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MostlyFiction.com Blogs:
| "A book is a gift you can open again and again." Garrison Keillor | ||
| DEC 16, 2007 | ||
In the cold October of 1917 Margaretha Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, sits in a prison cell in Paris awaiting trial on charges of espionage.The penalty is death by firing squad. As she waits, burdened by a secret guilt, Mata Hari tells stories, Scheherazade-like, to buy back her life from her interrogators. (read review and INTERVIEW) |
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| DEC 15, 2007 | ||
A woman who has spent 30 years in prison for comitting the most heinous crimes imaginable—the torture and murder of children—has finally died, and Billy Tyler is assigned a 12-hour shift guarding the killer's body at the hospital morgue. But alone on a graveyard shift, Billy has occasion to contemplate the various turns his life has taken. In this dark night of the soul, his own problems and anxieties gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance, giving rise to questions that should haunt us all: Whom do we love, and why? How do we protect our children? And what separates us from those we call monsters? (read review) |
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| DEC 13, 2007 | ||
A fresh and inspiring guide to the basics of creative writing—both fiction and creative nonfiction. Its hands-on, completely accessible approach walks writers through each stage of the creative process, from the initial triggering idea to the revision of the final manuscript. (read review) |
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| DEC 11, 2007 | ||
Set in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood known for its main street, Auburn Avenue, which once was regarded as the "richest Negro street in the world." The story centers around Barlowe Reed, a single, forty-something African American who rents a ramshackle house , just a stone's throw from the historic birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When Sean and Sandy Gilmore, a young white couple, move in next door, Barlowe and Sandy develop a reluctant, complex friendship as they hold probing -- often frustrating -- conversations over the backyard fence. (read review) |
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| DEC 9, 2007 | ||
Being a Greek god is not all it once was. Yes, the twelve gods of Olympus are alive and well in the twenty-first century, but they are crammed together in a London townhouse-and none too happy about it. And they've had to get day jobs: Artemis as a dog-walker, Apollo as a TV psychic, Aphrodite as a phone sex operator, Dionysus as a DJ. Even more disturbingly, their powers are waning, and even turning mortals into trees-a favorite pastime of Apollo's-is sapping their vital reserves of strength. Soon, what begins as a minor squabble between Aphrodite and Apollo escalates into an epic battle of wills. (read review) |
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| DEC 7, 2007 | ||
Oster's stories are simple—at least if you mean stories that can be summarized in a few words. In the case of The Unforeseen, such a summary would begin like this: the narrator, who has a perpetual cold, lives with a woman who never catches a cold and so has the immediate intuition that the cold she has now, as the two of them drive together toward the sea, is a very bad omen indeed. Oster's perceptive gaze, and the changing rhythm of his sentences, guide his reader through the psychological realism of obsession and desire. (read review) |
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| DEC 4, 2007 | ||
For 20 years, former NYPD cop Jack Stang has lived with the memory of his girlfriend’s death in an attempted abduction. But what if she weren’t actually dead? What if she somehow secretly survived—but lost her sight, and her memory, and everything else she had...except her enemies? Now Jack has a second chance to save the only woman he ever loved—or to lose her for good...(read review) |
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| DEC 3 , 2007 | ||
Alec Milius is young, smart, and ambitious. He also has a talent for deception. He is working in a dead-end job when a chance encounter leads him to MI6, the elite British Secret Intelligence Service, handing him an opportunity to play center-stage in a dangerous game of espionage. (read review)
Six years ago, Jack Till helped Wendy Harper disappear. But now her ex-boyfriend and former business partner, Eric Fuller, is being framed for her presumed murder in an effort to smoke her out, and Till must find her before tango-dancing assassins Paul and Sylvie Turner do. Masterful plotting and unnerving psychological insight. (read review) |
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| DEC 2, 2007 | ||
In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage-clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend’s attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never knew existed, is being released from Cauldstone Hospital—where she has been locked away for more than sixty-one years. (read review) |
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| DEC 1, 2007 | ||
The last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman, the indomitable literary adventurer of Roth's nine Zuckerman books, like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. (read review) |
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| NOV 30, 2007 | ||
It is 1934, and New York City is in the icy grip of the Great Depression. With enormous compassion, Dr. James Delaney tends to his hurt, sick, and poor neighbors, who include gangsters, day laborers, prostitutes, and housewives. If they can't pay, he treats them anyway. But in his own life, Delaney is emotionally numb, haunted by the slaughters of the Great War. His only daughter has left for Mexico, and his wife Molly vanished months before, leaving him to wonder if she is alive or dead. Then, on a snowy New Year's Day, the doctor returns home to find his three-year-old grandson on his doorstep. (read review) |
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| NOV 29, 2007 | ||
In 1995, nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America. (read review) |
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| NOV 27, 2007 | ||
Sophie Marks' path to artistic and personal fulfillment takes her from World War II England to postwar Paris and the Italian countryside. She leaves Europe in 1967 and spends the next two decades in the American Southwest. Acclaimed at last as an artist, she returns to England to confront the hidden memories of her childhood and test the possibilities of a renewed love, a passion ripened by maturity. (read review) |
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| NOV 25, 2007 | ||
Scott Ritter, former Marine and UN weapons inspector, argues that there is a growing despondency amongst the anti-war movement. Ritter proposes the anti-war movement seek guidance from sources they normally spurn — that one must study the “enemy” in order to learn the art of campaigning and of waging battles when necessary. They need to understand the pro-war movement’s decision-making cycle, then undertake a comprehensive course of action. (read review) |
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| NOV 24, 2007 | ||
Instantly recognizable, Auguste Renoir’s masterpiece depicts a gathering of his real friends enjoying a summer Sunday on a café terrace along the Seine near Paris. Renoir took on this most challenging project at a time of personal crises in art and love, all the while facing issues of loyalty and the diverging styles that were tearing apart the Impressionist group. (read review)
For psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. David McBride, death exerts an unusual draw. Despite his profession, he has never come to terms with the violent accident that took his brother’s life, a trauma that has shaped his personality and subsequent choice of career. But when a failed suicide, Elizabeth Cruikshank, comes into his care, he finds the deepest reaches of his suppressed history being reactivated. Elizabeth is mysteriously reticent about her own past and it is not until David recalls a painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio that she finally yields her story. (read review) |
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| NOV 23, 2007 | ||
 ON KINGDOM MOUNTAIN by Howard Frank Mosher Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (July 2007) Reviewer: Mary Whipple Amazon readers rating:  from 5 reviews
Set in northern Vermont in 1930, On Kingdom Mountain recounts the life and times of Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson. A renowned local bookwoman and bird carver, she is the sole proprietor and last resident of a remote and wild mountain situated on the U.S.Canadian border, now threatened by the Connector, a proposed new highway over her mountain. Abounding with Howard Frank Moshers trademark action scenes, from daring bank robberies to outrageous comedy to a passionate and surprising love affair, On Kingdom Mountain is rooted deeply in Moshers own family history, in one of Americas last frontiers, and in a way of life on the brink of extinction. (read review and excerpt) |
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SIGNED, MATA HARI 
DEATH OF A MURDERER 
from 5 reviews
THE MAKING OF A STORY 
from 15 reviews
THEM 
GODS BEHAVING BADLY 
from 73 reviews
THE UNFORESEEN 
DEAD STREET 
A SPY BY NATURE 
SILENCE 
THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX 
EXIT GHOST
NORTH RIVER 
DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE 
BROKEN COLORS 
WAGING PEACE 
LUNCHEON AT THE BOATING PARTY 
THE OTHER SIDE OF YOU 
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