Many people all over the world have families who have been affected by the events of World War II. Elizabeth Rynecki is one of those people. Her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki “depicted the everyday lives of the Polish-Jewish community in his art,” but sadly, he died in a concentration camp and most of his art was lost in the war. Elizabeth Rynecki’s book, titled Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy, details the journey of Elizabeth as she strives to rebuild her great-grandfather’s art collection. For some time, Elizabeth has been working on producing a documentary film which bears the same title as her book, and now, at the end of May, the film will premiere in Warsaw, Poland. In light of this exciting news, I had the chance to interview Elizabeth Rynecki for Swenson Book Development, and I am excited to share it with you. Swenson Book Development: What has it been like seeing this documentary film project come to life? Elizabeth Rynecki: We filmed the first interview in 2008 and cut a 9 minute “proof of concept” trailer in 2010 as a way to generate interest and funding in the project. I thought I’d be finished in a year. I had no real understanding of the complexity of putting together a documentary film. I didn’t know how much money I would need, how hard it would be to raise it, nor how important it would be to assemble just the right team to bring it all…
1) Emma Donoghue, Frog Music: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company, April 2014) From the author of the bestselling novel, Room, Emma Donaghue penned this novel based in San Francisco during the summer of 1897 in which the city suffered a smallpox epidemic and a record-breaking heat wave. The story begins when a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead through the window of… [Read More]
Filed Under: Amy Strewart, Between Shades of Gray, Chasing Portraits, Editor of Genius, Elizabeth Rynecki, Emma Donoghue, Frog Music, Girl Waits with Gun, Max Perkins, Ruta Sepetys, Scott Berg
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When I mentor interns, I often spend time thinking about what advice might be helpful to those who pursue career goals in the world of publishing. This month I’ve had the good fortune to have two interns working with Swenson Book Development LLC. They’ve both seen many of their friends and classmates graduate this June but both of them completed their third not final year… [Read More]
Filed Under: bookseller, career in publishing, college graduation, internships, jobs, library volunteer
Amidst the nervous titter of soon-to-be graduates, I could feel the excitement boiling under the clean, black robes at Lawrence University’s graduation ceremony. This year’s commencement speaker was Lan Samantha Chang. An Appleton WI native, Chang is the author of Hunger, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, and Inheritance. Hunger is a novella and collection of short stories, published in 1988. Chang’s prose follows the… [Read More]
Filed Under: commencement, graduation, Hunger, immigration, Inheritance, Iowa Writers Workshop, Lan Samantha Chang
Guest blog by Naomi Yaeger, Duluth MN A book award ceremony can refresh and energize you while you plug away at a manuscript. For more than three years I’ve worked on a manuscript. I’m a newspaper journalist, but that doesn’t make writing a book any easier for me. I’m used to weekly deadlines and writing short stories. I’ve been in a funk lately. A couple… [Read More]
Everyday my email is flooded with a rush of correspondence. There’s a seemingly endless stream of messages all day, every day. Yours, too? Do you sometimes wonder whether your message disappeared into cyberspace because you did not receive a response? Did they end up in a spam folder? Is no response a “no”? How are the email messages you send handled by recipients who are… [Read More]