Elizabeth Benedict on Books, Money, Hair, Mothers, Gifts & What Not

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 194

Earlier this summer, I went to a house in the Maine woods with no Internet or cell phone service to make some headway on a novel. When I discovered that my laptop didn't work either, I was forced to take drastic measures: paper and pen. Read all about it .

I was asked to blurb this novel earlier this year and liked it so much I wanted to review it instead. Here's my review in today's Boston Globe . In addition to being a fabulous novelist and screenwriter, Nicholson has a very classy pedigree: his wife, Virginia, was named after her great aunt, Virginia Woolf, and her grandmother was Vanessa Bell. I hope the review brings Nicholson many new American readers.

Mentors, Muses & Monsters writers John Casey and Maud Casey will join me and author Alice Randall ( The Wind Done Gone, Rebel Yell ) on Thursday, March 18, at 8pm, for a panel on writers and their influences, on the opening night of this wonderful book festival held every year at UVa, in Charlottesville. John Casey is a professor in the graduate creative writing program and Maud Casey grew up in Charlottesville. Here's information on our event (tickets required) at the Festival.

Narrative Magazine has just published my first short story in quite some time - "If I Could Speak Chinese." I'm honored to be in this wonderful publication, with so many terrific writers and editors Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian. Thank you.