April 2012 Newsletter

Hi Goodreads Member,

Here's our monthly newsletter from Goodreads—giving you the latest and greatest in our quest to connect people through reading!

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS

Anne Tyler

A grieving man grapples with visitations from his dead wife in The Beginner's Goodbye, a new book from the fiction master who wrote The Accidental Tourist.

Lionel Shriver

This envelope-pushing writer covered school shootings in We Need to Talk About Kevin and now terrorism in The New Republic, a playful take on the rise of a rookie journalist.

Jane Green

On April 13, join this best-selling author for a live chat about her new novel, Another Piece of My Heart, the perils and rewards of step-mothering, and blended families.

Anna Quindlen

The Pulitzer-winning columnist will be answering questions in a live chat on April 26 about growing older and her new memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.

Book Bloggers Compete!

Bloggers on Goodreads help spread the love of reading through their honest and witty reviews. Vote now in four categories in the Independent Book Bloggers Awards!

Vote now

GOOD MINDS SUGGEST

Alex Adams's Favorite Post-Apocalyptic Books

Dare to imagine the end of the world in these picks from the author of White Horse, a horrifying tale of disease and global chaos.

Adriana Trigiani's Favorite Books About Families

The novelist celebrates her grandparents' romance in The Shoemaker's Wife and shares her top books about family ties.

Christoph Niemann's Favorite Books that Combine Words and Images

This illustrator's quirky New York Times blog posts make up his new book, Abstract City. He recommends his favorite visual reads.

Charlotte Rogan

The setting: an overloaded lifeboat adrift in the ocean. The dilemma: Would you kill to survive? Characters must choose in The Lifeboat, a historical novel set in 1914.

An ex-flame persuades elite hacker James Pryce to track her rogue artist brother, who has disappeared into an alternate-reality game. James goes undercover into a deviant world filled with virtual sex and high-stakes crime.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened

by Jenny Lawson (Goodreads Author)

Taxidermy enthusiast, irreverent mommy blogger, candid poster child for mental illness—Lawson wears many hats with pride. Her memoir chronicles childhood, marriage, and motherhood in hysterical and inspirational prose.

A Land More Kind Than Home

by Wiley Cash (Goodreads Author)

A faith healing of an autistic child by a snake-handling preacher ends in tragedy when the boy dies in front of his little brother. The resulting investigation stirs up small-town secrets in this literary Southern Gothic tale.

Two Rings: A Story of Love and War

by Millie Werber & Eve Keller

After more than 60 years of silence, Holocaust survivor Millie Werber, now a great-grandmother, recounts her stories of unimaginable hardship: imprisonment at Auschwitz and a secret, but brief, marriage.

The Good Father

by Diane Chamberlain (Goodreads Author)

Destitute and facing a bleak choice, a single father leaves his four-year-old daughter with a coffee shop waitress—a woman he barely knows—so he can work an illegal job he hopes will secure their future. What could go wrong?

Unraveling

by Elizabeth Norris (Goodreads Author)

In this teen thriller, Janelle is convinced that her classmate brought her back to life after an accident. While snooping in her dad's FBI files, she learns that a clock is ticking down—she has only 23 days, ten hours to find the truth.

Reach Out and Read

This nonprofit hooks families on reading in an unexpected place: the doctor's office. Pediatricians help educate parents on the developmental importance of reading aloud.

Videos for Groups

Videos can now be added to groups! For example, science fiction and fantasy gurus Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt are sharing all episodes of their online book show in their Goodreads group, The Sword & Laser. Upload videos for your book club now. And as always, we welcome your feedback!

Visit the Sword & Laser

GOODREADS POETRY CONTEST

Want your words to reach 5 million people? Goodreads and the ¡POETRY! group have partnered to host an ongoing poetry contest. Join the ¡POETRY! group to vote each month to pick a winner from among the finalists. You can also submit a poem for consideration. Here is our April winner!

Unfixable

by David Sloan

It happened again last week standing on Monhegan's headlands,
alongside other sweat-soaked first-timers with trail-maps,
cameras, sloshing water bottles. They shushed their children
and we all looked down on wheeling gulls, slope-browed
eiders, gannets gliding inches above the rumpled-shirt
surface of the waves. A little girl in red shorts
clambered up a boulder, flapped her arms, cried
out, I'm flying! and had to be gathered in mid-
leap by her father. On those cliffs, sky-spill
and sea-tilt blending blues, wings everywhere,
even the yellow fans of clicking grasshoppers,
I felt this familiar, spreading sense of seepage,
as if I were bleeding but unable to locate
the source, the day all leaking away
before filling up; no way to fix it,
to yoke me to the moment, no container
sound enough to prevent sky
from sliding down lopsided
like broken blinds, waves
from scattering into feathers,
or birds from whirling
into children who slip
over an edge,
unnoticed and
uncatch-
able.