Authors On Tour

June - 2008

Xujun Eberlein - Apologies Forthcoming

Xujun Eberlein grew up in Chongqing, China, and moved to the United States in the summer of 1988. After receiving a Ph.D. from MIT in the spring of 1995, and winning an award for her dissertation, she joined a small but ambitious high tech company. On Thanksgiving 2003, she gave up tech for writing. She has since won many literary awards. Her stories and personal essays have been published in the United States, Canada, England, Kenya, and Hong Kong, in magazines such as AGNI, Walrus, PRISM International, StoryQuarterly, Stand and Kwani. Her debut story collection Apologies Forthcoming won the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award and will be published in May 2008. She hosts the literary and cultural blog Inside-out China.

Four decades ago China was embroiled in the Cultural Revolution, a period that turned the country on end and defined the generation of Chinese now coming to power.  This collection of stories opens a different  door to life during and after that time.

“A totally  illuminating collection of stories centered around China’s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, which, as we learn, continues even today. Xujun Eberlein lived in China during that turmoil and now makes her home in America. This, her first story collection, is both disturbing and enthralling.”

–  Livingston Press

 

 Christina Meldrum - Madapple

Christina Meldrum received her Bachelor of Arts in religious studies and political science from the University of Michigan. After working in grassroots development in Africa, she earned her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. She has worked for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, Switzerland, and as a litigator at the law firm of Shearman & Sterling. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family and is on the advisory board of Women of the World Investments. MADAPPLE is her first novel. 

At once a literary novel and a psychological thriller, a novel of suspense and an intellectual puzzle, MADAPPLE draws the reader into a world where reality seems a puzzle in which the pieces are organic, forever changing: a world in which plants may be murder weapons; Roman letters may be runic symbols; the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil may be the Norse tree of life, Yggdrasil; and virgin births may be commonplace.

Told alternately in terse trial transcripts and in the atmospheric voice of Aslaug, a sixteen-year old girl on trial for murder, we learn of Aslaug’s childhood of seclusion in rural Maine, with a mother who is at once pitiful, cruel and cerebral. Aslaug’s mother tells her she has no father and teaches her daughter far more about mythology and botany than she does about the modern world. Aslaug knows of the God Odin, and of his secrets, and of the old crones who live at the base of Yggdrasil and who weave the tapestry of fates. And she knows how to use uncultivated plants for everything from food to soap to narcotics. And perhaps to poison.

Is Aslaug the innocent she would have the reader believe, or a calculated killer? Only MADAPPLE will tell.

 

Susan Woodring - Springtime On Mars

Susan Yergler Woodring, an award-winning short story writer and novelist, grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. She also lived in California, Alabama, Illinois, and Indiana as a child. Upon graduating from Western Carolina University, she spent a year teaching in Vologda, Russia before moving to the foothills of North Carolina to teach middle school. Susan is a graduate of the Creative Writing MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte. She is the author of one novel, The Traveling Disease. Her short fiction has earned many honors, including the 2006 Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Fiction Award and the 2006 Isotope Editor’s Prize. Her work has appeared in Quick Fiction, Yemassee, Ballyhoo Stories, Slower Traffic Keep Right, The William and Mary Review, Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Passages North, turnrow, and Surreal South (Press 53). Susan currently lives, writes, and home-schools her two children in Drexel, North Carolina

Bees swarm. A president is assassinated. A young mother is electrocuted in her own basement. A space shuttle vanishes. One couple is struck by sudden wealth, another by lightning. An older woman obsesses over a bag boy at the local supermarket. People everywhere watch the sky for signs of intelligent life on Mars and covert Russian space missions. The television era begins, and the Vietnam War ends.

Ranging from the 1950s to present time, the stories of Springtime on Mars feature characters who grapple with the human extremes of despair and hope, holding faith in both God and science, and in the love and courage of those around them.

April - 2008

Susan Breen - The Fiction Class

Susan Breen teaches fiction classes for Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan. Her short stories have been published by a number of literary magazines, among them American Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly and www.anderbo.com. She is also a contributor to The Writer and Writer’s Digest. She has an M.A. from Columbia University and has worked as a reporter for Fortune magazine and an editor for the Foreign Policy Association. She lives in Irvington, New York, with her family, two dogs, and one cat. Visit www.susanjbreen.com

Synopsis: On paper, Arabella Hicks is more than qualified to teach a weekly fiction class on New York’s upper west side.  She’s an author herself, passionate about books.  She’s even named after the heroine in a Georgette Heyer novel.

So why do her students seem so difficult? And why can’t she find an ending to the novel she has been working on for seven years? Arabella’s beginning to suspect that it’s because her mother, Vera Hicks, is driving her insane. After each class, she goes to see Vera in a nursing home outside the city. Every visit turns into an argument. Arabella can’t figure out how to make peace, until one day she discovers something surprising: Her mother wants to be a writer.

Slowly, cautiously, Arabella begins to teach her, and as the lessons preogress along with her class, Arabella discovers that it is she who has a lot to learn about writing, and about love.

Susan will be touring during the month of April.  The Fiction Class is available for purchase at:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Powells

Feel free to stop by her blog at Bloomer.  See our interview with Susan on the Author 10 Q&A page.

Win an autographed copy of The Fiction Class!

Blog Stop dates and blogs:

April 1 - Thursday Bram

April 4 - Maw Books Blog

April 7 - Jenn Hollowell: Working Writer

April 11 - Writing From Kiddom

April 14 - Something She Wrote

April 18 - Mom is Just a Nickname

April 21 - Virtual Wordsmith

April 24 - A Mama’s Rant

April 30 - Escape to Books