The Tenderest of Strings

Starting 2022 for Regal House (my publisher!) and launching January 4th is Stephen Schwartz's The Tenderest of Strings.

From the Regal House website:

In search of a new life, Reuben and Ardith Rosenfeld and their two children move from Chicago to the small town of Welton, Colorado, looking for all the hope that the burgeoning West has to offer—its abundance of jobs, space, sunshine, prosperity, and the promise of reinvention. Reuben, a former copyeditor at the Chicago Tribune, purchases the local town paper, the Welton Sentinel. Ardith stays home and copes with the task of fixing up an older house, which suffers such disrepair that on Halloween it’s mistaken for part of a haunted house tour. Teenaged Harry continues his life as a troubled loner, skipping school and losing his tooth in a mysterious encounter. Meanwhile, Reuben, unaware that Ardith is having an affair, worries about his wife’s growing unhappiness and distance from the family. One night, after a cookout at some friends’ dairy farm, a fatal hit-and-run occurs that shocks the community, exposes a secret, and begins to rip apart the Rosenfeld family. The Tenderest of Strings is a riveting, full-hearted story of what it takes to survive as a family in a small Western town that beckons from afar but will put its newcomers to the test of their lives.

The Taste of Ginger

With 2022 being the year my novel In Search of the Magic Theater comes out, I plan to blog with special attention to other novels launching during this year. Since there's no way I can mention (much less read and review) all worthy novels, I'll be focusing on two sets of authors: members of the 2022 Debuts group and fellow Regal House authors. With luck I'll manage to highlight most of these books while also announcing scholarly books by friends and keeping you abreast of developments with my own books and anything else of interest I can manage to write about.

The Taste of Ginger, by Mansi Shah, kicks off an exciting round of 2022 adult traditionally published debut novels, of which my own In Search of the Magic Theater will be one. The Taste of Ginger launched January 1 and has already garnered high praise for its tale of an immigrant who returns to India and her estranged family after years in the US, grappling with her two cultures and their different expectations.

I'm looking forward to reading The Taste of Ginger!

Get Magnetic Woman on Sale!

Guess what! University of Pittsburgh Press is having a 30% off sale on all titles! This means you can order Magnetic Woman for just $70 until January 9, 2022. Go to https://upittpress.org/books/9780822946472/ and in your order use the code PITTBOOKS.

Take Dada Daily for Best Results

"The times are dark and hard, and I know no better means to overcome the chaos of the day than reading about Dadaist appearances.” Rudolf Lothar, “Der Dadaismus.” Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 3 October 1918.

2022 Debuts Winter Roll Call Day 12

Day 12 of the 2022 Debuts winter roll call... writing quotes! Early in In Search of the Magic Theater, narrator Kari ponders the husband she left:

Magnetic Woman in New Zealand

Magnetic Woman makes it to the Kelburn Library at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand! So says Worldcat.org.

Some Comp Titles for In Search of the Magic Theater

In publishing, as in real estate (but unlike in theater), we talk about comps. Comparables. Comparisons. And as the debut novelists of 2022 are doing themed posts all through December about our forthcoming books, one of them is for our comps. Some of us are posting on Instagram, others on Facebook, and others, no doubt, on Twitter or TikTok. My post on Instagram ran into a computer glitch of some sort, so I'm doing it here too.

Two of my comps are "old" but perfect, two are recent enough that we're using them as "official" comps (published in the last five years). So...

1) Hermann Hesse's STEPPENWOLF was the inspiration for my novel IN SEARCH OF THE MAGIC THEATER, which will be out June 1. I switch the genders of the main characters and set the novel in 1999. Mine is also happier overall than STEPPENWOLF and gives the landlady's niece a major role.

2) Robertson Davies's THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS. Not only is Davies one of my favorite authors, but he wrote so well about the arts in general. THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS is about a group of quite different people (who don't all even like each other) collaborating on finishing an opera by the Romantic writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann. I took many useful lessons from this novel in writing the theatrical portions of my own novel (along with having worked in theater myself and having composed small musical pieces in the distant past). Oh, and also, like LYRE OF ORPHEUS, the theater piece in my novel includes text from long-dead authors and lots of music.

3) Jan Alexander's MS. MING'S GUIDE TO CIVILIZATION. Jan is now a friend and we're in a writing group together, but I first learned of her and her novel through a mutual friend. MS. MING sounded like a book I needed to read--two young women, one American and the other a poor kid from China scraping a not-so-savory living in the US, get involved with the mythological Monkey King and scheme to improve the world--and it also led me to my publisher, Regal House! So MS. MING means a lot to me. It's about women's lives, about big dreams, about myth, and it's lively and fun and often satirical.

4) Carmen Boullosa's THE BOOK OF ANNA. This too is a good comp for my novel, as it uses a classic novel (ANNA KARENINA) as a launching point for a new and wildly imaginative work that also includes a work of fiction by the character Anna Karenina.

Follow along with the hashtag #2022Debuts to see what my other fellow debuts are saying and give a follow to @debutauthors, which will showcase all our books coming out in 2022!