(Pamela Dorman Books), arrives in bookstores next week. The novel's titular character is a fifteen-year-old girl learning to cope with the absence of her father, a soldier in the U.S. Army Reserves who has just deployed to Iraq. Harrington's plays, musicals and operas have been widely produced in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. She is a two-time winner of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award in playwriting and a two-time winner of the Clauder Competition for best new play in New England for Mercy and Hallowed Ground. Much of her work is inspired by her fascination with history and her commitment to work that explores the human cost of war, from the Civil War (Hallowed Ground) to World War I (The Book of Hours) and World War II (Fifteen Minutes at Midway). Alice Bliss grew out of Harrington’s one-woman musical Alice Unwrapped, which ran off-Broadway in New York and in the Minneapolis Fringe Festival in 2009. Harrington teaches playwriting at MIT and lives in Gloucester, Mass. Visit her website at www.lauraharringtonbooks.comMy First Book
The day I am invited to write this guest post, my first book lands on my doorstep. A true artifact, an actual object; it even has a little heft. It is sitting on my kitchen table. I circle around it, not quite believing it’s real. It is so strange to have something tangible in my hands after years of working in the theatre where our work is so beautifully, magically ephemeral. Even if you hold a play in your hand, you know it is only a blueprint for the theatrical experience it inspires. But a book....a book will exist as an object and in the mind of its readers and therefore holds the potential of being both tangible and ephemeral.
The day my book launches is the day of my daughter’s graduation from college, which certainly puts things into perspective: the joy of her accomplishments, the excitement of starting out, stepping into the first days of her adult life. And like all graduations, perhaps all watershed events in one’s life, there is as much looking backwards as looking forwards. Thus the poignant mix of emotions we all experience: fear, elation, anxiety, joy, and anticipation.
As I hold this book with gratitude and a degree of awe, I also hold something back. Have I been a writer for too long to fully experience this “first” in my life? Am I superstitious? Not yet, I hear a little voice saying, don’t get excited yet--as if my excitement could somehow impact book sales or reviewers’ reactions in a negative or positive way. I don’t want to overburden the slender shoulders of Alice Bliss as she makes her way into the world. As much as I wish for this book going forward (and don’t we all have these dreams of finding our audience, our readers?) I keep reminding myself of all that has happened to bring me to this moment; all who have helped me along the way. So, like my daughter on her upcoming graduation day, I find myself looking forward and reaching back.
Reaching back to my first mentors: How can I leave them out when I hold my first book in my hands? Parents and teachers and, for me, my lucky, blessed relationships with several collaborators in my theatre life: the composers who celebrated my love of language and embraced my desire to create deeply emotional work, the producers and directors who championed my work and made it happen, the performers who made my characters come alive in words and in music. They are all a part of this book and the journey that led me to this book.
Reaching back to my family: My husband and daughter who have done the daily work of living in the trenches with a writer, my brothers who have cheered me on with such generosity, my parents, now gone, who would have loved to sit with my book in their hands. A book. So different from a play. Something we all know and recognize and revere. Something we can hold in our hands. Full of promise; carrying our hopes and our dreams.
Author photo by Claire Barclay
by Shann Ray, due to hit bookstores four weeks from now. At one point, American Masculine was subtitled "Montana Stories" and featured two sparring bison on the cover. The buffalo still remain, but "Montana" appears to have been dropped, perhaps in an effort to make the fiction more universal. Make no mistake, however, the Big Sky Country--both beautiful and brawling--spreads to every corner of these 10 tales, which Dave Eggers has compared to the work of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx: "lyrical, prophetic, brutal, yet ultimately hopeful." In "Three From Montana," for instance, Ray writes: "In Montana, skies run from a tilted wooden porch all the way to the horizon line, and nothing keeps back the dawn...Everyone who has ever come here, remains. The land and the vault of sky are everything and people so insignificant they are struck by the idea that God doesn't owe them anything." When I read lines like those, I'm gripped by the desire to get in my car, drive ten miles north of Butte and stand at the edge of Elk Park, where I lean against the hood of my Hyundai, drink the fresh-washed air of the high-elevation valley through my nostrils, and say, "Goddamn, he got it right alright." The book's Jacket Copy says Ray writes of "washed-up basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father’s apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana’s Rocky Mountains." American Masculine is the winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, chosen from at least eight other strong semi-finalists, said fiction judge Robert Boswell. In his foreword to Ray's collection, Boswell had this to say:
by Richard Ford
(Ford’s beautiful small book of awe-invoking portent), Rock Springs delivers.
by Claire Davis
by Jim Harrison
), screenwriter, poet (
), and short story writer, Jim Harrison embeds people in landscape and weaves through subtle narrative layering, masterful prose, and emotional import a web of intricate and compelling design. "The Woman Lit by Fireflies," the final novella of this collection, generously explores ingenuity, freedom, and loyalty.
by Edward P. Jones
, won the Pulitzer Prize. A luminary of American letters, Jones affirms that which is humble and human, and does so with startling power. The characters Jones writes are imbued with compassion, and the words of Martin Luther King Jr. aptly apply to Jones’ prose, a distilled language with “a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
by Annie Proulx
and known for vigorous torque-driven prose, Annie Proulx takes readers on a journey of speed and destiny in Close Range. Her ability to uncover and dissipate the dead waters of American culture, providing a rich love of character and story in the process, is replete with momentum and artistry. Her stories burn like bonfires in the darkness of a vast literary plain.
by Edith Pearlman, the acclaimed collection published earlier this year by 
, won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature and was published by the University of Pittsburgh University Press in 1996. Her second, 
(Eastern Washington University Press, 2002) won the Spokane Annual Fiction Prize. Her third collection, 
, was published by Sarabande Press in 2005 and won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Visit her website at 
, published this month.
by A. S. Byatt
by Charles Dickens
by Robin McKinley
by Sarah Waters
by Melanie Rae Thon, brought to you by the consistently-stellar 
, "It's not the story. It's just this breathtaking world—that's the point" and that perfectly describes "Tu B'Shvat."
, 
, and 
, and the story collections 
and 
. Her work has been included in 
(1995, 1996), three 
(2003, 2006, 2008), and 
(2006). She is a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award (1997), two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1992 and 2008), a Writer's Residency from the Lannan Foundation (2005), and a fellowship from the Tanner Humanities Center (2009). Originally from Montana, Thon now lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches in the Creative Writing and Environmental Humanities programs at the University of Utah. 
by Henning Koch from 
failed to sell, he wrote to a friend, "It was too short. Remember this. Never write a book under 60,000 words." Yet surely we are now beginning to realise that long books can bore the pants off us. Does Jonathan Franzen's 
really need to weigh in at almost 600 pages? Perhaps a fat book makes the consumer more willing to spend fifteen dollars, like buying a big bunch of bananas at a knock-down price?
which by all accounts is a classic work, nevertheless considered his 78-page 
--a collection of prose poems and flash fiction--"the only novel that doesn't embarrass me." 
