“About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

.

.

Patient-doctor confidentiality hobbles this memoir of any specifics, but the point seems to be that author, Dr. Connie Mariano, is the first female physician attending the POTUS.  Read some about it in THE WHITE HOUSE DOCTOR.

This time it’s all about the music; scandals and oddities are left unsaid in Nelson George’s THRILLER: THE MUSICAL LIFE OF MICHAEL JACKSON.

The LA Times looks at two books about our wired lives, COGNITIVE SURPLUS: CREATIVITY AND GENEROSITY IN A CONNECTED AGE, by Clay Shirky, and THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUT BRAINS, by Nicholas Carr.

And The Guardian posts a book review roundup.

Stacy from Girls in the Stacks chats it up with Young Adult author Ellen Schreiber:

Bente Gallagher finally gets to roll out her first-written novel, A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS, as her fifth published mystery.  Taking a little from both the write-what-you-know and dream-big axioms, Bente delivers the fun and intrigue between each set of covers.

We’d like to thank her for taking the time to be part of our “5 Minutes Alone” interview series.

AuthorScoop: What was your very first publication credit?

Bente: There was that article in the LaGuardia Community College newspaper some years ago, about a drama department production of The Wiz… No, I wasn’t a student there, although my husband was. In retrospect, I think the byline may have been his, not mine, although I’m damn sure I was the one who actually wrote the article. Along with quite a few of his assignments and essays, as I recall.

As books go, A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS was the first complete manuscript that I wrote, but it took a while to find a home. While we were waiting for a publisher to fall in love with it, an editor at Berkley Prime Crime approached my agent and asked if I might be interested in generating a series for them about a home renovator. She’d read A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS and decided it didn’t fit their line of cozy crafts- and activity-related mysteries, but she liked me and my writing style, and also thought my background as a realtor and home renovator might be a good fit for them. I was offered a three-book contract to create the Do-It-Yourself home renovation mysteries. The first book, FATAL FIXER-UPPER, was released in November 2008. I guess that’d be my first professional publishing credit.

AuthorScoop: Tell us about your latest release.

Bente: A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS was the first book I wrote, four years ago. It’s a rather obvious case of writing what you know. I was a brand new realtor in Nashville, going into empty houses with strangers every day, and I got to thinking about what I might find behind the locked—and sometimes unlocked—doors. Out of that came the story of a struggling realtor and Southern Belle, Savannah Martin, who’s sitting in her office one early Saturday morning hoping that the phone will ring, when the phone rings and the man on the other end tells her that he’s been stood up by Savannah’s colleague and competitor Brenda Puckett.

Savannah, delirious at the thought that Brenda has dropped the ball, rushes to the rescue, only to discover that her caller is none other than Rafael Collier, former black sheep of the little town of Sweetwater, where they both grew up. Oh yeah, and Brenda is dead inside the house, chubby throat cut from ear to ear; that’s why she was unable to show him around. Of course, Savannah has to figure out who killed Brenda, and avoid getting killed—or kissed—by Rafe, all before the money in her savings account runs out and she has to go back to selling make-up at the mall.

It’s a sort of a hybrid of genres: a Southern romantic chick-lit mystery, or maybe a romantic mystery with a Southern chick. Or as it has also been described, “a frothy girl drink of houses, hunks, and whodunit, narrated in a breezy first person voice.” (The Nashville Scene said that, and I love it.)

AuthorScoop: Aside from your own hard work, who (or what) else do you feel has contributed to your success?

Bente: My success? Don’t know that I’ve had a whole lot of that, frankly, but whatever you want to call it, it wouldn’t have happened without a lot of people marketing and promoting and talking about the books. There’s my in-house publicist, employed by the publisher, and my independent publicist, employed—or at least paid—by me, and then there are all the people who’ve read and reviewed all the books on their blogs and in their magazines and newspapers and on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the other websites. None of us would be anywhere without readers, of course, and I’m sure luck has played a part too. And then there’s God…

AuthorScoop: At what time of day or night do you do your best writing?

Bente: I don’t think my writing changes much with the day or time. I can write any time, just as long as I have the necessary time to get into the zone, if you will. That said, if I wait too long in the morning before getting to work, it becomes easier to get distracted and not get to work at all. I do better, i.e. I’m more disciplined, when I get started right away. The quality of the words I churn out seems to be much the same whether I’m writing at night or in the morning, and whether I write fast or slow, though.

AuthorScoop: Finally, what advice would you give to new or unpublished writers?

Bente: Read a lot. In any genre, not just the one you think you might want to write in. Sure, you’ll have to be intimately familiar with what sells and what doesn’t, what works and what doesn’t, in your chosen genre, but good writing has a way of sinking in when you’re not paying attention, and you can absorb good writing from any genre or format. So read widely, anything you can your hands on. It’s the best way to learn the craft of writing, and the best way to figure out what you like and don’t like.

Then write a lot. The more you do something, the better you’ll get at it—usually—and writing is no exception. Everything will be easier the more you do it.

And finally, learn as much as you possibly can about the business you want to get into. Because it is a business, and it has its own ins and outs and ways of functioning, and if you don’t understand the inner workings of the publishing industry, you’re gonna find it hard to break in. Case in point: some seven years ago, I thought I wanted to write romance novels. Someone had told me it was ‘easy’ to get published in romance—I’ll take a break for laughter here; no, it isn’t ‘easy’ to get published in any genre—and I thought I’d give it a try. So I wrote a synopsis and shipped it off to the biggest romance publisher in the world, Harlequin. (I should probably mention that at this point I hadn’t actually written a book. I just had an idea for a story, wrote a two page synopsis, put it in an envelope, and hoped for the best.) A couple of weeks later I got a response: a two page rejection letter detailing everything that was wrong with my synopsis and outlining suggestions for what I could do to fix it.

