Some artists work with a brush; others with a pen, and still others with their voices, bodies, or a musical instrument. Trudie Strobel’s instrument is a slender needle, and she wields it with fierce and incredible power.
The Book Of V (Henry Holt, $27.99) is nothing if not ambitious—three main characters, three storylines and three wildly divergent time periods—and yet novelist Anna Solomon manages to weave all three together with an effortlessness that belies the profound nature of her fictional probing.
What constitutes a good mother? A good father? A good daughter? A normal life? These are questions posed by R.L. Maizes in her compelling debut novel Other People’s Pets.
Dani Alpert is one funny lady and like many comics, she uses her life as a prime source for her material. After falling for a divorced dad of two, she struggles to find a way to embrace the offspring she claims never to have wanted.
Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough talks to novelist Michelle Cameron about her new novel “Beyond the Ghetto Gates”.
Debut novelist Carmit Delman talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about how food becomes both marker and symbol for the haves and the have nots.
Newberry award-winning author Gail Carson Levine talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about bringing significant episodes in Jewish history to life again.
Like any novelist, I did what my characters and my story led me to. The place, Siena, which I’d been to 10 years before I started writing the book, drew me in because of the way it exists in both past and present. Being there blurs the boundaries of time. Siena’s people live their centuries-old traditions with profound seriousness, and a deep emotional connection. And in Siena a mystery resides about what happened during the plague of 1348, an unsolved mystery that I uncovered as I began to learn more about Siena’s history. So my story took me there, and then.
At the time of publication, Peony was hailed as an insightful study of the decline of a small Jewish community in Kaifeng, China, in the mid-1800s. But I was struck by her reliance on ethnic stereotypes.
