A tragic accident sets in motion a cycle of violence and retribution in John Burnham Schwartz’s riveting novel Reservation Road. Two haunted men and their families are engulfed by the emotions surrounding an unexpected and horrendous death. Ethan, a respected professor of literature at a small New England college, is wracked by an obsession with revenge that threatens to tear his family apart. Dwight, a man at once fleeing his crime and hoping to get caught, wrestles with overwhelming guilt and his sense of obligation to his son. As these two men’s lives unravel, Reservation Road moves to its startling conclusion. This is an astonishing tale of love and loss, rage and redemption, that is as suspenseful as it is emotionally compelling.

“Haunting. . . . A powerful and affecting novel.”–The New York Times

About the Author: John Burnham Schwartz is the author of the novels Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days and Reservation Road, which is being made into a motion picture based on his screenplay, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, and Jennifer Connelly. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages and his writing has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and Vogue. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn, New York.

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Inspired by her relationship with murderer Robert Weeks, Rose Marie Kinder spun real life into elegant fiction. A noted story collection author, Kinder’s debut novel about the life of a genteel serial killer Arthur Blume unraveling. The author and I chatted about Arthur Blume - a man who loved his Victorian furniture and meditations on the animal kingdom - a quiet man who had committed monstrous crimes. We discussed the great serial killers, Othello, heavy-handed Gothic’s and how to avoid their narrative pitfalls, the consideration of time, compartmentalizing it, Faulkner as an influence, the predatory-prey relationship between mother and offspring in the animal kingdom, Arthur’s mother who we first meet as a wild creature - part Medusa, very much Medea, and his relationships with two key characters: Nada, the 70ish aspiring poet who is a sweet, maternal figure, and Grace, his pill-popping colleague and lover.

Click here to listen to our chat and enter the mind of a serial killer and the author who created him.

We’re off next week (your host will be shamelessly promoting her forthcoming memoir at NAIBA), however, join us on Oct. 21 as we chat with John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road

An Absolute Gentleman is fiction, the memoir of self-confessed serial killer Arthur Blume, in prison for killing twelve, perhaps seventeen, women. He wishes to correct the media’s distorted view of him and his mother. He juxtaposes memories of his childhood in the hands of that loving, but psychotically cruel woman, with his more recent history as aging writer and itinerant instructor, and with observations about the nature of the world—no place for any creature. Offhandedly, he slips in horrors, some of which he endured, and others, perpetrated. While he’s a nice guy, champion of the insulted and outcast, he is also a monster who will, most certainly, strike.

Arthur Blume took shape from my association with murderer Robert Weeks in the mid-eighties, from lengthy research, including consultations with police officers, detectives, and psychologists. The Afterword to An Absolute Gentleman answers some anticipated questions about the inspiration for this novel.

About the Author: Rose Marie Kinder, who writes under the pen name of R.M. Kinder, won the 2005 University of Michigan prize for a collection of short stories titled A Near-Perfect Gift. Another of her short story collections, Sweet Angel Band, was awarded the Willa Cather Award in 1991. R.M. Kinder’s prose has also appeared in Other Voices, Short Stories, and The New York Times. She holds an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and currently resides in Warrensburg, Missouri.

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Read an excerpt from An Absolute Gentleman after the jump!
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From the author of Family History (“Poised, absorbing . . . a bona fide page turner”—The New York Times Book Review) and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion, a spellbinding novel about art, fame, ambition, and family that explores a provocative question: Is it possible for a mother to be true to herself and true to her children at the same time?

Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to fourteen. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of museums around the world as well as the pages of New York City tabloids that labeled the work pornographic, cast a long and inescapable shadow over its subject. At eighteen, when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of small-town Maine, where she married and had a child, a daughter whom she has tried to shield from the central facts of her early life and her damaging role as her mother’s muse.

Fourteen years later, Ruth Dunne is dying, and Clara is summoned to her bedside. Despite her anguish and ambivalence about confronting a family life she has repressed and denied for more than a decade, Clara returns. She finds Ruth surrounded, even in her illness, by worshipful interns, protective assistants, and her conniving art dealer.

Once again, she is Clara Dunne, the object of curiosity, the girl in the photos. Except this time she has her own daughter to think about—a girl who at nine looks strikingly like the girl in Ruth’s photos—and she yearns to protect her, to insulate her from the exposure that will inevitably result when her two worlds, New York and Maine, collide.

As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro’s novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. A brilliant examination of motherhood—a novel that pits artistic inspiration against maternal obligation and asks whether the two can ever be fully reconciled—Black & White explores the limits and duties of family loyalties, and even of love. Gripping, haunting, psychologically complex, this is Shapiro at her captivating best.

About the Author: Dani Shapiro’s most recent book’s include Black & White (Knopf, 2007), Family History (Knopf, 2003) and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Bookforum, Oprah, Ploughshares, among others, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. Her books have been translated into seven languages. She is a visiting writer at Wesleyan University and a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. She lives with her husband and young son in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Read Chapter 1
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Small Spiral Notebook interviews Dani Shapiro

In her acclaimed debut novel, Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld created a touchstone with her pitch-perfect portrayal of adolescence. Her prose is as intensely realistic and compelling as ever in The Man of My Dreams, a disarmingly candid and sympathetic novel about the collision of a young woman’s fantasies of family and love with the challenges and realities of adult life.

