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ToB 2008

The 2008 Tournament of Books will soon be underway. There’s a star-studded list of judges — and me.

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The Teahouse Fire (and tea ceremony) giveaway

Regular readers will remember Marie Mockett‘s Letter from a Japanese Crematorium and amazing bamboo shot recipe. And now those of you in New York can see her interviewing Ellis Avery this Friday, the 7th, at Asia Society, following a reading from Avery’s first novel, The Teahouse Fire. In 2006, Mockett said this about the book: Western writers, not to mention . . .

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Monday afternoon Paula McLain giveaway

The move and associated travails have kept me from the computer for over a week. What with all the unanswered email and looming deadlines, you’ll want to brace for a few more giveaways.   Abandoned as children, the young Paula McLain and her sisters drifted from foster home to foster home for a decade and a half. McLain wrote a . . .

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Pain, as if seen through glass

My review of Cate Kennedy’s new short story collection, Dark Roots, appears in the weekend’s New York Times Book Review. Here’s an excerpt: A writer, Eudora Welty insisted, must know her characters’ “hearts and minds before they ever set visible foot on stage. You must know all, then not tell it all, or not tell too much at once: simply . . .

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