Welcome, new subscribers!

Thanks to The 7am Novelist for recommending my newsletter

It’s high time I extended a warm welcome to all the new subscribers, most of whom found my newsletter/blog through the recommendation of Michelle Hoover’s amazing seven-week/50 day series of free writing webinars and podcasts, The 7am Novelist.

More than a hundred writers have signed on in the last month, and I’m so glad to have you here. In short, readers and writers are my favorite people. Be sure to let me know if you have a Substack (or other) newsletter or blog so I can return the favor.

I haven’t been posting quite as regularly as I’d like to, thanks to family and work obligations, but I’m hoping to remedy that as soon as possible. I’ve been reading slowly but steadily and need to catch up on writing my reviews. Over the next month you should see reviews for the books pictured above.

I’ve recently read We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama, Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko, The Missing Word by Concita De Gregorio, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, all of which I highly recommend.

My very long TBR list includes Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver’s reworking of David Copperfield that addresses poverty and opioid addiction in the Appalachians), Horse by Geraldine Brooks, and The Stranding by Kate Sawyer (which for some mysterious reason has yet to be published in the United States).

My wife has been exhorting me to read The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish, so I’ll have to attempt that 560-page tome from 2017. Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark, Gilded Mountain by Kate Manning, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, and Foster by Claire Keegan have also caught my eye.

And then there are the no-longer-hot off the presses books that I want/need to read: the short story collections The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw and Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel Moniz, the memoir Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, and the novels I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart, The Colony by Audrey Magee, and The Family Chao (an updating of The Brothers Karamazov set among a Chinese-American family in Wisconsin) by Lan Samantha Chang.

As the old saw goes, so many books, so little time!

I will continue to feature guest essays by authors. Next up is Hannah Sward, author of the new memoir Strip (Tortoise Books).

If you are interested in contributing a guest piece or know an author who might be, please let me know. I like to help get the word out about new books, especially from debut authors and independent publishers.