David Abrams's Blog, page 23

Friday Freebie: BIG Holiday Giveaway for Book Lovers

Congratulations to Jennifer Spiegel , Jane Rainey, and Kara Shamy, winners of last week’s Friday Freebie: Shelf Life of Happiness by Virginia Pye.

It’s time once again for a big clear-the-shelves blowout giveaway for the Christmas season. This year, I’ve got 20 books up for grabs, including a signed copy of my most recent novel, Brave Deeds. One lucky reader will win the whole kit and caboodle. The selection is rather eclectic and there should be something for just about every reader on the li...

Front Porch Books: November 2018 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.



Veterans Crisis Hotline
by Jon Chopan
(University of Massachusetts Press)

Jacket Copy:  The twelve...

Friday Freebie: Shelf Life of Happiness by Virginia Pye

Congratulations to Paul Weidknecht, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Catch, Release by Adrianne Harun.

This week’s giveaway is for Shelf Life of Happiness by Virginia Pye, a new short story collection now out from Press 53. Here’s what Jim Shepard, author of The World to Come, had to say about the book: “The characters in Virginia Pye’s Shelf Life of Happiness experience their lives as a tangle they urgently need to understand before it’s too late. These are deft and moving stories.” Thr...

When Books Go MIH (Missing in House): One Writer’s Library

Reader:  Lisa Romeo
Location:  Cedar Grove, NJ
Collection Size:  About 1,400
The one book I’d run back into a burning building to rescue:  A fill-in-yourself cookbook of my recipes—because it carries an inscription: “To my daughter, who turned out to be a terrific cook!” This surprised Mom because as she always admitted, she was not a good cook.
Favorite book from childhood:  Every single one that featured a horse. I’ll have to go with National Velvet .
Guilty pleasure...

America, You Know What to do Today

Government by the people is, in the end, an “affair of calculation,” a math problem: Who votes? How much does each vote count?
Jill Lepore, These Truths

(Not sure where to go to mark your ballot? The #BooktheVote website will help point you in the right direction.)

Sunday Sentence: Beautiful Country Burn Again by Ben Fountain

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.


Trump is good, so good that I half expect myself to be taken with him, to feel some glimmer of inclination toward the optimistic view, but the prevailing mood is dread, dread bordering on depression. Then the thought arrives fully formed, without effort, without joy or pleasure either, just this final, crude certainty like a hammer coming down: Donald Trump, plainly and simply, is full o...

Scenes From a Marriage: First Sight

It was a perfect late May morning: the air was crisp and cool as the other side of the pillow, clouds were a garden of white blooms, and birds were soundtracking the day with every ounce of air in their tiny lungs. Everywhere you looked in Jackson that day, the molecules of the air sang This day will be bright as a Colgate smile. The town felt ripe with possibility.

I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

*   *   *
I’d returned to my hometown after my sophomore year at the Univ...

Friday Freebie: Catch, Release by Adrianne Harun

Congratulations to Carl Scott, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Evergreen Tidings From the Baumgartners  by Gretchen Anthony.

This week’s giveaway is for Catch, Release , the new short-story collection by Adrianne Harun, author of A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain . Tim O’Brien had this to say about the new story collection: “Catch, Release is brilliant. Masterly brilliant. Tour de force brilliant―the crystalline prose, the characters who dive off the page and splash down into t...

Scary as Sheet: Ghost Stories For My Halloween

I live in a house that has good potential to breed ghosts. Built in 1920, the Craftsman home on a quiet tree-lined street in Butte, Montana, is a jigsaw puzzle of dark corners, cobwebbed crawlspaces, drafty closets, an obsolete coal chute, and narrow, twisting staircases that send one’s mind reeling with vertigo. In the basement lurks a big-bellied, multi-armed and asbestos-lined furnace that, when it gleams with inner fire, looks like a mechanical beast out of Jules Verne. And one hears thin...

My First Time: Jenn Stroud Rossmann

The First Time I Took Myself Seriously
The first time I went to a weeklong writers’ workshop I was still in grad school, before jobs and kids and various responsibilities kicked in. Since I was working toward my PhD in mechanical engineering, a week at Squaw Valley felt like a glorious moment of finding my people while visiting a land where words were the currency. I felt instantly at home. There’s a reason they call it the Squaw Valley “ Community of Writers .” But, because I was still in the s...