It's baseball season! If you can't get to the ballpark, at least you can pick up this contemporary romance set in the world of baseball.
Alex Winters is the devil, at least according to Maggie Jameson. Maggie has spent her life dreaming and preparing for the day when she'll take over as the CEO of the New York Saints baseball team. Unbeknownst to Maggie, her father has decided to sell the team to Alex. Maggie grudgingly agrees to help Alex through the ownership transition and in the process, they fall in love.
It’s no secret that the landscape of publishing is rapidly evolving. With thousands of new books joining the marketplace every day, millions of bloggers vying for readers, and the ease of sharing words, how do writers connect with readers? In an environment where readers are either pigeonholed into selecting from an infinitesimal best-seller list, or bombarded with choice, how can one writer rise to the surface and capture the readers who will come back looking for more of the same?
Tiny Cooper is a character in David Levithan's book Will Grayson, Will Grayson. He is flamboyant and emotional, and he spends that novel writing and then performing a musical of his life. Hold Me Closer is that musical, written in theater script format.
Cheryl Glickman is a 40-something manager of Open Palm, a women’s self-defense studio that has morphed into a supplier of self-defense as exercise videos. Cheryl’s home life is turned upside-down when she, seemingly overnight, takes in as a housemate a 20-year-old daughter of her Open Palm bosses, Clee. Cheryl and Clee do not get along. In fact, their bouts of passive-aggressive violence, subterfuge and insults are nothing short of operatic.
In 1884, Arthur Conan Doyle published a fictionalized account of what happened to a mysteriously abandoned ship, the Mary Celeste. Following in his footsteps, Valerie Martin imagines what life may have been like for the family of Captain Briggs. Briggs, his wife and daughter, along with the entire crew disappeared from the Mary Celeste in 1872. She was found drifting, undamaged, but crewless.
Sometimes you feel yourself spiraling downward, and you don't know what to do next. Or maybe next has involved seeking comfort all too frequently in your chocolate stash. I hear you. Recommended to me by a good friend, I picked up this book.
Maisie Dobbs' first case as a private detective is not what she expected nor wanted. But in the spring of 1929 in her new London office her first client walks through her door and asks for her assistance with a love triangle. Maisie, who was born into a working class family, is aware of her status and sex and is trying to make her mark in the detective world and so takes on the case as professionally as she possibly can.
In one of my favorite books about writing, The Memoir Project, Marion Roach Smith says “[writing] is serious work. And it cannot be reduced to generic writing exercises and prefabricated prompts.” While reading, I was immediately offended, for I lead a prompt-based creative writing group. And my writers, as I like to call the members, produce wonderful work.
While it certainly contains the titular activities, this book isn't nearly as sensationalistic as its title might imply. More than anything, Sex & Violence is a fantastically-voiced, layered character study. The description "layered" applies to narrator-protagonist Evan, the other characters in the book, and their relationships; and it applies to the meanings of, manifestations of, and connections between sex and violence that Evan gradually comes to grasp in unstated, embodied ways.
