The leaves that fell in May |
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Ocean Vuong once said ... |
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I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free.
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Edwidge Danticat once said ... |
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Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously....Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.
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Gleah Powers |
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Lit Angels Reading
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On June 10th at 5 pm PT, Gleah Powers will be a part of the Lit Angels reading taking place at the Village Well Books & Coffee as they celebrate their new online literary journal.
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Kwan Kew Lai |
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June Events
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Kwan Kew Lai's promotion of The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly will continue with a virtual event hosted by the Wellesley Asia Alumnae Alliance on June 25th at 4 pm ET.
Her oil painting, The Wild Nocturnal Cat, is also a part of the Wild Spring Awakening exhibit, which will have an opening reception on June 10th at 6:30 pm ET and will remain open at the Belmont Gallery of Art until July 13th.
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Jhumpa Lahiri once said ... |
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That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
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Anne Pinkerton |
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THE COMPASS
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"When I went to David's alarmingly quiet house a week later, I grabbed this compass—not for its inherent value, but for its connection to him as an adventure racer." Anne Pinkerton writes about finding her late brother's compass, his love of climbing, and his tragic passing in "THE COMPASS," recently published in The Keepthings.
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Roz Morris |
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Diary of an Audiobook...
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"Once you’ve made a decision that feels right, you realise what the wrong decision would have done." In a recent Nail Your Novel post, Roz Morris describes her experiences with having an audiobook created for her novel, Ever Rest, and provides useful tips for authors hoping to have their works recorded as well.
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Assotto Saint once said ... |
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Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.
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Jill Amber Chafin is a personal finance writer for the LendingTree. Her short-form prose has been honored as a Finalist for the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, Honorable Mention in the New Millennium Writing Awards, and Third Place winner in the anthology America’s Next Author. Other publications include The Personal Story Publishing Project, Motherfigure, Life Savvy, and Motley Fool, as well as on her blog. She received a certificate in Creative Writing from Whitireia Polytechnic in New Zealand and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from University of North Carolina. Jill lives in North Carolina with her husband and two kids.
Her novel, Shaken, will be published in March 2025.
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Anne Pinkerton |
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[Pinkerton] "also does a strong job examining the emotional toll his death took on her, especially in trying to understand the swings she would have between grief and anger when people asked her how she was doing — or if they didn’t ask." Read Steve Pfarrer's recent write-up about Anne Pinkerton's Were You Close? A Sister’s Quest to Know the Brother She Lost for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
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L. M. Montgomery once said ... |
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I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.
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Check out our top-rated all-time bestsellers & other recommendations: |
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by Martha Engber |
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Bliss Road: A memoir about living a lie and coming to terms with the truth
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Martha Engber lives a charmed life in the suburbs with a husband and two kids where everything is fine, fine, fine until suddenly she’s… completely broken. She’s so used to lying to others and herself that she has no idea who she really is or how she feels about anything. What happened? Why is her life smooth driving one minute and totaled the next?
In this sometimes funny, often devastating memoir, Martha describes the arduous journey toward discovering the invisible roadblock that ran her life off course: her psychological distress is the result of being the neurotypical daughter of a dad with undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder, a condition that affects over 75 million people worldwide.
Martha uses personal anecdotes and research about the emergence of ASD as a diagnosis to explain the psychological, emotional and social challenges she faced as a child, then as an adult and parent. Along the way, she shows the sometimes harrowing, but eminently rewarding, route others can follow to chase down the source of their family angst and so reach a more blissful future.
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by Carolyn R. Russell |
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Q & A
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Something very creepy is going on inside the Eco Trooper Club's gloomy warehouse.
Quinn Bard has been forced to join a club at her high school in the new town she hates. Her first meeting leaves her questioning her sanity.
Despite her family’s joyfully chaotic home life, things get worse. Quinn is shocked to discover a sinister conspiracy at the heart of the club’s mission, and there’s something very bizarre about the group’s adult leader, Nadine Stent.
Enlisting the help of her older sister Arista, Quinn learns that the club’s student members are unhappy hostages. What mysterious power does Stent hold over them? And what kind of twisted scheme has she dragged everyone into?
In a race against time, the two sisters and new friends work to expose Stent’s evil plot. And together they have adventures funnier, stranger and more thrilling than Quinn ever imagined possible.
If Quinn and her allies succeed, it’ll be a new beginning for her. If they fail, innocent people will go to jail, and families will be destroyed. Including Quinn’s.
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by Rusty Allen |
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Ella's War
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It’s 1943 on the American home front, and Ella’s pent-up, common-law husband finally decides to leave their farm and enlist. Ella must either depart their seafaring town in coastal Delaware to pursue other dreams inland or try to save their farm. Their grade-school son, Reese, won’t budge, and Ella sees that farmers have a patriotic duty to stay on the land.
The bay and ocean waters before them have been preyed upon by German U-boats, and their village has become a refuge for survivors. When an officer from a surrendered German submarine is sent to her as part of POW farm labor, can Ella embrace the help in order to survive? And what happens when Dieter becomes more than a hand to her, amidst prying eyes and under her beloved but conflicted son’s watch? How will she choose when her explosive husband returns from Europe wounded from infantry duty against the Germans?
In Ella’s War, we travel a journey amongst women and men whose lives are deeply altered by the circumstances of WWII. What heroic or questionable choices must they make to be true to themselves and come through the great conflict?
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by Sue Dobson |
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Burned: The Spy South Africa Never Caught
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From the snowy Soviet shooting range to the heat and dust of Africa, nothing is what it seems. And neither is Sue Dobson.
The image of South Africa in the 1980's as the golden paradise on the tip of the African continent conceals a brutal, racist Apartheid regime. Those who oppose it risk their lives. Beauty and brutality go hand in hand.
Sue Dobson, a young white South African woman lives a 'legend'—a life where she pretends to conform, moving easily through the echelons of the racist government in her work as a journalist, whilst concealing her espionage and military training in the Soviet Union, and her intelligence work for the banned African National Congress.
Matters come to a head when sinister forces try to derail the Namibian independence process and Sue's cover is blown during a difficult honey trap operation, bringing the Cold War to Africa, and leading to her desperate flight across Southern Africa with the Apartheid security police snapping at her heels.
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by Roz Morris |
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Ever Rest (now available as an audiobook)
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A lyrical, page-turning novel in the tradition of Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano, Ever Rest asks how we carry on after catastrophic loss. It will also strike a chord with fans of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones for its people bonded by an unforgettable time; fans of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, for music as a primal and romantic force; and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air for the deadly and irresistible wildernesses that surround our comfortable world.
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