serial fiction

I read a lot of novels by Charles Dickens when I was a teen, and it amazed me when I reached college and discovered that Dickens wrote his lengthy novels as serials—individual chapters were published in weekly or monthly magazines, and readers could purchase them for a fraction of the cost of a bound book.  [...]

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focus

It feels like the world’s going to blow away…all night the wind was raging, and it’s still tearing stuff up today.  The golden leaves on the tree in our back alley are just about gone, and I wonder what the garden looks like—might have to head over and find out.  Something in the turkey, ham, [...]

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aftertaste

Sometimes I wonder about the timing of book releases…I just finished reading Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith, and found myself making endless comparisons to Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis, which I read several months ago.  I’d heard great things about Flygirl and it was original and interesting, but it was hard to read [...]

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It’s OFFICIAL!

Ok, the official press release has gone out; you can read it here, or you can just tell me what you think of the new cover:

The new Amazon Encore edition of Wish will come out in February 2010, but you can pre-order your copy now.  I guess I should be on cloud nine, but right [...]

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Perfect Ten

Can you believe this is the TENTH installment of Colleen Mondor’s What a Girl Wants?  Stop by Colleen’s blog, Chasing Ray, to add your opinion to ours: are “mean girls” really such a menace, or do they just sell more books?  Neesha Meminger has now joined our panel (hurray!); here’s some of what she had [...]

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east/west/north/south

I’m happy to be paired with another African Canadian woman author, Itah Sadu, in this latest review in the Chronicle Herald.  George Elliott Clarke is a prominent African Canadian author/scholar/poet who teaches at the University of Toronto, but his heart is still in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  Whenever he’s asked to review black books, George kindly [...]

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timing

They say timing is everything, right?  So my birthday week got off to a great start, and I was really moved and inspired by what I learned at the African Burial Ground Museum.  But THEN, I made the mistake of going to see Chris Rock’s film, Good Hair, the very next day.  I don’t know [...]

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good news

Sometimes the news can get you down, but here are some uplifting stories you don’t want to miss:  check out G. Neri’s impact on a middle-aged man over at Crazy Quilts, and then read this short NPR article about the power of librarians to turn one reluctant reader into a lifetime learner…(cover art by the [...]

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Chicks kick a**

I’m nursing a migraine this morning, but this cup of unsweetened mint tea is helping a lot…Colleen has posted the latest in her What a Girl Wants series; stop by and join our discussion of female superheroes—do girls still need to see powerful women represented in comics, novels, or film?  Or does the hypersexualization of [...]

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Dark Dude

I’m starting to feel estrogen-deprived.  This will be the last book by and about men that I review for a while, even though I’ve had quite a streak of great reads.  Dark Dude by Oscar Hijuelos is another novel set during the turbulent late ’60s (I think–there’s mention of Viet Nam, Nixon, and hippies), and [...]

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