Visual Storytelling: from film to books and the possibilities in between
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February 21, 2012

Last month, I reviewed a graphic novel/interactive documentary called KENK: A Graphic Portrait. This journalistic comic was the first release for Toronto-based multimedia production and publishing company Pop Sandbox, and it was met with a hoard of accolades and reviews within its first three months of release. I was lucky enough to snag an interview with Alex Jansen, the owner and operator of Pop Sandbox,… [Read More]

The Man in the Empty Boat by Mark Salzman
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February 14, 2012

If a man in a boat is crossing a river and an empty boat drifts along and bumps into his, he won’t get angry. But if there is someone in the other boat, then the man will shout out directions to move. …If a man could make himself empty, and pass like that through the world, then who could harm him? Mark Salzman’s ebook The… [Read More]

Review: Marriage Rules by Harriet Lerner
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February 7, 2012

I begin with two confessional caveats. One, Harriet Goldhor Lerner is my second cousin; we communicate by email, but have never met. Two, I am not Marriage Rules’ (Penguin, 2012) target audience even though my husband of 16 years and I have been in marriage counseling for two years. In 1985, Harriet (she’s family, I can call her by her first name) took the world of… [Read More]

Protagonists and Pandas: An Interview with Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan
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January 10, 2012

Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan (Melville, 2012), will unashamedly tell you that she’s lived with her parents four times. Her newly-released novel, a coming-of-age about post-college angst, is spliced with details from her own experience and speaks volumes to the plight of so many twenty-something’s undergoing a quarter-life crisis. Stein’s protagonist, Esther, is a recent Northwestern graduate suffering from the post-grad blues. While… [Read More]

Book Review: No Biking in the House Without a Helmet
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December 22, 2011

Author Melissa Fay Greene I had the pleasure of meeting Melissa Faye Greene at the Austin Jewish Book Fair in November. She was there to sign No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (Sarah Crichton Books, 2011) and to provide the opening address. No Biking is a memoir chronicling how she and her family of six (mom, dad, four kids) adopted five orphans from overseas—one… [Read More]

Gone Local: Larson Publications
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November 29, 2011

Our blog’s “Gone Local” series aims to explore who and what the Ithaca area’s literary community has to offer. Be it bookstores, publishers, or local authors, each contributes invaluably to the bookish zeitgeist. Recently, Swenson Book Development contacted Larson Publications (of Burdett, NY) to get an independent publisher’s views on the literary business, the craft, and the community. Larson Publications started in 1982 as a… [Read More]

History of a Suicide by Jill Bialosky
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November 10, 2011

An endless loop of images, sounds, and events play in the theatre of my horrified mind. Specific details brand themselves red hot into memory. The hour, the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade before it happened replay backward and forward as my mind searches for clues to the mystery of my lover’s suicide two years ago. As a reader, I rode a… [Read More]

“Almost Everything Takes Forever”: Poems by Kirsten Wasson
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November 3, 2011

“A novel, biography, and memoir, all/three going at once.” This is how Kirsten Wasson describes her mother’s voracious literary appetite in the poem “One Way to Read.” The two lines, however, could well have been written to describe the author’s new collection of poems, Almost Everything Takes Forever, published by Antrim House Books. It is a lush, lithe, witty, emotionally frank series of postcards from… [Read More]

Guantanamo Boy
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October 13, 2011

Guantanamo Boy (Albert Whitman, 2011 reprint) is the story of a teenager in the wrong place at the wrong time in a dangerous political climate. It’s a story of closed ears, fearful eyes and silent mouths. A story in which the small kindnesses buried deep in the heart have the power to keep a person alive, like the power of a good book (a Reader’s… [Read More]

Ithaca’s Balkan Voice: Tea Obreht, Tiger’s Wife
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August 30, 2011

Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife: A Novel, Random House, March 2011 Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be. Tea Obreht opens her novel with her protagonist, Natalie, searching to escort her grandfather’s soul home during those 40 days after the spirit passes from the body. Her grandmother is shocked by… [Read More]