spin tunes and talk about Guatemala, Latin American cultural identity, jazz, writing, living in Florida and Nebraska, the influence of Bob Dylan, and much more.
In selecting Ghost Moth for the Publishers Weekly “Best Summer Books” issue, co-editorial director Michael Coffey explains how “this amazingly assured first novel” found its home at BLP: “After receiving rejections from 38 publishers in the U.K. and Ireland, Forbes (an actress) got a tip from Paul Harding of Tinkers fame at the Dublin Writers’ Festival, which led her to send the manuscript to Bellevue.”
Congratulations to Bill Hayes, author of The Anatomist, on receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction! In this blog post, he talks about where he was when he got the news and the artists who have provided inspiration.
Download the reading group guide.
In the Passover edition of The Forward, Austin Ratner writes about the legacy of the Warsaw Ghetto, the psychology of bigotry, and the parable he found within Edward Reicher’s memoir, A Country of Ash, musing “that there would perhaps be fewer great sins in the world if people were not so frantic to purify themselves of small ones.”
Q: How did you come to write about the human foot?
A: I had just published the 5th edition of Nutrition for Dummies and was looking about for my next project. I started the search for a subject (a moment all writers anticipate with both pleasure and dread) and my first thought was to explore the cleft lip/palate, but that lacked reach beyond the medical. My second idea was rubella, but there is already an excellent book on that. And then I thought about the foot—inelegant, overlooked, underreported and completely indispensable (it turns out) to our climb out of the caves into modern civilization. While it is common to credit our progress to the evolution of our increasingly more complex brain, in fact, we stood straight before we began to think straight, and our two feet have influenced our language, our politics, our religion, our legislation and, of course, our medicine.
Who could resist such a mix? Continue reading…
Listen in on a very fun conversation with Tim Horvath and Brad Listi on the Other People podcast. Topics include their Midwestern childhood, bridge climbing in New York, the birthday they both share with Herman Melville, Dom DeLuise, and Jerry Garcia, and Tim’s “red hot” Understories.
Passion. Vision. Courage. Chance. BLP Publisher Erika Goldman and Akashic Books Managing Editor Johanna Ingalls discuss independent publishing and the unmistakable joy readers bring to all our endeavors: “When you put something out there that you’re passionate about and other people respond . . . there’s nothing like it.”
Irish author Michèle Forbes had trouble finding a publisher for her debut novel, Ghost Moth, until she sent her manuscript to Bellevue Literary Press. Read her story in the Irish Times and the find out more about its very happy ending in The Bookseller.
“It’s clearer than ever that our future as a nation depends on keeping th[e] spirit of curiosity and innovation alive in our time. These honorees are at the forefront of that mission.”
—President Barack Obama
President Barack Obama honored Jan Vilcek, MD, PhD with a prestigious National Medal of Technology and Innovation during a White House awards ceremony on February 1. This year eleven individuals received this medal, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government upon scientists, engineers, and inventors. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Vilcek for his service on our board—and for the contributions he has made to the arts and science communities throughout his extraordinary career.
Q: Set in Belfast, Ghost Moth alternates between the 1940s and the period leading up to what came to be known in Northern Ireland as “The Troubles,” the late 1960s. What interested you in these time periods?
A: Belfast in the late 1940s was a very different city to the one in which I grew up. I remember hearing stories about that time from my father. Although still recovering as a city in the aftermath of the Second World War, Saturday nights would see the city bustling with crowds, with people queueing for cinema tickets and dancehalls, lively couples in busy cafés, and families happy to stroll the streets and window-shop late into the evening. As a teenager growing up in Belfast in the ’70s this seemed to me a strange and exotic thing, that a city could be vibrant, exciting, and safe.
This contrast in how I experienced growing up in Belfast with the idea that a very different city could and had existed was important to me. As a writer I wanted to explore that difference. I knew I couldn’t ignore the fact that by the end of the summer of 1969, Northern Ireland was on the brink of a civil war—no writer writing about that time can—but I also wanted the narrative to remain insular, to be able to focus on the protected world of the child, the family, the home. I believed that even in the face of such impending political turmoil, smaller stories still had their place. That was a difficult tenet to hold on to. But I held onto it, and still do. Continue reading…
Michèle Forbes shares her playlist for Ghost Moth at Largehearted Boy:
“Music has always played a vital part in my creative life. In my work as an actress I have performed in many new plays that utilized original scores and this can mean being lucky enough to end up working together with musicians on stage. I listened to music mostly when I was driving over the period in which I worked on Ghost Moth. It was a great way for ideas to casually and creatively knit together for me, for images and words to link in new way and just to let the subconscious do its work. The music I’ve chosen here either appears in Ghost Moth as an integral part of the story, played its part in inspiring me to write the novel in the first place, or just kept me going.”
