Tag Archives: reading

Stillpoint/Prometheus Authors at Arisia!

New England fans of speculative fiction, take note! Stillpoint/Prometheus authors Heather Albano and Kenneth Schneyer are appearing this weekend at Boston’s Arisia 2017 conference, “New England’s largest, most diverse sci-fi and fantasy convention”!

Keeping Time Kickstarter - Heather AlbanoHeather Albano, game writer and author of the recently published time-travel adventure Timepiece, will speak on three panels:

She’ll also be signing copies of Timepiece at the Dealer Room table of Broad Universe, an organization dedicated to promoting, encouraging, honoring, and celebrating women writers and editors in science fiction, fantasy, horror and other speculative genres. Go say hi, and pick up your signed copy!

CHECK OUT HEATHER’S SCHEDULE ON HER BLOG

 

Kenneth Schneyer, award-winning short writer and author of the collection The Law & the Heart, will be appearing no less than five times:

CHECK OUT HEATHER’S SCHEDULE ON HER BLOG

Check them both out—though you’ll have to choose this evening! In addition to being wonderful writers, they’re both wonderful speakers about their craft.

 

About Heather Albano and Kenneth Schneyer

Timepiece - now availableHeather Albano is a storyteller, history geek, and lover of both time-travel tropes and re-imaginings of older stories. You most likely know her from her game design work (which most recently included A Study In Steampunk, produced by Choice of Games, and contributions to TimeWatch and The Dracula Dossier, both published by Pelgrane Press)—but she writes non-interactive fiction too. Like the Keeping Time trilogy. Read more at heatheralbano.com

Stillpoint/Prometheus: Law and the Heart coverKenneth Schneyer forgot he wanted to be a writer for 25 years, until he was ambushed by a gang of plot bunnies in 2006. Since then, he has sold stories to many science fiction and fantasy magazines and anthologies, several of which can be found on Amazon. His novella “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” has been nominated for a 2014 Nebula Award and a Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short science fiction.

Ken attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at UCSD in 2009, and joined the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop in 2010. Mostly he writes science fiction and fantasy, but he’s been known to write crime stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes his fancy.
He was a theater major at Wesleyan and briefly a semiprofessional actor before attending law school at the University of Michigan. He teaches legal studies and humanities at Johnson & Wales University, and has published numerous articles on the constitutive rhetoric of legal texts.
Born in Detroit, he now lives in Rhode Island with one singer, one dancer, one actor, and something striped and fanged that he sometimes glimpses out of the corner of his eye. He’s interested in astronomy, history, politics, philosophy, presidential trivia, brain science, and practically everything else. He cooks better than most people you know.

About Arisia

ArisiaArisia 2017 is a volunteer-run convention that covers all aspects of science fiction and fantasy literature and media.

It is taking place this weekend, January 13–16, at Boston’s Westin Boston Waterfront.

MORE INFORMATION

Signing: Risuko Author David Kudler to Read at Book Passage

david-kudler-headshot-cropped-off-center-_EHP85271-150x15011.jpgOn Monday, October 3, author/publisher David Kudler will read from his new teen novel Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale at the Left Coast Writers monthly salonIn addition to sharing sections of the book, he will discuss the process of publishing his first novel. The salon takes place at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Copies of the book will available, and he will be signing as well. Continue reading Signing: Risuko Author David Kudler to Read at Book Passage

Lynn Bornstein to read Laura English at Larkspur Library

Laura English by Lynn Arias BornsteinHere’s your chance to hear Stillpoint author Lynn Bornstein read from her critically acclaimed debut book, Laura English!

On September 20, Bornstein will read from her novel of romance, glamour, and intrigue, which Readers’ Favorite called “a must read,” at the Larkspur Public Library. Afterward, she will stay to answer questions and sign books. Continue reading Lynn Bornstein to read Laura English at Larkspur Library

What Is Reading?

A Tale of Two Cities, Four Ways by Linda Gardner (grandgrrl/flickr.com)

Whether I’m flipping paper pages, scanning through an ebook, listening to an audiobook or reading into a mic, reading a book is reading a book. Or is it?

As much as anyone, I live through words. I’ve been a professional actor. I’ve edited books. I’ve written them. I’ve narrated audiobooks. I’ve designed ebooks. It would be reasonable to say my life centers around words — that my life centers around reading.

But what does that mean?

My earliest memories have to do with books: being read to by my parents, reading along to picture books narrated on scratchy 45s, hiding under my covers with a flashlight and The Hobbit or Encyclopedia Brown. Many of my dearest adult memories are book related: reading the same copy of Ender’s Game side-by-side with my soon-to-be-wife; reading Where the Wild Things Are to my first-born and realizing that I remembered every word, having not seen the book in twenty-five years; reading all seven of the Harry Potter books (and many others) aloud to each of my daughters.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what exactly reading is — Continue reading What Is Reading?

