Offering readers the best in quality literature
by Joseph Olshan
To write a successful novel, I have to dip my pen into autobiography; and if I don’t, I lose my way. This makes it difficult when I am writing fiction about a crime. It means weaving a tight narrative comprised of an act of violence and the mystery surrounding that act of violence with something substantial that I’ve lived through.
by Richard Rashke
Author of The Whistleblower’s Dilemma, Escape from Sobibor, and
The Killing of Karen Silkwood
He provides us with some insight into the writing of the amazing book Useful Enemies.
Useful Enemies began as an in-depth look at the criminal case against Ivan (John) Demjanjuk, a former World War II guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland. American Nazi hunters found him living and working in Cleveland, Ohio. The Justice Department charged him with lying on his visa application and sought to have him deported. [Read more…]
Whenever an author publishes a book, perhaps the best form of publicity is a profile written in a national magazine that is devoured by avid readers. I read one of these profiles the other day and was struck by the fact that the journalist who wrote the piece positioned the writer to come off like some kind of off-beat genius. [Read more…]
A good friend of mine (who started her career more or less at the same time) reminded me the other day how it used to be when a writer of literary fiction published a book. All the reviews would appear within a couple of weeks, and there were quite a few of them at that. I remember, for example, whenever I had a book out in the UK, it would get reviewed the day of publication, and often that same day, in several different places at once. Now, except for the most prominent of writers, the climate has changed.
At Delphinium, we often ponder the difference between fiction and non-fiction narrative, and it seems more and more that these two literary distinctions are being blurred. Even though the memoir genre is still thriving, it’s now generally understood that memoirs are embellished, truth laced with invention; and yet it’s also true that many memoirs could not be successfully published as novels. With a memoir, it’s the very idea—or in some cases, the illusion—of confession that makes a book saleable. The premise is that a memoir will attract a reader who can believe they have gone through an experience similar to the one they read about. For this reason, memoirists—and their publishers—may be reluctant to divulge whatever is actually invented. [Read more…]
by Bina Shah
Author of A Season for Martyrs and
the forthcoming dystopian novel Before She Sleeps
The premise of my dystopian novel set in South West Asia, Before She Sleeps, is that war and disease have decimated the female population of the region. A new authoritarian regime emerges that seeks to do two things: restore the female population to normal numbers, and keep tight control on a society made unstable by the sudden imbalance of the male-to-female ratio. They do this using a combination of technology and terror, tracking women and their fertility, assigning brides to multiple men, and punishing anyone who rebels against the new order. [Read more…]