< Back The Book of Lost Light Ron Nyren July 20, 2021 Ron Nyren’s The Book of Lost Light —winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2019 Big Moose Prize and finalist in the 2020 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction—tells the story of Joseph Kylander, whose childhood in early 20th-century San Francisco has been shaped by his widowed father’s obsessive photographic project and by his headstrong cousin Karelia’s fanciful storytelling and impulsive acts. The 1906 earthquake upends their eccentric routines, and they take refuge with a capricious patron and a group of artists looking to find meaning after the disaster. The Book of Lost Light explores family loyalty and betrayal, Finnish folklore, the nature of time and theater, and what it takes to recover from calamity and build a new life from the ashes. Ron Nyren’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Mississippi Review , and 100 Word Story , among others, and his stories have been shortlisted for the O. Henry Awards and the Pushcart Prize. His writing about architecture, urban design, and sustainability has appeared in Urban Land, Interior Design, Metropolis, and elsewhere. He is the coauthor, with his spouse and writing partner Sarah Stone, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers and a former editor of Furious Fictions: The Magazine of Short-Short Stories . Ron earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A former Stegner Fellow, he is an instructor in fiction writing for Stanford Continuing Studies. In his free time, he loves going to the theater, museums, and the San Francisco Bay. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Timeless Sisters Shelly Hoover April 8, 2020 Janene, Cora, and Amadahy live on the banks of the river in a small North Carolina town, but they live centuries apart. Janene, a modern-day high school teacher, loses her career and identity in the face of a devastating disease. Cora, an enslaved child during the Civil War, flees the Yarbrough plantation after her family is murdered and finds refuge at the home of a big-hearted woman. Amadahy, a Cherokee of the Wolf Clan in 1663, loses her child and husband, leaving her with a surviving child and a psychotic mother. A sacred, maternal talisman connects the three women as they search for lasting peace. It’s an emotional journey for these three women, who meet at the river. U.S. Navy veteran Shelly Hoover is the author of Timeless Sisters: Peace at the River . She earned an Ed.D. in Education from Cal State, Sacramento and retired as a public-school administrator in 2013 after being diagnosed with ALS, a terminal motor neuron disease. But physical limitations have not stopped Shelly from educating and advocating. ALS has paralyzed her body, so she types with her eyes using a Microsoft surface tablet whose camera is able to follow her eyes. Despite her physical challenges, Shelly lives in gratitude and encourages other to do the same, regardless of circumstance. She is a mother of two, a grandmother of four, and lives with her husband, Steve, in the mountains of Northern California. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Speed of Dark Patricia Ricketts July 5, 2022 Speed of Dark (She Writes Press, 2022) by Patricia Ricketts opens with a black man getting off Metra train in Northbrook, Illinois to search for someone who might be hiding in the woods. Mosely Albright works in a Mission house helping drug addicts, alcoholics and those who are down on their luck. The reverend has asked him to search for one of the men who isn’t capable of surviving in the freezing cold. The man he finds is a different one though, and he’s gone when Mosely wakes up, stiff and frozen the next morning. He’s forgotten the way back to the station and knocks on Mary M. Phillips’s door to ask for a glass of water and directions. Mosely has the gift of seeing when people need help, and he knows that Mary Em is desperate. He wants to help her, but the lake, (Mishigami – its Ojibwe name) wants her in its icy waters. Told by Mary Em, Mosely, and Mishigami, Speed of Dark is a story about human connection, the plight of the great lakes, and the power of kindness, friendship, and love. Patricia Ricketts inherited a lifelong love of music, the written word, the visual arts, and healthy arguing from her Irish Catholic household. While teaching English to many wonderful students, Patricia raised two fine daughters and a stand-up son and now has six beautiful grandchildren who live in the Kansas City area. Throughout her life, she penned essays, short stories, poems, and novels; however, her passion for writing escalated after being awarded a scholarship for creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Since then, she has had short stories published in New Directions, Slate, Meta, Blue Hour, Realize Magazines, and on NPR’s “This I Believe” website. The Peninsula Pulse awarded her third place among hundreds of entries in its short story contest. She is currently working on a new novel, tentatively titled The End of June. Patricia lives in Chicago with her partner, artist and photographer, Peter M. Hurley. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Lines Between Us Rebecca D'Harlingue May 18, 2021 Today I talked to Rebecca D’Harlingue about her novel The Lines Between Us (She Writes Press, 2020). A widow in 17th century Spain discovers that her beloved niece, Juliana, has suddenly disappeared. Juliana records her forced journey in the diary she received from Tia Ana. Years later, when she feels herself to be nearing the end of her life, she writes to Ana, explains why she fled, and tells her that she is a nun in the new world. Ana’s response provokes Juliana into sharing her life story and demanding that Mercedes, a nun who hasn’t yet taken her vows, leave the convent. The years pass, and Mercedes, near the end of her own life, passes Juliana’s packet to her granddaughter with a demand that the mothers among her descendants keep the secret of this packet from their own daughters, only passing it to one granddaughter in each