The first page of Jenny Erpenbeck’s amazing 2014 novel The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend in German, available in English from New Directions) has to rank among the most agonizingly beautiful—and thematically apt—novel openings ever written: “The Lord gave,…
Pamela Wechsler’s first novel, Mission Hill, the first in a series of three legal thrillers featuring homicide prosecutor and Boston Brahmin Abby Endicott, comes out on May 3rd. Publishers Weekly writes about Mission Hill, “Though the swiftly moving plot offers…
What does Prince have to do with writing? Everything if you’re a kid growing up in a dead-end town in a state that everyone forgets exists and everything around you is the worst and your stupid stepbrother told your parents…
At this year’s Muse and The Marketplace I will be peddling (presenting? offering? begging acceptance for?) my YA historical novel, Big Shot. This will be my second time at Muse with this novel, though its first as a Young Adult…
Meet Captain Happen—troublemaker, narrative enabler, change agent. The novelist, essayist, and poet, Charles Baxter talks about Captain Happen as one of several ways to increase urgency and momentum in fiction. Male or female, this kind of character shakes things up….
This post first appeared on Jungle Red Writers in September 2015. I’m from a small town. East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Population: almost 11,000 when I last lived there. That was 1993, the year I graduated high school. A half-year earlier Kent…