Goodreads Giveaway: The Summer She Was Under Water

There's still time to enter for a chance to win 1 of 5 copies of The Summer She Was Under Water at Goodreads! You can enter here.

Praise for Summer:

“There are no easy answers here but instead a family's dysfunction laid bare in all its messiness and heartbreak—and also its moments of occasional, near-accidental grace.”
—Katharine Noel, Halfway House

Interview with Laura van den Berg at Baltimore Fishbowl

I had so much fun interviewing Laura van den Berg at The Baltimore Fishbowl, and I'm even more excited to host her and fellow writer Katharine Noel at Starts Here! (An Ivy Bookshop reading series; January 7th, 7 pm, Artifact Coffee). Laura's second collection of fiction, The Isle of Youth (FSG), a collection of "lost" narrators in often-exotic vistas, is fantastic. Although she is unsentimental, there is a particularly sensitivity to her stories that devastates. Each word has the weight and height of a water balloon and bruises your heart like a brick. So what is Laura's isle of youth?

A place where Law & Order is on every single channel day and night and where there is an infinite supply of red wine and gourmet tacos and good, weird books.

I actually think each story is its own kind of “isle”—a place where I go to at once get away from something and to discover something that surprises me.

To read more of the interview, go here. For more information on the reading, go here.