generation. Three hundred years later and we’re in 20th century America, when a college Spanish professor finds the packet while cleaning out her mother’s closet after her mother’s untimely death. She wonders if the secret is still worth keeping. Rebecca D’Harlingue was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and never got used to the humidity. Growing up, her mother read every spare moment, and her father often just had to read out loud some new passage from a book he was immersed in. Her high school English teacher inspired her to read on a deeper level, with some unexpected choices like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King , which fed into D’Harlingue’s enchantment with all things Arthurian. She also loves languages, having studied Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, and even taking an ill-fated stab at Mandarin. She had completed all but her dissertation for a PhD in Spanish language and literature when she had her first child, felt reality strike, and went back to school to get an MBA in health services administration. After working in that field for a number of years, she quit her job to start her novel, but abandoned it, only to pick it up twenty years later, after having taught English as a Second Language to adults for many years. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Arthur. D’Harlingue’s debut novel, The Lines Between Us , won in New Fiction in the 2021 Independent Press Awards, and was a finalist in Best New Fiction in both the 2020 International Book Awards and the 2020 Best Book Awards. It was also a finalist in the 2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in Historical Fiction. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Man Who Loved His Wife Jennifer Anne Moses March 9, 2021 In The Man Who Loved His Wife (Mayapple Press, 2021), Jennifer Anne Moses creates characters who grapple with the minutiae of their lives while considering family, fate, love, death, the afterlife, the divine presence, and spirituality. Peppered with Yiddishisms and salted with sisters, brothers, parents, children, grandparents, neighbors, and friends, Moses tells the stories of regular people faced with the problems of daily life but weighted with the 4000-year-old history of Judaism. She is reminiscent of writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, and Philip Roth (to name a few) who captured the spirit of humanity in a specific time and place. Jennifer Anne Moses was born in 1959 and grew up in McLean, Virginia. She always wanted to be a writer, so she read a lot and later earned a degree at Tufts. Eventually she married, had three children, taught herself to paint, and moved from Washington D.C. to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Montclair, NJ. In addition to her books (Food and Whine , The Book of Joshua , Bagels and Grits , Visiting Hours , Tales from My Closet , and The Art of Dumpster Diving ), she's published dozens of essays, articles, Op Ed pieces, and short stories. Her work has also been anthologized in the Pushcart Prizes and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. Moses loves to bicycle, garden, play the piano, and dance, although she can’t do it like she used to. She also adores her two smelly mutts. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back In the Shadow of Dora Patrick Hicks February 8, 2022 In the Shadow of Dora by Patrick Hicks (Stephen F. Austin University Press 2020) explores the space program’s path from the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany, to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Eli Hessel has lost his entire family and is pulled out of the Auschwitz death camp to march with thousands of other emaciated prisoners to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in central Germany, where they’ll be forced to help build the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. Eli glimpses Werher von Braun and other scientists, who helped developed the V-2 rocket and were later recruited in Operation Paperclip to work in the United States on our nascent rocket program. Hicks describes Hessel’s struggle to survive the deprivations and torture by sociopathic ‘kapos’ in control of daily humiliations, cruelty, and murder at Dora. Approximately 20,000, mostly Jews, were murdered there, and very few survived. Eli survives, immigrates to New York, studies astrophysics, and gets recruited by the Kennedy Space Center. One day, he sees the infamous Wernher von Braun, now a respected United States citizen – his expertise, along with those of other Nazis, enabled the building of our space program. This is a story about resilience in the face of evil and the human capacity to recuperate, rebuild, and re-start. Patrick Hicks is the author of over ten books, including The Collector of Names , Adoptable, and This London —he also wrote the critically and popularly acclaimed novel, The Commandant of Lubizec , which was published by Steerforth/Random House. He earned a doctorate in Irish Literature from the University of Sussex and is currently writer in residence at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he teaches creative writing, Irish literature, and Holocaust Studies. His work has appeared in such journals and magazines as Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review , Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Huffington Post, Guernica, The Utne Reader, and many others. When he’s not writing Hicks is busy raising his son, who was adopted from South Korea. He is passionate about international travel and lived in Europe for seven years. He has plans to visit Spain, England, Ireland, and Germany, followed by trips to Israel and England. