Book of the Week #9

Dead Calm: Best New England Crime Stories (Somerville, Mass.: Level Best Books, 2011)

Level Best Books is an independent publishing cooperative which produces an annual anthology of Crime Stories by New England Writers each November. This is their latest collection, it was reviewed at examiner.com late last year, and it includes 27 original stories about the dark side of New England. Among the contributing authors are several from New Hampshire who will be part of the Crime Stories Anthology Night at Water Street Bookstore starting at 7pm on March 20, 2012.

From my inbox

A few interesting bits and pieces have turned up in my inbox recently:

• Nancy Cristiano, of the Family Resource Connection, sent me a recent article from Plymouth Magazine about Robert Frost.
• Back in December The Atlantic did an article on Writers and Their Books
• Gibson's Bookstore is having their annual February sale! Everything in the store (excluding previous special orders) will be 25% off this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, February 24-26, 2012.
• Jane Cleland is launching Dolled Up for Murder, the 7th book in the Josie Prescott series (set in NH) at the end of March.
• Manchester City Library will be having a $5 Bag Book Sale on 21 April 2012 (Saturday). 
• The Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library has been approved to continue as the official New Hampshire affiliate to the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress for 2012-2014.

LAL Update

The national Letters About Literature office is FILLED with letters right now. To be exact there are 58,747 letters that were received from students all over the country. There were 733 letters submitted by New Hampshire students. All those letters were read by the first round judges. The ones that moved forward are now being read by the second round judges who will finish their work by February 23rd. The NH letters selected by the round two judges will be packaged up and sent here to the Center for the Book at the State Library for state-level judging. We will get these letters in early March and the New Hampshire semi-finalists will be notified by mail by late March. State winners for New Hampshire will be notified by mail the week of April 23, 2012.

Happy Birthday!

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born Feb. 22, 1892 in Maine, making today her 120th birthday. You can read several of her poems at Poets.org and some at The Poetry Foundation. In 2001 Nancy Milford published an excellent biography of Millay called Savage Beauty.  Millay died in 1950.

Book of the Week #8

Harbor Ice by K. D. Mason (Kittery Point, Me.: Smith Kerr Associates, 2009).


K. D. Mason lives and writes on New Hampshire's seacoast. His Jack Beale mysteries (yes, I'm still on a mystery kick) are set in a fictional version of his home ground. Harbor Ice is the first in the series.

It  has been a brutally cold winter in the New Hampshire coastal town of Rye Harbor, leaving drifts of sea water frozen solid in the salt marsh. Finally, the weather warms enough for the ice to begin to break up and drift out to sea. That’s when a woman’s body is found under a slab of ice left by the outgoing tide. Max, the feisty redheaded bartender at Ben’s Place, recognizes that the body in the ice is her aunt’s partner. This triggers a series of events that will eventually threaten Max’s life as well. It is up to her best friend, Jack Beale, to unravel the mystery.(publisher's blurb)

Mr. Mason did a reading recently at Rye Public Library. If you missed him there, he has several other NH appearances coming up. Personally, I'm hoping to make it to the May event.

• Tonight, 2/21/12 at 7pm at River Run Bookstore: a reading from Dangerous Shoals, Q&A, and book signing
• Thursday, 2/21/12 at 7pm Nashua Public Library will host a local author's night which including K. D. Mason
• Friday, 5/11/12 at Cornucopia Wine & Cheese Market there will be a book signing as part of a beer (Throwback Brewery) and cheese (Hickory Nut Farm) tasting starting at 4pm.

Book of the Week #7

Birds of Prey by Lawrence Kinsman (Manchester, NH: The Abelard Press, 2002)

I seem to be on a bit of a mystery kick--admittedly not an uncommon situation. This novel by Manchester author Lawrence Kinsman, formerly a professor at Southern NH University, follows Boston homicide detective Sylvie Kaplan as she tracks a killer (or perhaps killers) through a maze of international crime, computer hacking, and defense contractors.

"At what feels like dawn I am awakened by the sound of a light tapping on my apartment door. The tapping goes on and on, slowly insinuating itself into the unhappy grayness of my sleeping mind. When I sit up amidst the scrambled bedclothes, my head begins throbbing. I squeeze my eyes shut and press the heels of my hands to my temples, like a woman driven mad by inner voices.
This stupendous headache is the direct result of several glasses of excellent dinner wine, mixed with two or three glasses of even better champagne, and topped off by three glasses of cheap sherry that I drank while sitting in the kitchen at about 1:00 a.m., feeling sorry for myself. The sherry came after my return from last evening's big Boston Police Holiday Gala, a bizarrely opulent event unlike any other gathering in the hotdog and Budweiser-ridden social history of the Boston Police Department. Upon my return to the house at midnight, I learned that my handsome, rich, narcissistic bastard of a fiance had left me." (p. 1)

Book of the Week #6

Catch Me by Lisa Gardner (New York: Dutton, 2012)

"The IN FOUR DAYS, SOMEONE IS GOING TO KILL ME… At 8pm on 21st January, twenty-eight year old Charlie Grant believes she is going to be murdered and she wants Boston’s top homicide detective, D.D. Warren, to handle her death investigation. Confronting D.D. at her latest crime scene, Charlie lays her cards on the table. For each of the last two years, one of her childhood friends has been murdered leaving Charlie as the only one of the three friends to remain alive. But as D.D. delves deeper in to the details of Charlie’s case, she begins to question the young woman’s story. Because Charlie can now outfight and outrun anyone she meets and D.D.’s instinct is that she’s hiding a secret. A secret so explosive that Charlie herself may turn out to be the biggest danger of all." (publisher's description)

Catch Me is the latest installment in bestselling suspense author Lisa Garder's Detective D.D. Warren series. The book will be available on February 7th and White Birch Books is hosting a book release party where you can meet the author, a N.H. resident, at Horsefeathers. The festivities will be held on 2/7/2012 at Horsefeathers Restaurant, beginning at 7pm.

Book of the Week #5

Recollections: Ten Women of Photography by Margaretta K. Mitchell (New York: Viking Press, A Studio Book, 1979)

When it was published in 1979 this book, and the exhibit it was a companion to, was looking at the work of photographers whose place in the history of 20th century American photography was still to be adequately understood. (to paraphrase the introduction). Brief profiles, based on interviews, of ten American photographers provide insights into what brought them to create the work they did and the book includes reproductions of several of each woman's works.

"Aside from gender, their only tie to one another is that of age: all these photographers were born around the turn of the century. Their work reflects a panorama of life experience and more than seventy-five years of photographic history. Their generation lived through drastic social change and observed extremes in social mores, ethical values, and the definition of good taste in art as well as life. The world they knew as children was abruptly upended by World War I and their adult lives were disrupted by World War II. Seen as a group, their photographs form a bridge of perceptions moving through these shifts in style." (p. 8)

Among the women profiled here is Lotte Jacobi, a photographer who championed fine art photography and who made her home in New Hampshire in 1955. She was active in local political causes as well as artistic ones. Ms. Jacobi's work, as well as that of her sister, is part of an exhibit, A New Vision: Modernist Photography, opening at the Currier Museum this week and running through mid-May 2012.