The leaves that fell in March |
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Alice Hoffman once said ... |
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Books may well be the only true magic.
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Laura Katz Olson |
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Gold Medalist
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Congratulations to Laura Katz Olson. Her book, Ethically Challenged, recently won Axiom Award's gold medal in the Business Ethics category.
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Maya Angelou once said ... |
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
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Virginia Woolf once said ... |
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I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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Ann S. Epstein |
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Learn History Through Fiction
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“Antisemitism in our town began when Romania became part of Hungary. We were marched from the ghetto through the cemetery. I stopped at my father’s grave to tell him we were being deported. At the railway station, our former neighbors cheered.” Ann S. Epstein's Learn History Through Fiction posts continue to focus on Holocaust survivors and what they endured before and after liberation.
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Cathy Shields |
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I had to overcome my shame of being...
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"Your 12-year-old daughter, Alia, is indignant. She pounds on the table and says, 'Mommy, that lady can’t talk to you like that. Why didn’t you tell her?'" The Today Show's website recently published Cathy Shields's "I had to overcome my shame of being a mom to a child with a disability."
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Mark E. Leib |
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A new dramatic play depicts...
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“There were really two forces working on me to write the play. The first one you might call spiritual. I'm Jewish, and I do a lot of study of Jewish texts. And as I have done that, I've realized that social justice is supposed to be on at the upper-most of our minds as we go about our daily business.” Mark E. Leib recently spoke to Jessica Meszaros of WUSF about his forthcoming play, When the Righteous Triumph.
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Melanie Brooks |
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A Sweet Way to Beat Rejection
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"I started baking and distributing these cookies in earnest about five years ago, right around the same time that my former agent started approaching publishers and shopping my memoir – a book about family secrets, illness, grief, and learning to be authentic. A book that has asked more of me than anything else I’ve ever done." Read Melanie Brooks's "A Sweet Way to Beat Rejection," recently published by The Writer.
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Shonda Rhimes once said ... |
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You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them.
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Raphael Pond has a degree in Professional Writing. He has written three fiction novels and many pieces of poetry. He likes when stories are dark yet beautiful, wise yet wild, and haunting yet healing.
His novel Bell Tower will be published in February 2025.
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Mike Maggio's Woman in the Abbey will be published in February 2025.
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Jessica Bell
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"My poems seem simple, but they're actually not once you 'get' the deeper meaning in them. I'm challenging the meaning of life in every piece," Jessica Bell explains to Deborah Kalb in their recent interview. Anne Louise O'Connell also interviewed Jessica recently, and you can watch that interview here.
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John McCaffrey
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When Peter McDermott asked what advice he'd provide for writers, John McCaffrey answered "Read. Read what you like, and now and again read what you don’t like, as long as it connects you to culture, art or any subject you want to learn more about." Read McDermott's interview with John in The Irish Echo.
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Kate Brandt
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"There’s a poem by a Polish poet that reads something like this: Now that you’re gone,/a glass of wine is just a glass of wine again. That is the kind of magic I wanted to capture in Hope for the Worst, which is really about passion and the way it lifts us higher than we’ve ever been, but can also drop us into free fall from a great height." Learn more about Kate Brandt and her recently released novel Hope for the Worst in Roz Morris's latest "Nail Your Novel" interview.
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Sue Dobson
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"I remember South Africa in the late 60s and throughout the 70s where apartheid was alive and well, and there were separate entrances in businesses for Black people and white people, you had different park benches for white people and Black people, different beaches, different facilities..." Learn more about Sue Dobson and her fascinating life in her recent interview with the BBC Sounds' Julie Skentelbery.
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Harriet Prescott Spofford once said ... |
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A gush of bird-song, a patter of dew / A cloud, and a rainbow’s warning / Suddenly sunshine and perfect blue / An April day in the morning.
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Check out our top-rated all-time bestsellers & other recommendations: |
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by Cynthia Newberry Martin |
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Love Like This
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Incredible escapes, fantastic sleight-of-hand-Houdini's most challenging performances are dramatically portrayed in Houdini's Fabulous Magic. Walter Gibson, co-author, was in close touch with Harry Houdini for a number of years before his death and worked with the master magician in preparing material for the book. It is with the aid of Houdini's own scrapbooks and notes that this book was written.
The spectacular highlights of Houdini's career are described--and explained--here. Included are the famous escapes: escapes from a padlocked milk can filled with water; from locked jail cells; from a water-filled Chinese torture cell while suspended upside down; from packing cases weighted underwater. Again, in this book, Houdini walks through a brick wall, vanishes a 10,000-pound elephant and is buried alive. Once more, Houdini and his wife Bessie mysteriously exchange places in a locked trunk-in three seconds!
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by Anne Pinkerton |
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Were You Close? a sister’s quest to know the brother she lost​ |
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A successful radiologist and elite athlete, Dr. Dave tended to the blistered feet of strangers on race courses and gave many of his trophies away. He was known for his generosity and camaraderie with family, friends, colleagues, and adventure racing teammates, the latter of whom usually accompanied him on excursions. But he embarked on his final pursuit alone—an attempt to summit all 54 of the 14ers in Colorado—and made an unknowable error, falling 200 feet to his death.
Were You Close? challenges the cultural notion that the bereaved should simply “get over” their losses, illustrating that integrating these experiences can actually help a mourner not just heal, but move forward with clarified purpose.
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by Kate Brandt |
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Hope for the Worst
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Ellie is twenty-four years old, stuck in a dead-end job, and questioning the meaning of life when she meets the much older Calvin. It’s as if her deepest wish has been granted. Star of the Buddhist teaching circuit in New York’s Greenwich Village, his wisdom is exactly what she’s been seeking.
When she becomes the center of his attention, it’s almost pure bliss… until it becomes clear that Calvin expects sex as part of the bargain. At first reluctant, Ellie gradually falls ever more deeply in love, until Calvin is all she can think about.
Hope for the Worst asks how far we will go for love, and what happens when we reach our limit.
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by Emilie-Noelle Provost |
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The River is Everywhere
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Sixteen-year-old honors student Ernest Benoit has always followed the rules. But when his best friend drowns on Cape Cod, he begins to question his family’s devout Catholicism, and he disrupts an Advent prayer service at his Catholic high school. Now his life will never be the same.
A blizzard leaves Ernest stranded in a depressed western Massachusetts mill town after he boards a bus to Manhattan to avoid being sent to a Jesuit boarding school. It’s the beginning of a months-long journey that leads him to rescue a young girl from an icy river, into the bed of a lonely middle-aged widow, and to the woodland cabin of Roland Laliberté, a recluse who can shoot with the accuracy of a sniper.
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