Michael J. McCann's Blog: Open Investigations, page 10

The Latest Buzz about Go Set a Watchman

In the uncertainty of today's publishing industry, more news is always good news in that it keeps an author's name and book in the forefront. So as we await the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, the literary world is abuzz with news that the book may have been "rediscovered" as early as 2011.

Go Set a Watchman is a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960 and remains one of the most widely-read and influential books of all times. The new book revisits the characters twenty years later. The manuscript in fact was written before To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee's publisher recommended at the time that Watchman be re-written from the young girl's point of view and set in her childhood.

Go Set a Watchman is due for release on July 14, 2015. Two million copies of the book will be printed.

For the New York Times article relating to discrepancies in the date the manuscript was located, please see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/boo....

Book Review of A Sporting Murder by Lesley A. Diehl

 
Once again The Overnight Bestseller is pleased to participate in a Tribute Books Blog Tour. Today we welcome Lesley A. Diehl, author of the cozy mystery A Sporting Murder.


  A Sporting Murder Book Summary


It's smooth sailing for Eve Appel and her friend Madeleine, owners of Second to None Consignment Shop in rural Florida's Sabal Bay, land of swamps, cowboys, and lots and lots of 'gators. Eve and her detective boyfriend Alex have joined Madeleine and her new beau David Wilson for a pleasure cruise on his boat. But cloudy, dangerous waters lie ahead. A near fatal encounter with Blake Reed, David's supremely nasty neighbor, is soon followed by a shooting death on the dividing line between David and Blake's land. Both men run sport-hunting reserves, but Blake imports "exotics" from Africa and promotes gator killing, while David stays within the law, pointing clients toward the abundant quail and turkey as well as the wild pigs that ravage the landscape. Nevertheless, when a mutual client is killed, it is David who is arrested and charged with murder.

Blake's nastiness is only exceeded by that of his wife, Elvira, who forces Eve and Madeleine out of their shop, intending to replace it with a consignment shop of her own. It seems that bad luck looms over them all, even Eve's brawny and hard-to-resist Miccosukee Indian friend Sammy, whose nephew has disappeared. As the case against David grows stronger and his friends' misfortunes multiply, Eve and her strange and diverse group of friends, including her ex, a mobster, her grandma, and Sammy's extended family, band together to take on the bad guys. But the waters are getting muddier and more troubled, and Eve and Madeleine may end up inundated in every sense of the word.

Price/Formats: $4.95 ebook, $13.95 paperback
Genre: Cozy Murder Mystery
Pages: 250
Publisher: Camel Press
Release: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 9781603819398

Buy Links

Amazon
Barnes and Noble


Lesley A. Diehl's Bio



Lesley A. Diehl retired from her life as a professor of psychology and reclaimed her country roots by moving to a small cottage in the Butternut River Valley in upstate New York. In the winter she migrates to old Florida--cowboys, scrub palmetto, and open fields of grazing cattle, a place where spurs still jingle in the post office. Back north, she devotes her afternoons to writing and, when the sun sets, relaxing on the bank of her trout stream, sipping tea or a local microbrew.


 The Overnight Bestseller's Review of A Sporting Murder

This is the third in  Lesley A. Diehl's Eve Appel cozy mystery series, and she provides us with an entertaining mix of characters, an engaging setting, and two unsolved murders that baffle the reader until their resolution at the end of the novel.

Her intrepid amateur sleuth Eve Appel is reminiscent of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum with her lively sense of humor, her unresolved love life, and her uncanny ability to get into--and out of--trouble.

At the same time, Diehl touches upon serious themes in the novel, including the mistreatment of foreign workers, prejudice towards Aboriginal peoples, and the illicit trade in endangered species for "trophy" collections.

This novel will appeal to lovers of cozy mysteries everywhere, who will also want to check out Diehl's other series.


