women writers

A book tour with coffee and pajamas

/ lynnkanter / Leave a comment

Virtual Book Tour Banner

You may have read stories in which authors recount the travails of their book tours: the exhausting travel, the cold motel rooms, the bookstore audiences composed of one compassionate bookseller and a person waiting out a rainstorm.

Not me. Next week I’ll be doing a virtual book tour – visiting a range of very cool blogs and discussing everything from the challenges of naming characters to the thoughts and inspirations behind specific lines in Her Own Vietnam.

From Monday through Friday, every day I’ll visit a new blog – two blogs on some days. And you’re invited to each one.

Check out the tour schedule here: http://grabthelapels.weebly.com/home/lynn-kanters-virtual-book-tour.

Best of all, you can pour yourself some coffee and join the tour in your pajamas. And if only one person shows up, I’ll never know.

 

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #14 Zelda Lockhart

/ lynnkanter / Leave a comment

Only 10 more days until my novel Her Own Vietnam is published, but 16 more fabulous women novelists to explore. Today: Zelda Lockhart.

Powerful and harrowing

You might say that Zelda Lockhart is a friend of mine. Bu since we haven’t seen each other since 2002, does that make us merely acquaintances? Friend, acquaintance, whatever – she’s a gifted writer.

Zelda’s first novel, Fifth Born, is a powerful and harrowing story of a young girl’s search for belonging as she tries to separate herself from her abusive family and their almost inescapable history. The novel has one of the most striking covers of any book on my shelves.

Fifth Born

Cold Running Creek is historical fiction based in the time surrounding the Civil War. It avoids the usual characters that populate many novels set in that era, and instead focuses on the struggles of Native American and African American women as they try to survive  during the waning days of slavery and the violent theft of Indian land. Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle builds on Zelda’s debut novel, moving its protagonist Odessa from Mississippi and Missouri to New York City amidst the upheaval of social movements in the 1970s and 80s.

A quiet grief

In the Spring 2014 edition of the beautiful literary journal Referential Magazine, Zelda has a moving short story called The Empty Nest. In it, the narrator describes her daughter’s approaching adulthood as “the slow departure from my intentions.” If any phrase better encapsulates the quiet grief of parents as their children do what they must do and grow apart, I haven’t encountered it.

A busy woman

In addition to writing, Zelda Lockhart teaches, leads workshops, does public speaking, and is the director and founder of LaVenson Press Studios in North Carolina. There women writers can find their voices, sharpen their skills, and create a community. Zelda is making a place for herself and her sisters, in the heart of the written word.

Zelda Lockhart

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #13 Caroline Leavitt

/ lynnkanter / 7 Comments

As I count down to the publication date of Her Own Vietnam, I’m counting up to 30 fantastic novelists you should know.

Empty-handed but not for long

I met Caroline Leavitt once, for 30 seconds. She was about to do a reading at a book festival; I was in the audience.

I planned to pick up her book after the reading, so when we met I was a little embarrassed to be empty-handed. I did buy the book afterwards, and I’m glad I did, because it turned out to be my favorite of her novels: Is This Tomorrow?

Is This Tomorrow?

In the novel, Ava Lark and her young son Lewis move into a lovely Boston suburb, hoping for a new start. Instead, they are snubbed and ostracized.

The year is 1956, and everything about Ava is wrong for her new community. She’s divorced, she’s Jewish, she works for a living – and she’s beautiful, which the local husbands have noticed. When a child in the neighborhood disappears, a child who is friends with Ava’s son and has spent time at her house even when Lewis was gone, the town’s suspicion turns sinister.

Leavitt does a powerful job of creating the atmosphere of casual anti-Semitism and rabid anti-Communism that permeates the leafy suburb. Anyone with a different style, anyone with different values, anyone Jewish is immediately suspected of being a Communist.

Ava Lark is a compelling character: lively, compassionate, bold but vulnerable. She’s the kind of outsider you long to befriend, but Leavitt makes you wonder: if you lived in that town, with its harshly enforced code of conformity, would you dare to reach out to someone like Ava?

 She’s a little busy

Caroline Leavitt keeps herself busy. She writes essays, screenplays and book reviews. She teaches writing. She maintains a lively Facebook presence and writes a wonderful blog, on which she interviews all kinds of authors. And she’s a New York Times bestselling author who has written ten novels, with another coming out in 2015, called Cruel Beautiful World.

