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Anyone familiar with George Orwell’s 1984 is bound to think of the hapless Winston Smith while reading Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Orwell, of course, wrote his fantasy in reaction to the rise of Communist Russia. Johnson’s tale is also fiction, but it’s based on what we know about the…

This is my latest installment about books that are the pride of my collection. I occasionally read them again for the pleasure of savoring first-rate writing. When Walter M. Miller, Jr. wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz in 1959, his novel straddled a borderline between science fiction and stark probability. The…

Louise Erdrich follows her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Night Watchman, with another perspective on Native American culture and its ties to the spirit world. Tookie, a bookstore clerk with a prison record, finds herself haunted by Flora, a customer who mysteriously died while reading a book about a nineteenth century…

Being an independent publisher can be very discouraging. You spend months or years writing a book, only to have readers ignore it to death. I made a great many mistakes marketing my first novel.  I was so focused on the content that I didn’t realize how hard it is to…

This is the first book I’ve ever read whose text and cover captivated me equally. It’s as though the author and the artist were the same person. As I read, I kept turning back to the cover for some extra perspective on the past that so sharply defines Mauve and…

What Was Lost could have been two different novels: a delightful children’s story about a girl sleuth, or a gothic tale of urban despair. Catherine O’Flynn chooses the darker path, but only after making us fall in love with Kate Meaney, a ten-year-old aspiring detective who hangs around a shopping…

Don’t you wish sometimes that you could recapture your childhood talent for adaptability? To welcome new experiences, rather than fear them? To deal with parental contradictions and inconsistencies? When strangers spirit Carmel Wakeford away from her mother Beth, the child accepts it as an adventure. For Beth, the separation is…

In his previous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles had great fun creating a hotel oasis for an aristocrat in Joseph Stalin’s Russia. This time his pattern is a mishmash of heroic legends based largely on Homer’s Odyssey, as four 1950s youths embark on their own quests. Two of…

I’m sorry to report that nobody entered the contest I posted on last week’s blog. So nobody won the prize: a free copy of Weapons of Remorse. Regardless, here are the answers to the quiz: What is the name of the main character in C. S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy”? The…

This week’s blog is a chance to win a prize. I will send free copies of my novel, Weapons of Remorse, to the first three people who can answer the following two questions: -- What is the name of the main character in C. S. Lewis’s “space trilogy”? -- On…