A long hot summer has set in across Grinnell, Iowa, the small college town at the center of Dean Bakopoulos’s third novel, Summerlong. He was at Brooklyn’s WORD Bookstore to discuss the novel with Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers, now in paperback.
In Lisa Glatt’s The Nakeds, a young girl is struck by a car. Her parents marriage falls apart. The driver drives on. And Hannah spends the next decade recovering. Glatt read from The Nakeds at BookCourt in Brooklyn discussing the origins of the book and her own childhood trauma when she, like Hannah, was struck by a car.
The Working Title 7 writing group and reading series held their most recent event at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, NJ. The group, comprised mostly of Montclair residents, has been together for over twelve years. They meet monthly to workshop drafts and discuss craft. Once a year, they host a reading, calling it “grass roots fiction at its best” that’s open to the public to showcase their latest efforts, try out new material, or promote new titles. On June 10th in the back corner of Watchung’s children’s section, Nancy Burke, one of the founding members, emceed the evening of stories, which ranged from creative nonfiction to young adult to sci-fi.
The Magicians trilogy of books has grown into a genre-bending success for author Lev Grossman. Besides spawning a television series, the third book, The Magician’s Land, is now in paperback. Grossman discussed the book and series with Choire Sicha, coproprietor of The Awl and author of Very Recent History.
Amy Pickworth’s debut poetry collection Bigfoot For Women was the winner of Orange Monkey’s book prize in 2013 and was released in November 2014. The book explores the mythology of Bigfoot by applying his stories to relationships with the self, men, and family. In her author’s note, Pickworth writes that “a number of internet addresses are included in this manuscript, but the internet, like any healthy forest, is constantly changing. New things spring up as others die off. The links included here are breadcrumbs on the path.”
Rebecca Dinerstein spent a year living above the arctic circle in Lofoten, Norway. Lofoten is a place of extremes. In winter, the sun barely tints the sky with light. In summer, the sun never truly sets. Dinerstein wrote her first collection of poems Lofoten while living in an artist community. That collection is written in English and then translated by Dinerstein into Norwegian. Both sets of poems appear in the collection. Her debut novel, The Sunlit Night, also finds inspiration in the endless summer days. She launched The Sunlight Night at Powerhouse Arena and talked about the book with writer Darin Strauss.
Frank Cassese’s debut novel is a harrowing account of a young man’s relationship with his adored sister. Ocean Beach (No Record Press, 2014) explores the porous boundary between love and obsession from the point of view of Peter, a disaffected son of distant Italian-American literati, whose unchecked idealism threatens to poison his reality. When does love become destructive? Cassese’s introspective book occupies itself with this question and other, more troublesome questions about guilt and existentialism. In an interview with English Kills Review, Cassese discusses the writing process that resulted in his first novel.
In the vernacular of writers on social media, a book is “born”—conferred with legitimacy and a life separate from its creator—on the day that it is published. The metaphors of gestation, labor, birth come easily, and everyone seems to agree that the big day arrives not after the first sentence has been written, or the last, but on the day a book becomes widely available to the public. What then of the manuscripts that never make it into print? What do we call a book that’s never been born?