I know where I’m going to be when that new book of hers is released. On the couch, reading and falling deeply into the fraught, luminous world created by Caroline Leavitt.

Caroline Leavitt

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #12 Lily King

/ lynnkanter / Leave a comment

As I count down the days to the launch of my novel Her Own Vietnam, I’m writing about wonderful women novelists.

Gorgeous writing and powerful emotional pull, if you like that sort of thing

I’ve now read three of Lily King’s four novels, and I still can’t say exactly what it is that stamps a novel as a work of Lily King. The books are so different, set in different times and places with characters who share little in common, united only by the gorgeous writing and the powerful emotional pull of each novel.

The Pleasing Hour is about a young American woman who goes to Paris to work as an au pair and escape a tragedy in her past, only to find that the past is more alive in Europe than anywhere, and that tragedy shadows us all.

In The English Teacher, a high school English teacher with a teenaged son marries a man with teenagers of his own, and her world begins to unravel. Once you read this book, you’ll never think of Tess of the D’Ubervilles the same way again.

Euphoria

Her latest book, Euphoria, is about three anthropologists in the 1930s, studying and living among tribes in Papua New Guinea. The three scientists – an American woman who has written a shocking and best-selling book about the sex lives of a tribe, her Australian husband and an English man they know only slightly – plunge into a love triangle that’s a vortex of passion, intellectual zeal, rivalry, ambition, and perhaps a dash of madness.

The novel immediately creates an atmosphere of peril and strangeness. By the time I read the first five sentences, I was hooked: I had to know what had happened and what would happen next, even though I suspected it would be harrowing. And it was – harrowing, and uplifting and most of all, fascinating. The details about how anthropologists conduct their work and their lives were astounding.

A growing sense of dread

As I read, I was gripped by a growing sense of dread, both that something awful was about to happen and that the book was coming to an end. You know that feeling of grief you have when you finish a beloved book? Well, authors feel that too, as Lily King wrote here.

On my bookshelf, Lily King’s Euphoria stands next to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. It seems fitting.

Lily King

Lily King

30 Novelists You Should Know – #11 Dara Horn

/ lynnkanter / Leave a comment

Dara Horn writes exuberant, brainy novels about slices of Jewish life that might surprise you. For example, her 2009 novel All Other Nights is about a Jewish woman who served as a spy during the Civil War – for the Confederacy.

Race, class and the pull of conflicting loyalties

On one level of this multi-layered novel, the book is a thriller, with a driving plot about spies conducting their high-stakes activities on opposite sides of a war that split families as well as the nation. At another level, the novel is an exploration of race, class and the pull of conflicting loyalties, and a brilliant depiction of a society poised for extinction. Yet another layer examines a marriage that starts out as an act of espionage and evolves into something else.

Horn’s descriptions of the daily challenges and compromises that faced Jewish families in the South during the 19th century were eye-opening. I was particularly struck by a detail that has stayed with me in the years since I read the book: On Sunday mornings, all the Jewish families in Richmond, Virginia strolled the streets, finally able to breathe freely and relax because for a few hours all the Christian families – who normally judged them and worse – were in church.

 A thriller stuffed with ideas

Her latest novel, A Guide for the Perplexed, is a roller-coaster ride that hurtles you from the present day to the 19th century to the 12th century, all in search of answers to compelling questions about memory, history, identity and loyalty.

It sounds heady, but there is a gripping plot to propel you through the story. An American software genius has created an app that records every moment of users’ lives. She is abducted in Egypt, and her sister, always jealous of her success, must decide if and how to save her. And why did the Egyptians kidnap the genius? Not for the reasons you might expect.

All of this is tied up, in ways both wildly imaginative and practical, with the discovery of a rare manuscript more than 100 years ago, and a book written by the 12th century rabbi and philosopher Maimonides. The novel is stuffed with ideas and incidents, and you can feel the author’s glee as she knits together strands of history and philosophy.

Giddy with intellectual delight

Dara Horn’s four novels aren’t beach reads. But if you enjoy fiction that’s packed with historical detail and giddy with intellectual delight, Horn is a writer for you.

Dara Horn

Dara Horn