Hannah Gavener is fourteen in the summer of 1991. In the magazines she reads, celebrities plan elaborate weddings; in Hannah’s own life, her parents’ marriage is crumbling. And somewhere in between these two extremes–just maybe–lie the answers to love’s most bewildering questions. But over the next decade and a half, as she moves from Philadelphia to Boston to Albuquerque, Hannah finds that the questions become more rather than less complicated: At what point can you no longer blame your adult failures on your messed-up childhood? Is settling for someone who’s not your soul mate an act of maturity or an admission of defeat? And if you move to another state for a guy who might not love you back, are you being plucky–or just pathetic?

None of the relationships in Hannah’s life are without complications. There’s her father, whose stubbornness Hannah realizes she’s unfortunately inherited; her gorgeous cousin, Fig, whose misbehavior alternately intrigues and irritates Hannah; Henry, whom Hannah first falls for in college, while he’s dating Fig; and the boyfriends who love her more or less than she deserves, who adore her or break her heart. By the time she’s in her late twenties, Hannah has finally figured out what she wants most–but she doesn’t yet know whether she’ll find the courage to go after it.

About the Author: Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the bestselling novels Prep and The Man of My Dreams, which are being translated into twenty-five languages. Prep also was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of 2005 by The New York Times, nominated for the UK’s Orange Prize, and optioned by Paramount Pictures. Curtis won the Seventeen magazine fiction writing contest in 1992, at age sixteen, and since then her writing has appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Salon, Glamour, and on public radio’s This American Life. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was the 2002 - 2003 writer in residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. She lives in Philadelphia.

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After spending ten years in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson’s house—killing two people in the process—Sam Pulsifer is determined to start a new life.

But when the houses of Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Edith Wharton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (and the replica log cabin of Thoreau’s Walden Pond) start going up in smoke, Sam’s past comes back to haunt him.

Who is committing literary arson in Sam’s name, and why? Author Brock Clarke gets to the bottom of this literary mystery—and has readers guessing until the very end—in his brilliant and moving satirical novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

About the Author: Brock Clarke is the author of The Ordinary White Boy, What We Won’t Do, and Carrying the Torch. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, OneStory, The Believer, the Georgia Review, and The Southern Review; in the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies; and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.

Essential Links
Bookslut.com Interview
L.A. Times Review
Office Website for the Book
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Brock Clarke’s blog

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The Reincarnationist is equal parts modern-day thriller, historical fiction and love story. With one foot in present-day Rome and New York and another in Rome some 1,600 years ago, my story is about two worlds on a collision course.

Photojournalist Josh Ryder survives a terrorist’s bomb, only to be haunted by near hallucinatory memories of a violent past life in Rome descend on Josh at will, pulling him to an ancient trail of secrets and present-day murders.

The questions of who we are cannot be asked without first asking who we were. And I’ve tried to answer that using my own research into reincarnation theory - as well as the tenets and writings of those who have studied and believed in reincarnation over thousands of years.

About the Author: International bestselling author M.J. Rose is the author of eight previous novels, including Lip Service and three titles in the Butterfield Institute series: The Halo Effect, The Delilah Complex and The Venus Fix. She’s also the coauthor of two nonfiction books on marketing. Rose is on the board of directors of the International Thriller Writers and lives in Connecticut.

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London, 1711. As the rich, young offspring of the city’s most fashionable families þll their days with masquerade balls and clandestine court-ships, Arabella Fermor and Robert, Lord Petre, lead the pursuit of pleasure. Beautiful and vain, Arabella is a clever coquette with a large circle of beaus. Lord Petre, seventh Baron of Ingatestone, is a man-about-town with his choice of mistresses. Drawn together by an overpowering attraction, the two begin an illicit affair.
Alexander Pope, sickly and nearly penniless, is peripheral by birth, yet his uncommon wit and ambition gain him unlikely entrance into high society. Once there, privy to every nuance and drama, he is a ruthless observer. He longs for the success that will cement his place in society; all he needs is one poem grand enough to make his reputation.

As the forbidden passion between Arabella and Lord Petre deepens, an intrigue of a darker nature threatens to overtake them. Fortunes change and reputations — even lives — are imperiled. In the aftermath, Pope discovers the idea for a daring poem that will catapult him to fame and fortune.

About the Author: An Australian native, Sophie Gee graduated from the University of Sydney with a first class honors degree in English and History in 1995. She then received her PhD in English from Harvard in 2002, and began immediately as an assistant professor in the Department of English at Princeton. She has since been named the “John E. Annan Bicentennial Preceptor,” in recognition of outstanding research and teaching as a member of the junior faculty.

Essential Links
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Curledup.com Review
Read an excerpt from The Scandal of the Season
Interview with Sophie Gee

Sophie Gee will be chatting with us live at 6:30PM EST/3:30PST

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