Love in a Time of Cholera: Why you shouldn’t reread your favorite books

I’m sure you’ve had this experience: you go back to reread a book that you absolutely loved when you first read it, and… Meh.

A week ago I would have told you that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera was one of the great reading experiences of my life: a deeply romantic exploration of enduring human love. I finished rereading it for the first time in a bit over twenty years (ouch), and… Meh.

The problem for me was that, where I had been swept along by the sheer romantic ache of the central story–a couple separated in their youth who finally find love in extreme old age–on this read I found their story annoying.

The character of the woman, Fermina Daza, was still a compelling one: she’s a complex, intense, interesting woman, and you can see two men losing their hearts to her. But her husband, Dr. Urbino, only rises above being a pompous prig in her memory, and Florentino Arizo, the young man who first captured her heart, is portrayed as both an obsessive stalker and a philandering hypocrite. The recitals of the endless affairs in which he indulges while waiting for his One True Love become, after a while, numbing and–eventually–distasteful. By the time he takes his final pre-Fermina lover, a school girl trusted to his guardianship, Florentino’s right to claim any kind of moral high ground for his enduring passion for the lost love of his youth is long gone. No Joycean “scrupulous meanness” here–the two men are painted in absolute, merciless detail, and boy, they don’t come across well. At which point, I have a hard time caring about the story.

My other problem was the laxness of the narrative. I love Garcia Marquez’s audacity when it comes to narrative. In Nobody Talks to the Colonel, he writes from the point of view of an entire Caribbean nation, shifting in mid-sentence from a prostitute to a bishop to a group of school children. In the amazing Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he tells you what happened in the first few pages and then spends the rest of the book dissecting the cause. In Love in a Time of Cholera, he utilizes the same quasi-journalistic approach over and over–telling us what happened and then telling us at great length how or why it happened. After a while, I found myself wanting him just to get on with it. Also, threads drop. The opening sequence involves the aged Dr. Urbino attending to the body of a friend who has committed suicide. At the friend’s house, he discovers a letter addressed to him that contains news that shakes him to the core; it is this sense of disquiet that leads, we are given to understand, to his falling accidentally to his death. What was in the letter? We never find out. It’s never mentioned again. It doesn’t feel like a literary evocation of the unknowable. It feels like a lazy cheat.

I think I’m going back to reading young adult fantasies.

Love in a Time of Cholera: Why you shouldn't reread your favorite books

I’m sure you’ve had this experience: you go back to reread a book that you absolutely loved when you first read it, and… Meh.

A week ago I would have told you that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera was one of the great reading experiences of my life: a deeply romantic exploration of enduring human love. I finished rereading it for the first time in a bit over twenty years (ouch), and… Meh.

The problem for me was that, where I had been swept along by the sheer romantic ache of the central story–a couple separated in their youth who finally find love in extreme old age–on this read I found their story annoying.

The character of the woman, Fermina Daza, was still a compelling one: she’s a complex, intense, interesting woman, and you can see two men losing their hearts to her. But her husband, Dr. Urbino, only rises above being a pompous prig in her memory, and Florentino Arizo, the young man who first captured her heart, is portrayed as both an obsessive stalker and a philandering hypocrite. The recitals of the endless affairs in which he indulges while waiting for his One True Love become, after a while, numbing and–eventually–distasteful. By the time he takes his final pre-Fermina lover, a school girl trusted to his guardianship, Florentino’s right to claim any kind of moral high ground for his enduring passion for the lost love of his youth is long gone. No Joycean “scrupulous meanness” here–the two men are painted in absolute, merciless detail, and boy, they don’t come across well. At which point, I have a hard time caring about the story.

My other problem was the laxness of the narrative. I love Garcia Marquez’s audacity when it comes to narrative. In Nobody Talks to the Colonel, he writes from the point of view of an entire Caribbean nation, shifting in mid-sentence from a prostitute to a bishop to a group of school children. In the amazing Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he tells you what happened in the first few pages and then spends the rest of the book dissecting the cause. In Love in a Time of Cholera, he utilizes the same quasi-journalistic approach over and over–telling us what happened and then telling us at great length how or why it happened. After a while, I found myself wanting him just to get on with it. Also, threads drop. The opening sequence involves the aged Dr. Urbino attending to the body of a friend who has committed suicide. At the friend’s house, he discovers a letter addressed to him that contains news that shakes him to the core; it is this sense of disquiet that leads, we are given to understand, to his falling accidentally to his death. What was in the letter? We never find out. It’s never mentioned again. It doesn’t feel like a literary evocation of the unknowable. It feels like a lazy cheat.

I think I’m going back to reading young adult fantasies.