Continue reading Michèle’s playlist at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Bellevue Literary Press is a finalist for AWP’s Small Press Publisher Award—an annual prize for nonprofit publishers that honors the “publication of consistently excellent work.” Winners will be announced this March at the AWP Annual Conference & Bookfair in Boston.
Melissa Pritchard talks about The Odditorium and the ways in which faith intersects with creativity with IMAGE: Art, Faith, Mystery and discusses how she brings passion and imagination to historical fiction with Kirkus Reviews and ASU News.
Eduardo Halfon talks about his life and work with Asymptote Journal, Latin American Literature Today, Jewish Journal, Mass Review, Dazed and Confused, Words Without Borders, Guernica, and Electric Literature; on the BBC program The Strand; with Jhumpa Lahiri and Ilan Stavans at the Literary Hub; and in this video from the UNESCO City of Literature “On the Fly: Writers on Writing” series.
Find out why Eduardo Halfon says he’s “only writing one book, and everything I publish along the way is just part of it” in a Shelf Awareness feature about the different ways Halfon and Andrés Neuman approach the art of fiction.
Watch Eduardo Halfon discuss “bringing to life deeply personal stories of exile, displacement and resettlement” with Claudio Lomnitz and Mark Mazower in the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination Writing Lives series.
Discover the remarkable story behind The Polish Boxer’s path to English publication (via New Spanish Books), more about its origins in Guernica, and how strange it is to be “Translated from English to English, by Way of Spanish” (via Words Without Borders).
Publisher Erika Goldman talks to City Lights Booksellers & Publishers about what’s exciting her at “this moment in publishing.” Find more insight from fellow independent publishers, including Akashic Books and Feminist Press, in this terrific interview series.
As a publisher, it is one thing to believe that our books can change the world, but it’s an extraordinary feeling when those responsible for focusing attention on global affairs discover a book that guides their thinking. With The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers, we have published such a book. As diplomat Charles Petrie, who investigated the United Nation’s role and responsibilities during the Sri Lankan conflict, said:
“When I was commissioned to do this report, the first thing I was handed was a copy of The Cage. Weiss’s scrupulously balanced account should serve as a guidepost for decision-makers and scholars of international affairs. A book can change the world.”
Read more from Gordon Weiss about why he wrote The Cage:
My objective in writing The Cage was to challenge the myth that few civilians had been killed during the crushing of the Tamil Tigers by Sri Lankan government forces in 2009. I wanted to argue that given the nature of the long civil war, it was in some sense predictable that the conclusion of the war would be extremely vicious.
I had also been thinking about, or dealing with, many of the matters I discuss in this book in my daily work with the United Nations: human rights, international law, war, insurgency groups, nationalism, idealism, historical events, global currents, and the media, so The Cage was also an opportunity to distill some of those ideas, and bring them to bear on the topic at hand. Continue reading…
The title of the collection, “Understories” has several layers of meaning. The most literal is a reference from “The Understory” to the plants that grow at the base of the forest canopy, farthest from the crowns’ light and glory but just as critical to the overall habitat, and surely as intriguing when you hunker down close and know what to look for. I took a class called Forest Communities of New Hampshire where we went out hiking and examined the various layers in different forest stands, and I was amazed at how much you could learn by looking down as well as up and discerning connections between the levels. Even in “The Understory,” though, the word has a double meaning, referring also to the hidden stories, the stories that lie underneath the received version of events or the surface narrative that a person presents. Continue reading…
Download the reading group guide.
Q: The narrator of The Polish Boxer shares your name and the entire novel has been described as semi-autobiographical. What does fiction allow that a memoir would not?
A: To me, all literature is fiction disguised as memoir. Or perhaps memoir disguised as fiction. In other words, in my own work, I don’t see the difference between these two genres. I start writing from within, from myself, from my own experiences, but somewhere before the words hit the page they get shellacked with a coat of fiction. I can’t describe this process. And I don’t pretend to understand it. There’s something magical, and surreal, and intimate, and absolutely ludicrous about writing fiction. Continue reading…
The National Endowment for the Arts has announced their 2013 Art Works grants and we’re very proud to be among the literature recipients. Our $10,000 grant will be used to help readers discover and engage with our books through a variety of creative digital initiatives.
