Author name: Booksquare

We could paraphrase and pull out favorite thoughts, but sometimes it’s better to just let you read for yourselves. A Sense of Vocation

We know you’re not counting on us to remind you about Banned Books Week — which is good because somehow it’s Thursday and we just took our first glance at a calendar this week (which is not to say we haven’t seen calendars on the preceding days…we just happened to spend our hours poking and prodding at calendar theory). If you’re a reader of any note, you already celebrate this week in the style to which you’ve grown accustomed. Probably, if you’re like us, by doing something like reading while eating. We mostly don’t understand the concept of banning books

It’s rather embarrassing to admit, but we had no idea that Rona Jaffe wrote a novel. Our exposure to her was through celebrity profiles. It’s always cool to learn something new about someone you have put into a slot. Suddenly, they don’t fit and you get to change all sorts of things around in your mind. Learning that Jaffe gives back to her community is also cool — authors don’t get the patronage they deserve (we are advocating for a system where up-and-coming artists are kept, in a manner of speaking, freeing them to do the art thing without worries

So the weather wasn’t perfect today, but it was nice. Not too hot, not too cool. The type of day where sitting outside is a true pleasure. Great lunch, crazy hummingbird dances, and the daily paper. And then we hit the sentence: It seems that under every mystery writer’s skin beats the heart of a novelist who yearns to transcend the genre. But it couldn’t stop there, oh no. There was another sentence: Writing about Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, who spin tales of crime in New York and Boston, respectively, New York Times critic Caryn James describes them as

Have we mentioned how important it is to understand this business of writing? Good, then we won’t waste anybody’s time with a short lecture on paying attention to the art and the business. You’re already doing that. At MoorishGirl, author Terri Brown-Davidson celebrates the release of her first, well, first published, novel (Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight) by looking at the journey she took to get there: This book has been issued as a “first novel.” What this means, actually, is that it’s my first novel published. Actually, I wrote five full-length novels before this one. All were my own

We’ve read several articles on the lawsuit filed against the U.S. Treasury Department on behalf of American publishers. What we have learned is that the law appears to be, in the words of a former boss, intentionally vague. Which is great if you want everyone to agree and pass it, but not so great when nobody can figure out what it means. Without getting too political, we want to note that countries under economic sanctions from the United States are often those countries where speech is particularly restricted. We would also like to note that storytelling — art — is