Related Sites

Lesley A. Diehl's Web Site:
http://www.lesleyadiehl.com/

Lesley A. Diehl's Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/lesley.diehl.1?fref=ts

Lesley A. Diehl's Twitter:
https://twitter.com/LesleyDiehl
 
Lesley A. Diehl's Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3414925.Lesley_A_Diehl

Lesley A. Diehl's Blog:
http://lesleyadiehl.com/blog/

A Sporting Murder Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25506068-a-sporting-murder

Tribute Books Blog Tours Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tribute-Books-Blog-Tours/242431245775186

A Sporting Murder blog tour site:
http://asportingmurder.blogspot.com


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In Memoriam: Cynthia G. Hurd

Library Journal reports that Cynthia G. Hurd, manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library branch at Charleston County Public Library, was one of the nine victims of the Charleston shootings on June 17. She died before her 55th birthday on June 21.

In addition to the funds established to help the families of the victims, the Hurd family has also established a fund in her memory to support the library branches where she worked for 31 years. A scholarship has also been established in her memory.

Please see http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/06/....

Tips from the Workplace

There's an informative article in Writer's Digest on how to translate your workplace skills to your writing. The tips to successful writing include scheduling your writing time, creating short-term and long-term goals, committing to your writing, and remaining motivated and accountable.

Sound like a tall order? Actually the list is commonsensical in outlining how to approach writing as a professional.

For the full text of the article,please see http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-b....

Book Review of Jerome Charyn's Bitter Bronx

The Overnight Bestseller is pleased to be participating in the Tribute Books Blog Tour for Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn.


Book Summary


Brooklyn is dead. Long live the Bronx! In Bitter Bronx, Jerome Charyn returns to his roots and leads the literary renaissance of an oft-overlooked borough in this surprising new collection.


In Bitter Bronx, one of our most gifted and original novelists depicts a world before and after modern urban renewal destroyed the gritty sanctity of a land made famous by Ruth, Gehrig, and Joltin' Joe.

Bitter Bronx is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with Jerome Charyn's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a "land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders."

In "Lorelei," a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in "Archy and Mehitabel" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in "Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories—"Silk & Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla"—Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, New York Times).

Throughout it all looms the "master builder" Robert Moses, a man who believed he could "save" the Bronx by building a highway through it, dynamiting whole neighborhoods in the process. Bitter Bronx stands as both a fictional eulogy for the people and places paved over by Moses' expressway and an affirmation of Charyn's "brilliant imagination" (Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune).

 Price/Formats: $12.59 ebook,
$24.95 hardcover
Genre: Short Stories
Pages: 320
Publisher: Liveright
Release: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 9780871404893
Buy Links:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

Author Bio  

Jerome Charyn's stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, Epoch, Narrative, Ellery Queen, and other magazines. His most recent novel is I Am Abraham. He lived for many years in Paris and currently resides in Manhattan.



The Overnight Bestseller's Review of Bitter Bronx
Having previously reviewed There is both nostalgia and comedy in Bitter Bronx, and it is written in Charyn's lyrical prose that speaks of eyes bleeding “the viscous color of tears” and of Jackson Pollock's paintings “with their lashing rhythm, as if colors could cry out," to give only two examples of his lyricism.

The thirteen stories in this book are populated by an exotic blend of characters who surprise us with their eccentricities at the same time as they touch us with their unrequited love, losses, and thwarted dreams. There is Lorelei, who lives with her father in a Bronx apartment, never able to move beyond its sad confines. There is the story of Adonis, which is particularly poignant in its depiction of the lonely mob widows who are never able to feel loved once again. There are three stories of the Silks, reminiscent of Salinger's fictional and dysfunctional families. In “The Major Leaguer,” we are reminded of Charyn's abiding interest in the players of a lost era of greatness who emerged from the Bronx such as Joe DiMaggio, the subject of Charyn's book, Joe Dimaggio: The Long Vigil. And, in the background, as in Under the Eye of God, outside forces conspire to destroy the author's beloved Bronx through development and land grabs. The shadow of Robert Moses is felt in each of these stories, a man who created a highway that irrevocably divided the Bronx into north and south.   
Bitter Bronx will appeal to fans of Charyn's Isaac Sidel series, short story lovers in general, and those readers seeking a refreshing book with unconventional prose and colorful characters brought lovingly to life.

