Should We Be Shrinking Fiction in America’s Common Core Reading Lists?

As a novelist I never realized how much skin in the game I had in terms of the Common Core curriculum. Only recently did I discover that fiction, according to common core, is being shrunk in favor of non-fiction. After reading a telling New York Times article that gives an in-depth overview of how non-fiction is coming […]

AMERICAN QUARTET Booktube Review by Rachel Writes

  [iframe id=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/Tlb_hY68tJQ” align=”center”] Get your copy of AMERICAN QUARTET here

Writing Contests: A Cautionary Tale

When I started the Warren Adler Short Story Contest in 2006 I had rather lofty ideas about integrity and fidelity to the goal of resurrecting the popularity of the short story which was in decline. I appointed qualified people, meaning people who were either authors themselves or teachers of literature or creative writing with the […]

What I Did With My Backlist Titles

When I decided to set up my own publishing company, Stonehouse Press, I had published 27 novels with major legacy publishers. Many had been translated into numerous foreign languages and nearly half this output were sold or optioned for films. Two feature films had been made, “The War of the Roses” and “Random Hearts,” along with […]

Remembering Ruth Rendell 1930 – 2015

I am greatly saddened by the death of the brilliant novelist Ruth Rendell. Although she was dubbed a “crime” writer she was much more. Her work probed deeply into the psychological aspects of the human condition. She wrote a masterful series, The Inspector Wexford novels, about the inner workings of a moral man who is one […]

Should We Believe the Myth of the Suicidal Writer?

Looking at the long list of writers who have committed suicide, one is tempted to associate the so-called artistic temperament, the agony of creative achievement, with the primary motivation for that final act. The list is long and includes many well-known literary figures like Earnest Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, Louis Adamic, Romain Gary, Sylvia Plath, Arthur […]