Uncategorized

AuthorsXP is hosting a “Fill My Reader” book giveaway, December 28 through January 3. CLICK HERE TO ENTER Did you get an ebook reader for Christmas? Or do you prefer paperbacks? You have a chance to win a gift basket of books, or individual copies, by filling out the form.…

Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord’s…

What would you do if you woke up one morning and found that your dead mother had come back to life? Len Holder, an insurance adjuster, faces that dilemma in The Seven-Day Resurrection, the new Chevron Ross novel. Within moments, Len discovers that Mom isn’t a ghost. That he’s not…

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…