Martha Southgate is a very aware and gifted writer with a background in writing that includes journalism as well as novels. With an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College she has herself been a teacher. Her novel The Fall of Rome won the American Library Association’s Alex Award.
A review of Another Way to Dance by Martha Southgate
It is believability indeed that makes Another Way to Dance such a special book. The style is natural and, if not always grammatical, consistent with the language of an exceptionally bright teenager. I can’t think of any reader who would…
A review of Russian Silhouettes by Genna Sosonko
In Russian Silhouettes (and later in The Reliable Past: New in Chess, 2003) he describes a game, a sphere of human creativity, that amid nightmarish and fantastic oppression attracted the genius, the dreamer, the damaged and otherworldly, and the angry…
A review of Upstaged by Aaron Paul Lazar
The interaction of the student performers and stagehands is brilliantly described and there is shrewd observation in the treatment of the sexual predator Armand Lugio, the witchy stage-mother Agnes Bigelow and the gay youngster Nelson Santos who explores the world…
Interview with Delia Falconer
In this pithy and candid interview, the author of The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers talks about the pressures that go along with a dramatically successful debut, the gestation time involved in writing literary fiction, the despair within the publishing industry, her main character, Captain Frederick Benteen, about using real history as the subject of fiction, her writing style, the way in which The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is also an Australian story, the importance of being ribald, and lots more.
A review of The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers by Delia Falconer
This is a lovely, spare but beautifully written book full of contrast. It is a very feminine, reflective, and quiet book about a man whose life was masculine, noisy, and full of action. It takes a single point of history…
A review of Write It Right by Dawn Josephson and Lauren Hidden
Despite the didacticism inherent in the subject matter, this book doesn’t prescribe how you should edit your work. Instead, it leads you down the path of self-discovery, so you can uncover your own weaknesses, and work, as an increasingly experienced…
A review of About a Girl by Tony Nesca
Through the narrator’s reflections we accumulate an unusually exact understanding of his aims and character. His life is not pretty and he may waver and wobble but he is grounded in honesty. He waves illusion away and sees life with…
A review of The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr
Carr is a fine writer and his pastiche of Conan Doyle’s prose perfectly captures the voice of Holmes and Watson. One might say (entering into the spirit of things a little) that the particular singularities of Carr’s mimesis are most…
A review of My Arthritic Heart by Liz Hall Downs
But this is just the beginning of what most of us don’t want to hear. A good part of this collection is about the poet’s struggle with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that when coupled with poverty and inhumanity is a hard…