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Meeting Mozart Howard Jay Smith August 23, 2022 Today I talked to Howard Jay Smith about his new novel Meeting Mozart (Sager Group, 2020). It’s 1946, and a young army intelligence officer is awakened early by a gruff priest who needs another tenor for his church service. But Corporal Jake Conegliano has been invited to see a performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and his ride is leaving soon. The Abbe Luigi Hudal won’t take no for an answer, and threatens eternal damnation, until Jake says that he’s Jewish, but will be happy to sing in the choir the following week. The priest tells him that having a Jewish heathen in his church would be like bringing Satan himself to his door. As luck would have it, that’s the day Jake meets the love of his love and sets in motion a journey to discover both his own history and the history of a famous ancestor, known to history as the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. He was a Catholic priest who wrote the librettos for three of Mozart’s most beloved operas, and he was also Emmanuel Conegliano, a converso from a Jewish community in Italy. In rich detail, Smith weaves stories from different centuries and countries into the saga of a family that continued to be proud of its Jewishness despite expulsions, antisemitism, royal maneuvering, political intrigue, and wars. And even as the centuries progressed, their love of Mozart’s music is a binding force. Howard Jay Smith is an award-winning writer who recently won a John E. Profant Foundation for the Arts, Literature Division Scholarship, The James Buckley Excellence in Writing Award. Smith is a former Bread Loaf Scholar and Washington, D.C. Commission for the Arts Fellow, who taught for many years in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and has lectured nationally. His articles and photographs have appeared in the Washington Post, the Beethoven Journal, Horizon, the Journal of the Writers Guild of America, and the Ojai Quarterly. While an executive at ABC Television, Embassy TV, and Academy Home Entertainment, he worked on numerous film, television, radio, and commercial projects. He serves on the board of directors of the Santa Barbara Symphony and is a member of the American Beethoven Society. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Grace: Stories and a Novella Dan Burns December 5, 2019 Personal and insightful stories about our connections to each other and the world, our attempts to weave the past and present into a meaningful future, and our varying ways of seeking redemption. In Dan Burns ’ latest book, Grace: Stories and a Novella (Chicago Arts Press, 2019), unforgettable characters encounter gorgeous landscapes, nasty betrayals, shocking technology, a heartless future, and a decaying city neighborhood. Burns is also the author of the novels A Fine Line and Recalled to Life and the short story collection No Turning Back: Stories . He is an award-winning writer of stories for the screen and stage, resides with his family in Illinois, and enjoys spending time in Wisconsin and Montana, where he stalks endless rivers in pursuit of trout and a career as a fly fisherman. When not writing or spending time outdoors, Burns plays guitar in his pursuit of rock and roll greatness (or to learn how to play all the memorable rock songs of his youth). Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back To Keep the Sun Alive Rabeah Ghaffari July 25, 2019 It’s 1979, and the Islamic Revolution is just around the corner, as is a massive solar eclipse. In this epic novel set in the small Iranian city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi, grow apples, plums, peaches, and sour cherries, as well as manage several generations of family members. The days here are marked by long, elaborate lunches on the terrace and arguments about the corrupt monarchy in Iran and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And yet life in the orchard continues. An uncle develops into a powerful cleric. A young nephew goes to university, hoping to lead the fight for a new Iran and marry his childhood sweetheart. Another nephew surrenders to opium, while his widowed father dreams of a life in the West. Told through a host of vivid, unforgettable characters that range from servants to elderly friends of the family, To Keep the Sun Alive (Catapult, 2019) is the kind of rich, compelling story that not only informs the past, but raises questions about political and religious extremism today. Rabeah Ghaffari was born in Iran and lives in New York City. She is a filmmaker and writer whose work has appeared in the Tribeca Film Festival. Her collaborative fiction with artist Shirin Neshat was featured in "Reflections on Islamic Art"(Bloomsbury/Qatar) and her documentary, "The Troupe," featured Tony Kushner and received funding from the Ford Foundation and Lincoln Center. Her most recent feature-length screenplay, The Inheritors, was commissioned by producer and costume designer Patricia Field. Rabaeh is also a trained actor who spent her twenties doing theater and film in NYC. When not writing, she loves watching films and cooking. To Keep the Sun Alive is her first novel. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back What You Don't See Tracy Clark September 22, 2020 Cass Raines left the Chicago Police force after a morally bankrupt cop nearly got her killed. Now she runs her own Private Detective agency. When her old CPD friend and partner, Ben Mickerson asks Cass to join him for a side gig, she’s happy to do it. Then she meets the client – the wealthy, powerful owner of a fast-growing media empire. Vonda Allen is loved by the public but hated by her employees and also by whoever is sending her death threats. Cass isn’t thrilled about babysitting a heartless diva, but when two of Vonda’s staff members are murdered, the case gets serious. Then, at one of Vonda’s book signings, a mysterious fan stabs Ben. Although Vonda fires her, Cass is worried that Ben won’t pull through. Now, there’s no way she’s going to sit this one out even though that same morally bankrupt cop and his friend are trying to trip her up. She’s hell bent on figuring out Vonda’s secrets and determined to get answers before anyone else, including Vonda, dies. Tracy Clark is the author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines, a hard-driving, African-American protagonist who works the mean streets of the Windy City dodging cops, cons, killers, and thugs. She received Anthony Award and Lefty Award nominations for her series debut, Broken Places, which was also shortlisted for the American Library Association’s RUSA Reading List, named a CrimeReads Best New PI Book of 2018, a Midwest Connections Pick, and a Library Journal Best Books of the Year. In addition to her Cass Raines novels, Tracy’s short story “For Services Rendered,” appears in the anthology Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African‑American Authors. A native of Chicago, she works as an editor in the newspaper industry and roots for the Cubs, Sox, Bulls, Bears, and Blackhawks equally. