Category Archives: Authors

Reading & Book Signing at Books Inc. 5 Authors

WNBA with Cahterine and Julia

At Max’s Opera Cafe, Catherine Bramkcamp, WNBA member, master podcaster, and author. Julia Park Tracey, WNBA member and moderator for this event. I’m sitting at the far end.

 

Books, Inc hosted WNBA for “An Atmospheric Afternoon” of readings and book signings with five authors.  Before the event a few WNBA members and the authors met for lunch at Max’s Opera Cafe across the mall entrance from Book, Inc. at Opera Plaza in San Francisco. I chatted with Lucy Sanna and Kelli Estes. Lucy’s The Cherry Harvest takes place in Door County, Wisconsin, my home state, in 1944. Few people know World War II German POW’s were put to work in a Wisconsin farm community. An interaction with one of the families brings “dark and unexpected consequences.”

 

Kelli lives near Seattle with her husband and two sons. For The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, Kelli’s protagonist learns about Mei Lien’s life when Chinese residents were driven from their homes a century ago. The back cover of her debut book states, “Inspired by true events, Kelli Estes’s brilliant and atmospheric debut serves as a poignant tale of two women determined to do the right thing, and the power of our own stories.”

 

Janis Cooke Newman’s A Master Plan for Rescue is set in 1942 New York and Berlin. Her story is about a boy and a man who combine grief and magical thinking to bring their loved ones back, if only in spirit. A beautiful tale, propelled by history and imagination.

 

Carolina De Robertis’ protagonist in The Gods of Tango is a seventeen-year-old who leaves her family and a small village, but under dire circumstances she masters the violin  to make a living in Buenos Aires. Women were not allowed to be a musician in the salons of high society. The girl disguises herself as a man, “jeopardizing not only her music career, but her life itself.”

 

Kathryn Ma’s The Year She Left Us involves “four powerful, intertwining stories of accomplishment, tenacity, secrets, loneliness, and love.” The eighteen-year-old, Ari, visits the orphanage in China where she lived before being adopted and it plunges her into a “self-destructive spiral.” The story “explores the promise and pain of adoption, the price of assimilation and achievement, and the debt we owe to others and to ourselves.”

 

Which one to read first is hard to choose.

 

Lucy reading 2

Lucy Sanna THE CHERRY HARVEST

Kelli at the micc

Kelli Estes THE GIRL WHO WROTE IN SILK

Carolina The Gods of Tango

Carolina De Robertis THE GODS OF TANGO

Janis' turn

Janis Cooke Newman A MASTER PLAN FOR RESCUE

Kathryn laughing

Kathryn Ma THE YEAR SHE LEFT US

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Women’s National Book Association Inc.

National Reading Group Month – 2015

Books, Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave.

An Atmospheric Afternoon:
Five authors of must-read novels!

Saturday October 10, 2015
2:00 – 4:00 pm
Books, Inc., Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness Ave., SF 94107
FREE and Open to the Public

Come meet our authors as they discuss their captivating novels over wine and snacks catered by Max’s Opera Cafe. Giveaway raffle of all books presented. Free paperback and resources for Book Clubs, along with Great Group Reads featured titles. Moderated by Julia Park Tracey.

Authors at the event are:

Carolina De Robertis, The Gods of Tango (Knopf)

The Gods of Tango book cover

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lucy Sanna, The Cherry Harvest |(William Morrow)

The Cherry Harvest

 

 

 

 

Kelli Estes, The Girl Who Wrote in Silk (Sourcebooks)

The Girl who wrote in silk

 

 

 

 

Kathryn Ma, The Year She Left Us (HarperCollins)

The year she left us

 

 

 

 

Janis Cooke Newman, A Master Plan for Rescue (Riverhead)

The Master Plan for Rescue

 

Come and join us on October 10. I attended last year and met several writers. There will be refreshments and raffled books which I have volunteered to conduct.

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Guess the Author Contest on Time To Write Now

FrontCover of Written Across the GenresHIContest enter to win with keyboard

The first person who names the author the man is reading in the Time to Write and Color Mini Book will receive a free copy of my anthology, Written Across the Genres.

The third page of the mini book shows the man reading and what he says is the clue. The mini book is available on the right margin of this post. Put your answer in the comments section.

 

Those of you who are in my writing class and those people who have stories, essays, or poems in Written Across the Genres are ineligible, but you can email me with the answer and I’ll have a different prize for the one who answers first. That winner will not affect the winner who is outside of this group.

If we have no correct answers soon, I’ll have to give another clue next time.

 

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J. K. Rowling’s Birthday

jk Rowling with book

Happy Birthday today, July 31st to J. K. Rowling author of the Harry Potter fantasy series. She is 50 years old and was born in Gloucestershire, England, named Joanne “Jo” Rowling.  She was a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International when she had the idea for the Potter novels. The books sold more than 400 million copies. They became the best-selling book series in history. Rowling has been ranked the twelfth richest woman in the United Kingdom. In October 2010, Rowling was named the “Most influential Woman in Britain” by leading magazine editors.

She has a sister, Dianne, 23 months younger than Rowling. The fantasy stories that Rowling wrote as a child were read to her sister. In the Potter series, Rowling based Albus Dumbledore on her headmaster at St. Michael’s Primary School. Hermione Granger she based on herself when she was eleven. She enjoyed reading Dickens and Tolkien when she was in school.

While she wrote Harry Potter, her mother died from multiple sclerosis and didn’t know what Rowling was writing. Rowling emphasized Harry’s loss of his mother in the first novel because she knew how it felt. She moved to Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. She liked to write while listening to Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. She met Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes who shared her interest in Jane Austen. They married in October, 1992. Their daughter, Jessica Mitford was born in July of 1993 in Portugal and Rowling separated from Arantes in November 1993. With her daughter, she moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. She felt like a failure, was diagnosed with clinical depression, and her illness inspired the characters known as Dementors. The real reason she wrote in cafes was that she’d take the baby out for a walk to make her fall asleep which gave Rowling time to write.

In 2004, Forbes named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books. She established a charity with a yearly budget of 5.1 million pounds to combat poverty and social inequality. The fund also gives to organizations that aid children, one parent families, and multiple sclerosis research. She is involved with several other charities. You can read about them at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling.

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Quotes by Writer Iris Murdoch

Iris MurdochIris Murdoch quote about people on other planetsIris Murdoch, an Irish-born British author and philosopher,  was born July 15, 1919 and died February 8, 1999 at age 79. She ranked twelfth on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” She wrote 26 novels and followed the tradition of novelists like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George Elliot, and Proust. Murdoch was married for 40 years to John Bayley who wrote two memoirs about his life with Murdoch. Shortly before her death, he wrote Iris: A Memoir. After her death, he wrote a  sequel called Iris and Her Friends. His memories of Murdoch as she developed Alzheimer’s disease was made into a film with Kate Winslet portraying Murdoch.

Iris Murdoch quote about odd peopleIris Murdoch secrets of happy

Iris Murdoch a novel in sensoryIris Murdoch on bereavement

I haven’t read anything by Murdoch, have you?

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