Delphinium Books

Offering readers the best in quality literature

Does the End Always Justify the Means?

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 by Richard Rashke

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…]

Where Did The Women Go?

by Bina Shah
Author of A Season for Martyrs and
the forthcoming dystopian novel Before She Sleeps

Where Did The Women GoThe 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…]

Too Old to Write?!

by Steven Gaines
Bestselling author of Philistines at the Hedgerow and
now his memoir One of These Things First

Too Old to Write - A Blog Post by Steven Gaines

Last week, I was in a bookstore when I overheard three young men in their late-twenties making fun of the photo of Tom Wolfe on the back cover of his book Back to Blood. Sacrilege. Alas, the photo was a little silly. It was typical showman Wolfe, dressed in his trademark white suit and tie, a snazzy hat in hand. He’s 84 years old now, and he looked a bit more like a geezer in a costume instead of his usual debonair self. But who cares what Tom Wolfe looks like as long as it’s another great book? “I didn’t know he was still writing,” one of the guys sniffed. “He’s too old.” [Read more…]

Meeting Lee Krasner, the artist who inspired Modern Art

Modern Art - A Novel inspired by the life of Lee KrasnerWhen I got an assignment from a newspaper to interview Lee Krasner, the single thought in my head was that I was about to meet the widow of the great Jackson Pollock. Then I was warned that she would be “difficult,” which I took to mean “nasty”. But when I showed up at her house in East Hampton — the same small house she and Pollock had moved to in the 1940s — the woman I encountered there was anything but mean and hard. I had an overwhelming sense of a fiercely strong human being who had suffered a lot and come through: someone whose integrity, raw hunger for life, and blunt honesty were undimmed at age 72. I walked out of that first meeting on a high, thinking how fortunate Pollock was to have had her for his partner.

The last time I saw her, she invited me to look her up when I was in Manhattan, where she lived for much of the year. I never did that, out of a certain diffidence, a feeling that she must have more important people to see. So when I read, four years later, that she had died, I had a great sense of regret and loss. It was probably that which made me write Modern Art, a novel in which the character based on her, rather than the one based on Pollock, is very much the central figure.

Just as some people found Krasner too much of a tough broad to be likable, some readers didn’t care for Belle Prokoff in my book. But others saw her the way I had experienced Krasner: as a woman who had gained a certain hard-won wisdom, even a spiritual dimension, through the things she had suffered. That is exactly how I tried to present her.

Evelyn Toynton

Read more about the book – Modern Art (click here).