Life is filled with excitement, and high on the list is a debut novel, especially one that arrives with this kind of praise from Tim O'Brien: "The Benedictines is a taut, vivid, spellbinding, and gracefully written novel.
Authors
excerpts from new and forthcoming titles, announcements about book tours, readings, and relevant links
01/20/2015
It's nice to see we aren't the only ones excited about our new author, Nick Ripatrazone.
12/11/2014
Catherine Gammon, author of Sorrow, has been quite busy writing a number of astute and discerning book reviews for several online literary journals. Her careful and honest critique provides insight and thought-provoking discourse.
Street Talk
frank discussion by guest authors, editors, agents, and publishers who share insights into the literary life
Catherine Zobal Dent
06/03/2015
Braddock Avenue Books: Let’s start at the end. The final story in your collection, “Unfinished Stories of Girls,” is also the title of the entire collection. Why did you decide to use this title for the book and why did you decide to put that story last?
Zobal Dent: That last story is drawn from a novel I’m working on in which a daughter of Italian-American immigrants struggles with various accounts she’s been given of her family’s movement through time and space. This story, a narrative thread of the novel, draws from a folktale called Gatti sotto il mare, or “cats under the sea.” It’s this disturbing tale of good sister versus bad sister, and in the end, of course, the “good girl” wins and the “bad girl” loses.
Craig Bernier
03/04/2015
Braddock Avenue Books: Although the pervading idea of Your Life Idyllic is the setting of Detroit, the collection depicts vastly different characters from many walks of life; yet each one has his or her own voice and personal idiosyncrasies. They feel authentic and are very accessible to us as readers. What was your goal in compiling these individual stories with Detroit as their common thread?
Michael Kimball
Saving the World and Yourself on 25 cents a Day: An Interview with Michael Kimball by Salvatore Pane
01/28/2015
How do you write critically about a game that, for all intents and purposes, boils down to steering a spaceship on a flat, fixed line and shooting two-dimensional bugs that resemble undulating amoebas?
Bookmarks
general cultural commentary and ruminations about noteworthy books by new, established, and classic writers
Creative expression isn't for the faint of heart--especially during uneasy times, when creative workers have an important decision to make about whether to engage with or ignore contemporary circumstances. One artist who unflinchingly chooses engagement is comics journalist Joe Sacco.
Thanks to a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh creative writing program and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Braddock Avenue Books co-founder Robert Peluso had the chance to talk live with novelist Ian McEwan about novellas, Nabokov, the idea of the book, and living the literary life.
Joe Schuster, author of the novel The Might Have Been, recently invited me to participate in The Next Big Thing – a kind of “chain blog” among writers designed to share news about recent or forthcoming work. Thanks, Joe, for tagging me for The Next Big Thing!
