Nu? What's New?December 1, 2010 In the wake of Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for all the people involved in making my German book tour, which ended just a few weeks ago, so successful. I'm mentioned them in the pages of photos and text devoted to the tour. It truly was the best tour of my career, and I've been on many at home and abroad. So good, that the transition home was easier than ever before. I didn't feel exhausted, I felt exhilarated—and even a little homesick for Germany! So what am I working on now? Well, my first novel Winter Eyes is moving to eBook format and should be done early in the new year. I'm taking my time with the proofing to avoid the mistakes I find in a few too many eBooks, though I know that no matter how many sets of eyes you have proofing a text, some mistake always slips through. In this case, fixing it after the fact will be easy. It's been fun choosing a hot new cover, and the book has something that is brand new: the missing prologue. I was working on it when I was moving and had different versions of it, way back when computers were almost monochrome. Well, the version with the prologue disappeared, I didn't have it backed up, and so the book went to press in the U.S. and England without an important part of it there. The prologue re-emerged when we were cleaning out a cupboard in my spouse's study. It made it into the German edition of the book, a few years ago, and now Winter Eyes will soon be available to be read as it was intended to be. I'm still loving writing my essays for Bibliobuffet.com and my blog for the Huffington Post, where I don't only write about books and publishing, but on whatever subject ignites me, most recently, the craziness at airports over body scanners and pat downs. I've toured on and off for My Germany since spring of 2009 and am scheduling for spring 2012, which makes this the book of mine with the longest legs. Some books are sprinters, this one is a marathon runner, and I'm currently working on a Coda for the paperback, which should be out Fall 2011. It's a lot of fun to review my notes from the tour, relive the moments, reflect on them, and work out how exactly I want to round off the book, both thematically and stylistically. The big news is that NPR commissioned a piece for me for their popular show "Hannukah Lights" and you can listen to "Legacy" here: http://tinyurl.com/32mgmxz Happy holidays!
August 13, 2010 What's new is this feature on my web site where you'll be able to find updates on what's happening with me in one convenient clickable spot. Not that you shouldn't check out the individual new banners—don't be shy, it couldn't hurt. The latest development for me is blogging for Huffington Post, a web site I've admired for years, and is part of my daily news reading along with the New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, and other cultural/political blogs. It's exciting to be there and my first blog is about the theory that Shakespeare's plays were written by a Jewish woman poet. Sounds crazy, huh? It is, and I had a lot of fun writing about it. (The archive link is here.) I'm in my second year of writing a column a month for a wonderful literary magazine on-line, Bibliobuffet.com. This is a dream gig because the editor and publisher let me write whatever I want, so I'm not driven by "timeliness" as when I wrote for newspapers and sometimes could only review a book the month it was published. That was very stressful. I love working with smart, careful editors, and being in the cyber company of writers passionate about books. Check out the reviews and features there, you'll be glad you did. It's a magazine devoted to not covering the same titles the major outlets cover. I started my career as a short story writer, with my first story in Redbook, and wrote in that genre for years until I felt that I had said what I had to say, learned what I had to learn. Books, reviews and essays took over, but occasionally an idea comes to me that demands story form and that's what happened with "Money," due out in the fall in the U.S. and The Netherlands in Derek Rubin's anthology Promised Lands. Derek nursed the story from its first rough draft to its final form and it reminded me how important finding the right editor is to shape your work. Whatever you write can always be deepened, made to speak more truly. I've been in a constant state of communication with various people in Germany over the arrangements for my two-week book tour for My Germany in the fall. This all started back in the fall of 2009: a tour takes a lot of planning! I'll be doing readings in Frankfurt, Berlin, Celle, Magdeburg, Dessau and Halle in museums, high schools, synagogues. For those of you who've been to the astonishing Jewish Museum in Berlin, you can imagine how mind blowing it'll be for me to be reading there. This is my third book tour in Germany, and I'll be gathering material for an epilogue to go in the paperback of My Germany. I've continued my effort to study German (Deutsche sprach, schwere Sprach as they joke in broken German) by hiring a tutor who used to teach German in a local high school, and I've been having weekly or bi-weekly lessons. I've only dreamed in German once so far, but that's a good sign. So does it help having spoken Yiddish as a kid? Yes and no. There are false cognates to watch out for and German seems far more complex, but on the other hand, I get the concept of verbs at the end of a sentence. There's a great joke about a German woman who never learned what a book was all about because someone had torn out the last few pages where all the verbs were. After months of touring, it's been a summer with minimal travel and recharging in simple ways—walking the dogs, sitting in the hot tub in the morning, watching movies—has been just what I needed. Reading as always is my joy, and I just got a big fat Victorian novel perfect for dog days: Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right. In German, I'm slowly reading Walter Kempowski's Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? (Did You Ever See Hitler?) published in the 1970s. It's based on hundreds of interviews he did with Germans of all kinds, asking them if they ever saw Hitler. The answers are by turn shocking, odd, and even funny. The American edition reproduces photos of Hitler that Germans pasted into their photo albums and scrap books, as well as a short, powerful introduction by the famed translator Helen Wolf. Anyone interested in World War II should read this book. My "Under the Radar" reviews continue on a monthly basis on WKAR 90.5 FM, East Lansing Public Radio during Morning Edition hosted by Melissa Ingells, a veteran radio journalist with a dulcet voice and a keen sense of humor. Our segment focuses on books people might miss for one reason or another and even though it only airs at about 3-4 minutes, we usually tape about ten minutes, some of which is us laughing, singing, and making bad puns. She's threatened to do a CD of our outtakes. Melissa is a terrific rock vocalist, by the way. The segment usually airs the third Friday of every month but if you miss it, it's archived here. For fans of my Nick Hoffman mysteries, the first one Let's Get Criminal is back out in paperback with a gorgeous cover, and you can read it on Kindle or in book form. My Germany is also out in Kindle, and there will be more titles of mine available on this new platform in the coming year. Do I read ebooks? Not yet, but I will as soon as I get around to checking out an iPad which seems like the perfect travel tool for me. I've been too busy figuring out how my DroidX works. My eldest reminds me now and then that many years ago, I said, "Why would I want to surf the Internet?" In my own defense, I have to say I did not mock Blu-ray when it appeared, though 3-D gives me a migraine.
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