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Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
Children are the bonny little blossoms in the moldering garden of life.
Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart by Irmgard Keun -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
The Western world is located somewhere between the Statue of Liberty and the pillar of salt.
The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
Wine in, truth out.
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens -
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Blog postThe First Time I Told the Truth(Then Lied About It)
It was third grade. I don’t remember exactly what the assignment was, but I’ll never forget what I wrote for it. All these decades later it remains one of my first truths, first secrets, first confessions, and now it’s found its way into my new novel, Rules For Being Dead, which is filled with family secrets. (Whenever my friends think I share way too much on Facebook and other social media, little do they know it all started way ba -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
someone dragged the screaming boy
so deep into the woods he sounds like the trees now.
Homie by Danez Smith -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
A flock of starlings alights in a tree and chatters,
each a night of twinkling stars on its back, then
the hush and inexplicable lighting out en masse,
black whirlwind wheeling against blue, rippling
like bree -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
Lord, I wish I knew what ails me. If I was good
enough to be a dog I’d lose my bark.
Blood Ties & Brown Liquor by Sean Hill -
Blog postCongratulations to Carole Mertz, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Brave Deeds by David Abrams. Thanks to everyone who participated in the blog’s 10th Anniversary celebration!
This week’s contest is for The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai. You may remember hearing about this debut novel earlier at the blog; now I’m offering one lucky reader a chance to win a new hardback of the book The New York Times calls “[An] absorbing, stirring novel . . . that, in more than -
Blog postIt’s hard to write this week. And yet, I composed something: a raw draft of my thoughts after returning from a peaceful vigil at the Montana State Capitol on Sunday. This is a departure from the usual book conversation on this blog, but now, I think, is the time to take a break from the everyday comfort of our lives and to read something that makes us shift in our seat.
Breaching the Levee of Rage
An acquaintance, someone you don’t know personally, emails you an invitation to attend -
Blog postFresh Ink is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt
by Anonymous
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Ja -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s)* I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without** commentary.
If you met him, you would want to marry him. But you can’t, because I already did.
* * *
When I am packing a suitcase and I’ve crammed every last rectangle of folded clothing into the bag and added shoes, makeup, a just-in-case-it’s-cold cardigan and a panicked last-minute backup outfit or two, and I’m mashing everyt -
Blog postCongratulations to Teresa Sweeney, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Fobbit by David Abrams (That’s-a me!).
This week, I’m rounding out the Quivering Pen’s 10th Anniversary celebration with the other novel written during this blog’s lifespan: Brave Deeds, published in 2017 by Grove/Atlantic. Like Fobbit, Brave Deeds is set in Baghdad during the Iraq War, but it’s written in a much darker shade of ink. “[Brave Deeds] builds to an emotionally wrenching and tension-filled -
Blog postI don’t remember this day at all. It was my 10th birthday, a decade of life, so you’d think even my young brain would have marked it as a milestone: a day to remember.
But it wasn’t until my mother (seen here in mid-sing of “Happy Birthday” on May 27, 1973) sent me this photo three days ago that the memories came, not flooding back but seeping through a thick filter of age. The dining room table set, hand-crafted and painted by the Amish and purchased by my parents in Lancaster, Pen -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
At the bottom of everything, they were a family of silence—nothing but blind, black, coal-crumbling silence, his father never anchored or steady like his mother, his mother never sanguine or loose like his father.
The Wasp Eater by William Lychack -
Blog postCongratulations to Jane Rainey, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso.
As I mentioned earlier, this month marks the 10th Anniversary of The Quivering Pen. So, in honor of that decade of blogging, I’m offering up a signed copy of the book that was there at the very beginning: Fobbit, by yours truly. The blog proved to be a sort of child’s growth chart for the novel: I wrote about the process and content for several months b -
Blog postTen years ago this month, I found myself closing in on the end of the first draft of my first published novel. [cue montage of furrowed brow, fingers tapping keys, pencil gripped between teeth]
At the same time, I was feeling full of book chatter, bursting at the seams like I’d just overeaten at Heavy-Meats Burger Shack, but had no one with whom to converse. I was lonely for a book community. [cue montage of staring out the window, heavy sighs, the silvery track of a single tear ca -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
In war, as in farming, topography was fate.
The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson -
Blog postCongratulations to Columbus Moore, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky.
This week’s contest is for The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso. Perhaps you’ve been spending your quarantine life starting a little indoor garden, or maybe you just miss walking through a field of wildflowers, inhaling deeply with every other step. Either way, this richly-illustrated book about the flora in our lives should prove to be some inter -
Blog postCongratulations to Mike Cooper, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him by Tracy Borman.
This week’s contest is for The Memory Eaters by Elizabeth Kadetsky. If you haven’t already done so, you should check out Elizabeth’s recent guest posts here at the Pen: A Suitcase of Books and My First In-Depth Encounter with an Actual Author. Her new book has just been released and readers are already singing its praises: “The Memory Eaters functions a -
Blog postThe First Time My Life Imitated My Art
In 1889, Oscar Wilde claimed in an essay, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” I found this to be all too eerily true when I began researching and writing my novel The Distance from Four Points. I set the novel in a fictionalized version of my hometown, an impoverished former coal-mining town in the Appalachian foothills of southwestern Pennsylvania, and many details of my setting are drawn from life: blighted homes, neglected commerc -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
It grows dark quickly here,
and God no longer strolls
the gardens, calling out
the name of things with delight;
not even the damp clump
of a name.
“Transplant” in Nebrask -
Blog postIt’s the last day of National Poetry Month and I’ve been celebrating with poetry old (nineteenth-century poets) and new (Kwame Dawes, Eileen Myles, and M. L. Smoker to name a few). I’m also still thinking about the sometimes-tangled prosody of e. e. cummings whose Collected Poems dominated most of my 2019 in Verse. Today, I thought I’d say goodbye to April (you cruellest of months) and bid Hello to what the poet calls “blithesome May” in an excerpt from one of his earlier, more-accessible poems.
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Blog postFresh Ink is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming books—mainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)—I’ve received from publishers. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.
The Swallowed Man
by Edward Carey
(Riverhead)
Jacket Copy: The i -
Blog postSimply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.
In truth, I have been reprimanded by my own guilt / for how easily have I silenced the noises of a world entering the terror of a dictatorship, / how I have pretended that in time it will pass—how I have carried in me the hope in / a constitution that says in another five years, the terrible order will change— / a kind of jubilee and yet I know that I am ignoring the bones sca -
Blog postCongratulations to Paul Thomley, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles.
This week’s contest is for Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him by Tracy Borman. We hear a lot about the monarch’s wives, but what about the men surrounding Henry? As Booklist says of this week’s book: “[Borman’s] beautifully perceptive and dynamic reassessment of Henry VIII places emphasis, as the book’s subtitle indicates, not on the monarch’s infamous marriages but
Titles By David Abrams
Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest
Jul 14, 2015
by
Charles Yu,
Cory Doctorow,
Etgar Keret,
Robert Coover,
T. Coraghessan Boyle,
Juan Pablo Villalobos,
Aimee Bender,
Bryan Hurt - editor,
Tom Parks,
Audible Studios
$0.00 Free with Audible trial