Related Sites

Author Website:
 jeromecharyn.com

Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bronx-Stories/173247736020293?fref=ts

New York Times Review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/books/review/bitter-bronx-and-just-kids-from-the-bronx.html?_r=0

Tribute Books Blog Tour:  
http://bitterbronxblogtour.blogspot.ca/

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Rite of Passage

There is an interesting op-ed piece by David Brooks in The New York Times entitled "How Adulthood Happens." Based on current research on young adults, Brooks describes a rite of passage between the ages of 22 and 30 in which modern youth struggle towards adulthood.

Here are some of the most noteworthy observations:

Students who attend college regard their studies as secondary to their social relationships. Yet once they graduate, they find themselves on their own without the benefits of a social network.

Upon graduating, many lack the basic skills to find a job and, having been told to follow their dreams, they are unprepared for the realities of the current work environment. The majority (53%) are unemployed, underemployed, or working in jobs paying less than $30,000 annually.

At least one-third of students have moved back home (double the 1960s statistics). American parents pay an average of $38,000 in assistance to their young adult children.

The majority are not in a hurry to reach adulthood and regard the adult world with great pessimism.

Brooks does, however, end the article on a note of optimism:

Yet here is the good news. By age 30, the vast majority are through it. The sheer hardness of the 'Odyssey Years' teaches people to hustle. The trials and errors of the decade carve contours onto their hearts, so they learn what they love and what they don’t. They develop their own internal criteria to make their own decisions. They fear what other people think less because they learn that other people are not thinking about them; they are busy thinking about themselves.

Finally, they learn to say no. After a youth dazzled by possibilities and the fear of missing out, they discover that committing to the few things you love is a sort of liberation. They piece together their mosaic.

One thing we can tell young grads and their parents is that this is normal. This phase is a thing. It’s not a sentence to a life of video games, loneliness and hangovers. It’s a rite of passage that makes people strong.

For the full text of the op-ed piece, please see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/opi....

The Newest Casualty of Technology?

CBC News (Saskatoon) reports that JP Morgan has eliminated voice mail for employees who don't deal directly with clients and that many other companies are re-evaluating the use of voice mail.

And according to an MIT professor, it's time to get rid of it completely because it's a waste of time. His reasoning is that most people don't bother with voice mail. They simply check to see who's called and return the call or text the individual. He states that

Voice mail is sort of like a dodo bird or a dinosaur. It fit an ecological niche at one time, but now it's rapidly on the verge of extinction, and I'm afraid in economic terms, rightfully so...

The overwhelming majority of people, particularly under the age of 35, have really come to recognize voice mail is not worth their time...

In my mind, it's much less of a time-waster listening to voice mail to find out why people are calling you, than to call them or text them back without knowing exactly what they wanted in the first place. But then I'm over 35, which may make me resistant to change.

For the full text of the article, please see http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskato....

Jimmy Patterson: A New Book Imprint

James Patterson, author of the Alex Cross series and other crime thrillers, is branching out. He announced at BookExpo America recently that he will be establishing a new imprint called "Jimmy Patterson" for teens and young adults that will publish twelve books per year. At least six of them will be written by him while the remaining six will be acquired from other authors.

Patterson has already created eight series of books aimed at children and young adults. (For his middle school series, please see http://www.jamespatterson.com/books_m....)

American Library Association Annual Conference

The ALA Annual Conference is scheduled for June 25-30, 2015, in San Francisco.
Guest speakers this year include corporate litigator Roberta Kaplan, social and political activist Gloria Steinem, and well-known journalists, actors, authors, and social commentators.

According to its website:

ALA Annual Conference programs, updates, conversations, and other events cover key issues such as innovation and transformation, ebook lending and usability, digital content, community engagement, leadership, the impact and potential of new technologies, books and awards, development, teaching and learning, and best practices on a range of library -related concerns....

To learn more about the event and to register, please see http://alaac15.ala.org/.

For Your Listening Pleasure

Library Journal has an interesting article on the increasing number of audio books being produced: 7,237 books in 2011; 16,309 in 2012; and 35,713 in 2013, the latest year for which annual figures are available.

Although fiction continues to dominate, about 30-40% of audio books sold are non-fiction. There is a growing interest in this category of audio books for educational purposes. Celebrity memoirs read by their authors are also popular, and self-help books and comedy are becoming more in demand.

For the full text of the article, please see http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/201...