NOW IN PAPERBACK!

Mentors, Muses & Monsters is now in paperback, and also available on Kindle and through BN's ebook/Nook. Is there a writer, reader, MFA student, or librarian in your life?

From my "Preface to the Paperback" -- "Every book is special to its author or editor, but this anthology has a particular place in my affections for several reasons. When I asked the writers whose work you are about to read to contribute to the collection, I knew what they wrote would be good -- but there was no way of knowing just how good each of these essays would be. As they arrived in my e-mail inbox, one after another, and I read them sitting at the screen, I often felt the wind knocked out of me. It was clear from the depth of feeling and the care lavished on each sentence that the writers had devoted themselves to this project, to these tender and complex tributes to the people, books, and events that had altered the course of their lives...."

Thanks to all the contributors, the many magazine and journal editors who published these essays in connection with the anthology, and to the readers and reviewers who have lavished praise on them.

FOR MORE ON THE BOOK, PLEASE GO TO OUR BOOK BLOG:

Must Read: The Oriental Wife

My mash note to Evelyn Toynton's magnificent novel, The Oriental Wife, was published today on Jesse Kornbluth's site, Head Butler.

Novelists and the College Application Essay

In case you've been wondering what a novelist might offer a student who's writing his/her college application essay, here's the answer.

Don't Sweat the Essay

Books and What Not these days includes my business, Don't Sweat the Essay, a coaching service for high school students applying to college and anyone applying to grad school. My 25 years of teaching writing at colleges and universities, and a lifetime of writing and editing books, articles, and everything else has come together in this enterprise. Please visit the website, where you can find out how to email or call me ~~~ Thanks.

Not Your Grandmother's Miami

I went for the warm weather and got a big surprise. Miami Vice? What about Miami Nice?

Sarah Palin and the Tiger Mom

I couldn't resist and I've added another voice to the Amy Chau onslaught, but I view her through a psychological rather than a cultural framework. Thanks for taking a look, and please share your thoughts.

One Last Sweet Summer Read

All books published posthumously come to us shrink-wrapped in heartache, from a voice we know has already been extinguished. There is more sadness still in a subgroup of this category: books that come from manuscripts abandoned during wartime or hidden for safekeeping and discovered when the fighting is over, when the text is all that's left of the author.

A brief list of such books: The Diary of Anne Frank, Irene Nemirovsky Suite Francaise, Charlotte Salomon's autobiographical notebook-size gouaches with text, 769 individual pages, that she called Life? Or Theater? The last is not a book in the old-fashioned sense -- its pages are exhibited in museums and Salomon arranged them as acts in a play -- but I'm comfortable thinking of it as an early graphic novel. It tells the story of a gifted young artist in Berlin whose Jewish parents sent her to live with relatives in France before the Occupation, certain she would be safe there. It was only when they went to find her in 1947 that they learned she had died at Auschwitz -- and left a carton containing an illustrated account of her life, including her harrowing final years in a world gone mad. "Keep this safe," she had told a friend. "It is my whole life." To read more....