Download the reading group guide.
View the teacher and study guide.
The Polish Boxer brought together author Eduardo Halfon and an international group of five accomplished translators who—instead of competing for a contract—decided to work in concert with each other to deliver an exquisite manuscript. Their collaboration is a concrete example of the passion Halfon’s work generates among English-speaking readers and further proof that exhilarating literature has no geographic or linguistic boundaries.
Discover even more about the book’s remarkable path to English publication from author Eduardo Halfon at New Spanish Books.
A Note from Translator Daniel Hahn
Doing any kind of creative work collaboratively entails certain risks. Writing is no exception; and translators are, of course, creative writers. Sharing the task of creating a voice between two different writers can lend the text an uneasy irregularity; sharing it between five is more than a little foolish. But that’s what we’ve done with The Polish Boxer. It helped that all five translators (and author Eduardo Halfon) have taken part in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s annual summer school, so we did have some experience of the pleasures and challenges of collaborative translation work. The aim was always to produce one final translation, a single unified text, rather than lots of different-flavored fragments all sort of bolted together, a hybrid with all-too-visible joins. And I believe we’ve succeeded, too. Continue reading…
Gordon Weiss provides perspective about human rights abuses and the ongoing war crimes investigation in Sri Lanka with Radio New Zealand and on a harrowing ABC broadcast detailing new allegations of torture.
A very powerful op-ed by Gordon Weiss about the United Nation’s Petrie Report and its “second chance to right wrongs on Sri Lanka” appears in The Australian. Listen to him discuss this breaking news story with ABC Radio and read more from him at the BBC.
Thanks to the dedicated staff at Sonnet Media, we now have a place to share all the stories behind the books we publish. Over the coming months, we’ll be adding Q&As with our authors, excerpts from their books, reading group guides, videos, and more. We are also excited to unveil our new logo, which impressed author Jonathan D. Moreno as being an accurate reflection of our belief that literature is indeed life’s laboratory. We hope you’ll visit us often to enjoy our latest concoctions.
While we’re thrilled to have found a new home online, it may be many weeks before we can return to our office in Bellevue Hospital Center. In the New England Journal of Medicine, our board member Eric Manheimer offers a personal reflection on Hurricane Sandy, aptly quoting Theodore Rothke in his epigraph: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”
Also in the New England Journal of Medicine, Danielle Ofri, our board member and the editor of The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, recounts the extraordinary efforts of New York University Medical Center staff in the wake of the hurricane and beautifully evokes the reason we are so proud to be a part of the NYUMC community:
“Bellevue’s enormity is more than its imposing physical presence, more than its legacy as the oldest public hospital in the country, more than its outsized reputation in popular culture. Its grandeur resides in its status as a living, breathing medical organism. It possesses a gritty industriousness and a cacophonous vitality. The ferocious loyalty it has engendered for the past 276 years is apparent in its staff as well as its patients. Many of us have spent our entire working lives at Bellevue and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.”
We can’t wait to get back.
UPDATE: We are thrilled to announce, that as of March 29, 2013, we have returned to our offices in Bellevue Hospital.
Melissa Pritchard shares her playlist for The Odditorium at Largehearted Boy:
“The eight stories in The Odditorium took shape as I exhumed human ‘curioddities,’ to borrow Robert Ripley’s coinage, attempting to conjure historical persons dwarfed by neglect or mythicized and made into hollow giants—each one imprisoned, unmoving, within glass cabinets of half-fact and false fact. I listened to almost no music as I wrote these pieces, since it seemed to take every last aural wit I possessed to ‘hear’ what a specific time and place, what specific persons, might sound, look and think like. So the original playlist for this collection is largely subliminal, made up of quaint, sublime, sorrowing or frantic compositions and ghostly harmonies, sung by voices begging redress, exoneration, new life and breath.”
Continue reading Melissa’s playlist at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Tim Horvath shares his playlist for Understories at Largehearted Boy:
“There are a handful of stories in the collection—they literally fit in the palm of the hand—that remind me of Minutemen songs—short, thwacky, flirting with absurdity, but, one hopes, possessing a logic of their own. Several of the two or three pagers are like this. What I love about the Minutemen is what I love in the best flash fiction, the way they subvert expectations in a matter of words/chords/minutes (usually two or less), their sublime way of making things gel, their staccato wit, the way they tinker endlessly with form. Or maybe you’d want to call them poets, formal poets who leap from villanelle to haiku to sonnet to form upon form of their own idiosyncratic invention without missing a beat. There are some pieces in Understories I’d consider more prose poems than stories, and they’re the ones that take about a minute to read.”
