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 a railroad saloon. The survivor, her friend Blanch Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer who risks everything to bring Jenny’s murderer to justice – even if it might be the father of her child.  In Blanche’s search for answers, the secret life of Jenny is revealed to be more complicated than public persona as a notorious character who rides a bike, dresses in men’s clothes, and hunts frogs whose legs are served fresh in the finest of restaurants. Alison Owen and Debra Hayward of Monumental Pictures plan to make a feature adaptation of Frog Music. Donoghue, who adapted Room for the big screen and received an Academy Award nomination, is writing the screenplay. 2)  Scott Berg, Max Perkins, Editor of Genius (Pocket, 1978) Max Perkins revolutionized American literature working as an editor at Scribner and is known as the driving force behind literary superstars like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Berg’s biography is one of the best books on the publishing industry ever written. First published in 1978, it has been released on the fiftieth anniversary of Max Perkin’s death. The biographical…

Do you tell yourself you need a couple of days when your calendar is free from distractions before you can sit down and start to write? Then when the weekend arrives you sleep late, catch up on correspondence, watch a movie, and maybe make time to stare at a blank screen. In a block of eight hours without any other commitments, you’re lucky if you spend an hour or two actually writing. Are you convinced that next chapter will get written while you are away at a writer’s retreat? When you get there do you enjoy the camaraderie of kindred spirits indulging in literary conversations, visiting the tourist attractions, eating meals together, and checking out a nearby bookstore or art gallery? In a block of five free days, you might actually write a total of 10 hours. Have you looked at your watch and sighed with disappointment that there isn’t enough time to write before you have to a) go pick up the kids from school b) meet someone for lunch or c) rush off to your next appointment? Instead you Tweet #amwriting when you’re not, take a photo of your desk and post to Instagram, and check out what other people are reading on Facebook. Do the dishes have to be done and everyone else asleep in the house before you can start to work on your manuscript? Exhaustion and all the day residue defeat your best intentions to write. Have you joined a Facebook group with other writers…

I drive my 87-year old father to his memoir writing group every other week, where he meets with 8-10 peers to discuss short vignettes they have written. Each of them takes a turn having their piece of writing “critiqued” by the others. He’s been in this group for seven or eight years, and has written more than 117 stories about his life. I usually wait down the hall from the memoir group’s room. One day they had to use a different room. There was only one chair for me. Right outside the door. So I sat and listened. It was my father’s turn first. My shy, sensitive, grammatically-correct father. This time, he had written about the plants that were in our yard when I was growing up. His job had been as a biologist with the Fish & Wildlife Department of the Virgin Islands, St. Croix Division. What he had written was a combination of scientific and folk information about a few plants, with photos he had found on the Internet of the ones he described. Everyone had shared their writings over the internet before the meeting, so no one read their piece out loud. When it was Dad’s turn, everyone in the room gave him their reactions to the three page piece he’d written. I was not able to hear clearly, but the main comment seemed to be that he might have filled too much space with pictures when it was supposed to be a writing group. There was…