Blog

The Ravens Perch – Queen Anne Cherries

The first summer and winter were taken up with the move. He was five. Packing up his things in one house and unpacking his things in another, shopping with the family for a new sofa and kitchen table at Tonnesdatter’s, then Sears, and finally at Kaufmann’s, where his dad scowled at the price tags....

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Author2Author- Interview with Bill Kenower

Bill welcomes author Robert McKean to Author2Author where writer talk about writing and life. Rob shares how his love of writing began, and where his journey has taken him, and how it has shaped his perspective. LISTEN HERE. More From the Blog

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Largehearted Boy- Playlist for Mending What Is Broken

"Peter Sanguedolce swims in music. He remembers his Nonno Franco—known all his life as Fatty—playing a tinny upright on the mezzanine of a pungent cigar factory. Fatty regaled his bored cigar-rollers with everything from Giuseppe Verdi to the Big Bopper. Peter’s Uncle Nico commanded the organ at...

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NPR – Interview with Suzanne Lang- A Novel Idea

"McKean's characters are so palpable...and we can relate to aspects of their humanity and also their radical behaviors that are just off-kilter from what we might imagine of ourselves and others. And it’s in that slight extreme and unfilteredness that his characters are endeared to us." - Suzanne...

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JMWW – The Streets of Your Town

"... We are both indebted to Joe Taylor, Livingston’s director, for his generous support. How did winning the Tartt Prize affect me? Tremendously, in a word. As you well know, we labor countless hours on a manuscript without guarantee that our efforts will ever see the light of day, will ever be...

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Booksie’s Blog

"Peter Sanguedolce is stuck and he knows it.  He also knows he needs to do something about it but isn't sure what.  It seems like yesterday that he was the head of the business he inherited and brought back from the edge of poverty.  He was married to a woman he loved and had a daughter,...

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In Conversation with Terry Shepherd

Mending What Is Broken was born out of a short story about a man names Peter Sanguedolce. But Peter was too good to lose. He had more of a story to tell.  Listen to the backstory of how a short story evovled into a novel.More From the Blog

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The Literate Quilter on Rob McKean

"Peter Sanguedolce is stuck. In his late forties, he is jobless after economic pressures forced him to close the family business. He lives in his folk’s house, his mother’s room still filled with her things. His second wife married him when he was the boss’s son. Peter supported her through law...

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MonkeyBicyle – If My Book

"Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors compare their recently released books to weird things... If Mending What Is Broken were a play it would a rewritten fifth act of The Merchant of Venice in which the dying Shylock longs to reconcile with his...

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Q&A with Deborah Kalb

"Mending What Is Broken, like all my novels, grew out of a short story. Although “The Teardown Party” was published and I thought myself done with it, the story was not done with me. First off, Peter Sanguedolce. Peter really intrigued me. He was unlike any other character I’d drawn. He was a...

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