An Interview with The Arsonist’s Chloe Hooper

Chloe Hooper’s Explosive new True Crime book, The Arsonist,is founded upon the seemingly straight-forward question – what kind of person would deliberately start a fire? Told in Hooper’s inimitable, lyrical style, she seeks to answer such a question through the lens of the Black Saturday tragedy, a firestorm that devastated swathes of rural Victoria in 2009. In this in-depth interview, she talks about the book, her themes, characters, and processes, and much more.

A review of Where the Lost Things Go By Anne Casey

Where the Lost Things Go is a powerful book. The immediate accessibility of the poetry does not diminish the impact of the work, which moves through key moments in life, tracking grief, loss, ageing, parenting, and what it means to take a stance in a world where the need for compassion as a political gesture–deep-seated humanism–is greater than it has ever been.

A review of Reykjavík by Tom Maremaa

What Reykjavík does get absolutely right is the Russian regime’s century-long predilection for poisoning its critics, dissidents and traitors. Arkadi Vaksberg’s meticulous history The Poison Laboratory: From Lenin to Putin (Gallimard) details the state’s expertise at home and abroad in silencing its enemies, all the way from Lenin’s order in 1921 to create a poison laboratory.

A review of The Stendhal Summer by Laurie Levy

The Stendhal Summer takes the risk of being uncomprehended, yet pays us the compliment of presuming we have lived a little. Thus, mentions of Jean-Louis Barrault, Yves Montand, and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André (1981), to name just a few examples, either mean something to us or they do not. When they do, they conjure a world of meaning, or an image captured in time, or the tone of a conversation. Such resonances are strange and powerful.

A review of Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents

Jeff Herman’s iconic Guide to Book Publishers, Editors and Literary Agents is a well-respected industry standard, much like Writers Market. Now in its 28th Edition, the Guide enjoys continued acclaim and popularity—and there is a good reason for this. Flatly stated, it’s just the one of the best, if not the best, of many (many!) writers’ guides out there.