Continue reading Tim’s playlist at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jonathan Moreno talks to Salon, answers “9 ½ Questions” at The Atlantic, and delves into the intersection between bioethics and politics on Point of Inquiry
Continue reading...Jonathan D. Moreno discusses biopreparedness on FOX News and pens an op-ed with Senator Tom Daschle on the 10th anniversary of the anthrax attacks at Politico.
Continue reading...Listen to an interview with the author on WHYY’s Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane and on KUOW’s Weekday
Continue reading...The Lives They Left Behind gave rise to a successful campaign to commemorate patients who had been buried in unmarked graves on the grounds of the Willard State Psychiatric Hospital. Find a multimedia presentation about this campaign and the lives it has touched in the New York Times.
Q: What is the significance of the title, Inukshuk?
A: For the longest time the book had another title, which I never liked: Ice Masters. That title always made me picture a figure-skating tournament or exposition, but I couldn’t think of anything else to call the book, so I seemed stuck with it. Then, as often happens in the final stages of drafting and revising a thing, I was struck by something out of the blue and just kind of knew, like the proverbial light bulb coming on—there’s my title. Continue reading…
Read an excerpt from Inukshuk and a self-interview with Gregory Spatz at The Nervous Breakdown.
Read about Gregory Spatz’s relationship to Sir John Franklin at Native Home of Hope, find out how Spatz’s path to writing began at an independent bookstore in San Rafael, California (via NW Book Lovers), and explore the research behind Inukshuk at Necessary Fiction and in Glimmer Train.
Discover how Gregory Spatz persisted through years of New Yorker rejections at The Quivering Pen and why the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony is “the most exquisitely, perfectly sad pieces of music [he has] ever heard” (via New England Review).
Gregory Spatz shares his playlist for Inukshuk at Largehearted Boy:
“I grew up hearing my parents sing and play as a ’60s folk-rock duo. All of my earliest recollections have to do with that music —a constant soundtrack—and not just their music either, but anything I loved and happened to get my hands on: The Beatles, Frank Zappa, Boccherini, The Clancy Brothers, Mendelsohn, The Red Clay Ramblers, Fairport Convention and Vivaldi were memorable favorites. I was musically obsessed, and a musical omnivore. And at that age I was also completely sure that there was zero distinction between the music I loved and whatever stories I was reading or engrossed in.”
Continue reading Gregory’s playlist at Largehearted Boy—one of our favorite places on the Internet. It is, in the words of its curator David Gutowski, “a music blog featuring daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture.” In the “Book Notes” series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Author Tim Horvath filmed a reading from his new story, “Desert of Maine” for Extract(s): Your Daily Dose of Lit. Fittingly, this amusing video was recorded at the Desert of Maine tourist attraction (next to a giant plastic Camel!).
Tim Horvath discusses Understories with the Boston Globe, Bloom, and The Nervous Breakdown; muses on his inspirations at TSP: The official blog of The Story Prize; explains his offbeat research for the collection at Necessary Fiction; answers questions at Monkeybicycle; offers reading recommendations at The Short Form; contributes a guest post for Robert Lopez’ “No News Today” series; and talks to The Philadelphia Review of Book’s Andrew Ervin in a three way conversation with Gabriel Blackwell and Jensen Beach (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).
Visit Storyville to download a selection from Understories and read Tim Horvath’s story about its inception.
Read more interviews with Tim Horvath about the art of teaching and writing in The Hippo and at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts website.
Calling all Moby-Dick fans! During NYC’s inaugural reading marathon, literary luminaries including Sarah Vowell, Rick Moody, Michele Filgate, Touré, and our own Tim Horvath read from the Herman Melville classic. The Daily News covers the festivities and Tim Horvath offers a field report from New Bedford, MA, where it all started.
Find out why NPR selected The Sojourn as one of “The Year’s Top 5 Book Club Picks” on Weekend Edition, listen to the review on All Things Considered, and hear Andrew Krivak read from the novel at NPR Books.
Andrew Krivak discusses the family history that inspired The Sojourn with Robin Young on WBUR Here and Now.
Read more from Andrew Krivak about The Sojourn and his inspirations as a writer in Poets & Writers, Fiction Writers Review, and Words With Writers.
Mary Cappello, author of Awkward: A Detour, discusses her work with Propeller magazine.