Doing our best since 2009
Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Donna Miscolta writes about Ofelia and Norma from Regal House. + I was a science major in college. I won’t explain why. Suffice it to say it was a case…
Near the opening of Grace Krilanovich’s much-anticipated second novel, Acid Green Velvet, two youngsters give a bad man a good thrashing. “I’d only intended to smack him with a fence post, scare him a little,” explains Paulette—but plans go awry. The man is Paulette’s father, and he deserves it. He’s been using his daughter as…
Much like Colin McAllister, the narrator of my new novel The Shitbird, I arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts on a raw gray day in October of 1993 to begin my first assignment as a lowly seaman apprentice in the U.S. Coast Guard, at the very bottom of the pecking order aboard a 270-foot cutter.
Translated by Marita Thomsen, On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen is a meditation on the many losses of age and how these losses are balanced—sometimes—by insight and wisdom. This slim novel, which got under my skin and into my dreams, is also the first book by a Faroese woman to appear in…
I discovered Berkeley Springs because I had it in my mind to visit some hot springs within a few hours drive of Washington, D.C.
Carolina Pihelgas’ The Cut Line is two things at once: a classic story about a bad breakup, and thoughtful geopolitical fable. Gorgeously translated from the Estonian by Daisy Hurford, the novel follows Liine, a middle-aged woman who flees her life in the city of Tartu, in southern Estonia, in an attempt to escape an abusive…
As a lover of the retelling of history to promote the female gaze and/or reshape a less sexist heroine, and of travel writing in general, I picked up Chandra Grace Johner’s debut collection Naked in Turkey (AOS Publishing).