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, PI Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and a Mystery Writers of America Midwest board member. When she isn’t working, reading or writing, Tracy loves watching old movies, especially those involving monsters. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Seven Farzana Doctor November 25, 2020 Sharifa and her husband Murtuza are spending his sabbatical year in Mumbai with their seven-year-old daughter, Zeenat. While Murtuza teaches, Shari is planning to homeschool Zee, reconnect with her family, and research her great-great grandfather with hopes of creating a family history. But Sharifa’s cousins, with whom she was once close, are at odds. Fatema is involved in a campaign to ban the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) while Zainab sees it as a time-honored tradition that must be respected. Sharifa thinks it’s a cruel and harmful injustice, but isn’t at all sure it is still practiced in the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect they all belong to – and if it is, she wonders who is insisting on such an outdated practice? Today I talked to writer, activist, and psychotherapist Farzana Doctor, author of Seven (Dundurn Press, 2020). She was born in Zambia to Indian parents, lived there for five years and then in 1971, immigrated with her family to Canada. As a teenager, Doctor became interested in community organizing around issues of gender violence, gender rights, and environmental protection. She currently volunteers with WeSpeakOut, a global group that is working to ban female genital cutting in her Dawoodi Bohra community. Her first novel was Stealing Nasreen 2007, and her second, Six Metres of Pavement 2012, won a Lambda Literary Award and was short-listed for the 2012 Toronto Book Award. Her third novel, All Inclusive , was a Kobo 2015 and National Post Best Book of the Year. Named one of CBC Books’ “100 Writers in Canada You Need To Know Now,” she has also recently published a poetry collection. In her spare time, Farzana Doctor poses Maggie, her dog, with books she loves under the hashtag #MaggieWithBooks. And in previous times, she loved going to restaurants and travelling. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Gone Missing in Harlem Karla FC Holloway December 7, 2021 Gone Missing in Harlem by Karla FC Holloway (TriQuarterly 2021) tells the story of an African American family trying to survive the early decades of the twentieth century. The Mosbys leave their life in Sedalia within hours after six-year-old Percy loudly notes that his father’s boss has made a mistake in calculating what is owed. Percy’s parents know what would happen if they stayed. They settle in Harlem, but the Spanish flu is raging around the globe, and Percy’s father doesn’t survive. His mother, DeLilah, is pregnant with Selma. Years later, Percy witnesses a murder in New York, and DeLilah sends him back to Sedalia. She does her best to make a home for her daughter, but Selma’s childhood is cut short when a brutal rape leaves her pregnant. After her baby is kidnapped, the city’s first ‘colored policeman’, Weldon Haynie Thomas, vows that this kidnapping will not end like the Lindbergh kidnapping. Gone Missing in Harlem touches upon many things, including African American soldiers coming home from WWI, the Great Migration north, and the world of 1930’s Harlem. Gone Missing in Harlem is historical, African American literary fiction and a mystery, but it’s ultimately a novel about the lengths a mother will go to protect her family. Karla FC Holloway , Ph.D., M.L.S., is James B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and Professor of Law at Duke University. She is former Dean of Humanities and Social Science Faculty at Duke. Her research and teaching focused on African American cultural studies, bioethics, literature, and law. Her national and institutional board memberships have included the Greenwall Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics, the Trent Center for Bioethics and Humanities, the North Carolina Humanities Council, the College Board, and the Hastings Center. She is a co-founder of Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies and founding co-director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Professor Holloway is the recipient of national awards and foundation fellowships including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Fellowship and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute. Professor Holloway is the author of over fifty essays and ten books including Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics and the Color of Our Character (1995), Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (2002), BookMarks: Reading in Black and White (2006), and Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (2014). In her emerita years she has shifted to fiction and has published A Death in Harlem (2019) and Gone Missing in Harlem (2021) both with Triquarterly. She’s at work on the final book in the “in Harlem” series, A Haunting in Harlem , and tweets on bioethics, law, society, and popular cultures from @ProfHolloway. When she’s not tweeting, or writing, she’s deep into reading fiction or painting miniature acrylic landscapes and abstract compositions. Anything, she says, with colors that swirl into cerulean. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next