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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...
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...
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...
Authors Answer – 5 Questions from Elizabeth Rynecki
"Authors Answer is a new project by Elizabeth Rynecki, a writer, film director, and now a promoter of other authors..." 1. Are there particular films that have influenced your writing? 2. Do you listen to music while you write? 3. Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? 4. Do you collect...
Compulsive Reader – Interview with Rob McKean
"How did this book originate? Some years ago, between longer writing projects, I wrote a story. I hadn’t written a short story in a while, and the experience was liberating: imagining a finite scenario and drafting and revising the piece in a few weeks. Then I discovered a minor character in a...
But What Are They Eating?
"The fragrance of freshly milled wheat berries has a depth and liveliness unlike anything else, flowery, sweet, beery, faintly green and earthy. As the grain shatters beneath the grating stones and the new flour empties from the mill, an aromatic dust cloud wafts up speaking of a symbiotic...
Decadent Review – Rags of Time
"All good science fiction draws us into the author’s dreamworld, but seminal science fiction possesses something beyond riveting plotlines..." Rags of Time: Studies in Fictional Travels in TimeMore From the Blog
How a Novel Began to Spin a Web Around Me
Writers are often asked where a story or novel came from. Is this true? Did this happen to you? One would like to respond to such sweet curiosity with something definitive, “Oh, I took this from an article that appeared in the New York Times on October 4, 1965.” But rarely is the muse so...
Svetlana Alexievich: Voices from Chernobyl
As I have been reading my way through Powell’s Bookstore “25 Books to Read Before You Die, World Edition, 2016,” I have been choosing my selections from the list somewhat randomly. For some time I’ve had my eye on Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl and finally last month got around to...
Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude
Czechoslovakian writer Bohumil Hrabal comes out of a long tradition of wicked satirists. Think of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, and, in our era, Günter Grass (The Tin Drum), Raymond Coover (The Public Burning), and Terry Southern (The Magic Christian). Or, even more contemporary, Saturday Night Live....
Eileen Chang: Love in a Fallen City
Eileen Chang is, for me, a problematic writer. She is a very good writer, and I want to like her writing more than I do. The reasons are complicated. But first, let’s establish some facts on the ground. Chang was born in Shanghai, 1920, and raised bilingually, Chinese and English. Her family,...
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
“It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.” One thing that helped me decide when I contemplated doing a series of blog posts based on PowellsBooks Blog, “25 Books to Read Before You Die, World Edition, 2016,” was seeing on the list a book by Italo Calvino. I had previously read...