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The Listeners Leni Zumas Tin House Books, May 2012 $15.95 352 pages Perhaps a lesser-known corollary to the Chekhov’s gun principle is this:  if there is an octopus on the cover of the book, it had better shoot ink by novel’s end.  In Leni Zumas’ The Listeners, however, it’s not ink that’s spilled, but blood,…

Shades of pink at Café Gray’s bar where I met the omnipresent Nigel Collett for drinks. Nigel fits comfortably into my lit, lit life. For one thing, we’re contemporaries. As much as I love writing “this younger writer,” as I did last blog, it’s reassuring to bump into others on this same journey who actually remember…

The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on…

Equal Danger Leonardo Sciascia New York Review of Books Classics, October 2003 152 pages $14.00 [Editor’s note: Every few months, Akshay Ahuja will dig into the archives for an old book that has either fallen out of favor or never received the recognition it deserves. Feel free to add suggestions for future rediscoveries in the…

Last year my husband, Adam Stumacher, and I moved to Guatemala so we could work on our novels. That was the plan. Our first week there, he worked diligently, often using Freedom on his computer so he could stay focused on his daily word count goal. Me? Not so much. Here’s the thing: I get…

The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Enid Shomer Simon and Schuster, August 2012 464 pages $26.00 In 1873, newlyweds Henry and Clover Adams hired a dahabiyah to sail down the Nile, past the ancient temples and ruins from Philae to Abu Simbel. As Natalie Dykstra writes in her biography of Clover Adams (reviewed for the…

And then you say you will / And then you won’t . . . “Undecided” (1938) by Sid Robin & Charlie Shavers About itineraries, here’s Robin Hemley’s: He was going to stopover in Hong Kong, and then he wasn’t, and then he was, wasn’t, and finally did because a typhoon swirled in Manila and his…

Haven’t heard about the Conversations and Connections Conference yet? I got the inside scoop on this writer’s conference, which will be held on September 22, 2012 in Philadelphia, from Dave Housley and Susan Muaddi-Darraj, co-founders of the conference and editors at Barrelhouse. If you are interested in speed dating [with editors], Stewart O’Nan, and connecting…