The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson is a novel following a man who was a CIA asset in al Qaeda.

Today is the birthday of Romanian poet and translator Paul Celan (23 November 1920 – abt. 20 April 1970) . Born into a Jewish family in Romania (Ukraine) . Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. 1 ) Celan was born as Paul Antschel but changed his name to Celan (pronounced Chelan). 2 ) Celan’s father was a Zionist and insisted his son learn Hebrew. Celan’s mother loved German literature and insisted that German will be spoken in the house. Paul Celan abandoned Zionism after his Bar-Mitzvah but finished his Hebrew education. 3 ) During World War II Celan and his parents were deported into a ghetto on October 1941. Celan kept busy but translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets and writing his own poetry. In the Ghetto Celan was exposed t traditional Yidish songs and culture. When the ghetto was dissolved Celan was working as a forced laborer clearing debris and destroying Russian books. 4 ) Celan tried to convince his parents to leave Bukovina, but they refused. One night Celan was so mad he slept at a friend’s house. That night, 21 June, his parents were deported to an interment camp in…

David LeRoy, Sept 18th, 2012 Author of The Siren of Paris. Have you ever run a Marathon? There are usually two responses to this question. One is yes, or I have always wanted to run one. The other is to question the sanity of the person asking the question. I suppose there is a third, and that is to ignore the question and change the topic. Traditional publishers usually view marketing the way sprinters approach the 50-yard dash. The effort is intense, all out, for a very specific distance and short period of time. For the author of a major release, press releases, interviews, reviews of the book, guest appearances, and signing are all coordinated into a short window of time. The goal is to get as much exposure as soon as possible, and this “launches the book.” The target market is reached and the copies are sold, sometimes. Or sometimes not. Like sentence fragments, there are mistakes. For the self published author, or ‘indie author,” this approach to marketing can produce complete burn out and exhaustion. First, few people who choose to self publish a book today, through Amazon, Smashwords, or Nook, can afford to bankroll this kind of…

Twelve year old Hugo shoulders a lot of responsibility for his age. His parents are dead and his caretaker is his drunkard uncle, tender to the train station’s clocks, which one day simply disappears.

Son of a watchmaker, Hugo who loves to tinker with mechanical toys takes it upon himself to maintain the clocks while hiding in the hidden world of the train station. One day he finds an automaton, a mechanical man, which was cherished by his late father. Hugo restores the toy using his father’s notebook as a reference, he gets his parts by stealing them from the old man who owns a toy kiosk in the station.

Reviewed by Ren Zelen Buy this book in paper or electronic format While Vampires and Zombies have been jamming the highway to the bookshelves and multiplexes, Werewolves have largely been left to idle by the side of the literary road. With Glen Duncan’s protagonist, Jacob Marlowe, you get more than you bargain for: not just a man but a werewolf, not just a werewolf, but an existentially philosophical one. The novel is, ostensibly, a diary. The tale begins after a ‘feed’ “Two nights ago I’d eaten a 43-year-old hedge fund specialist,” Marlowe states with what will be his trademark insouciance, “I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no-one wants.” We learn his backstory, a 19th-century costume tragedy, by means of his journal entries, composed in breaks between violent action and meaningless fornication. Two centuries of living have endowed him with a vast reserve of cultural expertise and a linguistic style that moves between the wisecracking cynicism of his noir namesake and the syntactical flourishes of the 19th century literary gentleman. Marlowe imparts the contents of his inner life and his impressions of the modern world in a series of dryly succinct verbal morsels: the topography of Wales is…

The story is about an author named David Martin who accepts an assignment to write a book for a very rich client.

An offer too good to be true.

A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful by Gideon Lewis-Kraus is less about the scenic road and more about the internal journey towards self discovery.

Article first published as Book Review: The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers on Blogcritics. About: The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers is an award winning science-fiction book taking place in the near future. This is a book that out of my comfort zone as I usually don’t read this genre (I used to), but I’m glad I read and think it’s important to read books which you might not otherwise. The pub­lisher is giv­ing away one copy of this book— use the form at the end of the post to enter. 256 pages Publisher: Harper Perennial Language: English ISBN-10: 0062130803 My rating for The Testament of Jessie Lamb – 5 Buy this book in paper or electronic format More Book by Jane Rogers Thoughts: The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (website | Facebook.)almost reads like a classic dystopian novel and I’m sure it will become one soon enough. I found the story surprising with several gentle twists, every time I thought I knew what was going to happen, I found out I was wrong. The writing is excellent, but the book is not your fast paced variety. The story is narrated from the point of view…

Southern writer Eudora Welty was born today, 13 April 1909 (died 23 July 2001) in Jackson, Mississippi. Books by Eudora Welty 1 ) Eudora Welty was the daughter of an insurance company owner and had a sheltered childhood and a led a sheltered life. 2 ) Many of Ms. Welty’s stories feature strong women, however feminist scholars shunned them due to negative comments she made in the 1970s about the feminist movement. 3 ) Eudora Welty was the first woman to study at Peterhouse College in Cambridge. 4 ) Ms. Welty was an accomplished photographer who took pictures for three years in the south during depression in the 1930s. 5 ) When she returned home from college (Columbia University School of Business), Ms. Welty worked as a radio writer and newspaper society writer. 6 ) The Death of a Traveling Salesman was Eudora Welty’s first published short story (1936). Her work appeared in the Southern Review for the next two years. 7 ) A Curtain of Green, a book of short stories was published in 1941. 8 ) Ms. Welty was awarded the O. Henry Award for best short fiction in 1942 and 1943. The novel The Optimist’s Daughter was…

Jean Naggar writes her childhood spent in Cairo and England as we all remember our childhood – a magical time in an enchanted world. Surrounded by a large, protective family members of the Cairo elites