Now I know that this is code for ‘fix this and send it back to me.’ Then, I didn’t know anything except that I’d gotten rejected. So I put the letter in a drawer, never looked at the manuscript again, and basically shot myself in the foot. If I’d known a little more about the industry and how it works, I might have gotten published a whole lot sooner.

Just goes to show.

***

A CUTTHROAT BUSINESS rolls out later this month from PublishingWorks.  You can secure a signed bookplate for your copy by contacting Bente through her website - www.jenniebentley.com.

A nation mourns José Saramago. (The Portugal News)

The Fremont (California) Unified school board once again puts the kibosh on the study of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina by an Advanced Placement English class. (San Jose Mercury News)

Vanessa Thorpe examines a new UK literacy program inspired by Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia projects. (Guardian Books Blog)

Steinbeck auction fails to excite bidders. (Salon)

Stephenie Meyer is “burned out on vampires…” (GalleyCat)

…Besides, as Arifa Akbar points out, today’s vampire is a “needy, neurotic wimp.” (The Independent)

Kids say the darndest things.. and they’re not far off the mark. (The Second Pass)

Speaking on writers getting paid to write, Elissa Bassist looks at the prickly issue of turning words into cold, hard cash. (The Rumpus)

The “White House gatecrashers” Michaele and Tareq Salahi are poised to cash in on their famewhoredom with a book. (FOXNews)

Clive Cussler’s “Sahara” courtroom crusade continues. (Reuters)

On this day in 1857 Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was published. Critics now regard it as the one of the most important and influential collections of 19th century poetry, but the newspapers of the day thought it full of “all the putresence of the human heart,” and the courts excised six poems found to be “in contempt of the laws which safeguard religion and morality.” (Today in Literature)

“I’ve had two proposals since I’ve been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.”

-Ruth Rendell

.

.

.

Katherine Hepburn reveals much, posthumously, through accomplished biographer, Charlotte Chandler, in I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING: KATHERINE HEPBURN, A PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY.

Graham Bowley tells of the August 2008 climbing disaster on K2, the world’s toughest climb, in NO WAY DOWN.

Historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, takes readers to school to good review by The Washington Post in HISTORY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT.

DENIAL: A MEMOIR OF TERROR, by Jessica Stern, throttles a why out of her career choice as one of the world’s leading experts on violence.

From the Simon and Schuster YouTube description:

From the bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, comes a spectacularly compelling second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.

Pregnancy, childbirth, and parental attachment metaphors abound in this business. Strain at the plot arc and grind your teeth through the editing pains and you’ve given birth (or at least served as midwife) to a new thing, a wobbly creature you christen with a title, then swaddle in cover art. Endure criticism and it stings like having your baby defamed as hard-on-the-eyes. Ask many a writer and you’ll hear that the task of peddling a manuscript is nothing short of turning out your very flesh and blood into the cold, cruel world.

Life is hard, but literature is a nursery of horrors.

Or is it?

AuthorScoop has invited authors of every stripe to weigh in, three at a time on Thursdays, on one question:

Is your book your baby?

(view the entire essay collection here)

……………………………………….

“Hello, my name is Jessica Brody and I am the proud mother of three books…with another on the way. The parallel between writing books and being a parent is not accidental. It’s a brilliant comparison. I don’t have any “real” children so I can’t say with absolute certainty that writing and publishing a book is exactly like gestating and giving birth to a child, but I can say it’s as close as I’m going to get…for a while anyway. At 30 years old, I’m in no rush to have children. I’m not even sure I’ll have any ever. Even as all of my friends are starting to multiply with offspring, I feel content in my existence as a writer. I’ve heard mothers say that they weren’t “fulfilled” until they had their children. I feel the same way about my books. I didn’t feel like my life was on track, like I had found my true purpose, until I started writing for a living.

My books are my children. They start with a planted seed. They’re gestated, molded, shaped, and instilled with wisdom until they’re ready to face the world on their own. I try my best to prepare them for what they’ll encounter on the outside, but in the end, they’re on their own. And I just have to sit back and hold my breath while the world receives them. I have no control over what or who will affect them. If they’ll be faced with kind words or hurtful ones. All I can do is be there to support them through the good times and the bad. Because no matter what happens to them, I will always love them. Because each one of them has a tiny piece of my soul within it. Each one of them is my pride and joy. And I’m proud of them no matter what.

And isn’t that the very definition of a good parent?”

-bestselling teen and adult author, Jessica Brody

.

***

“If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard the comparison of a writer’s work to his child, I wonder if it would take the sting out of writing for only hope and heartburn?  Probably not.  But no matter, the question is: is it true?  Is each story a spawn?

In a word, or three – not at all.  Not for me, at any rate.

This has less do to with what I think of my writing than it does with how I think of my children.  From the moment I knew they were there, they were never mine.  Even earlier than that, in the days before I realized that everything was about to change, or change again, the DNA had already merged; the match was in the tinder.

After that, nothing beyond my dumb animal functions of chewing the choicest feed and resting when the hooves and hide told me to was going to make much of a difference.  That baby, to an extent, was what it was going to be from the first spark, and all very much beyond my control.

And no plea or plan I owned had any bearing on labor and delivery, that’s for sure.

Making a baby is easy.  Writing is hard.

It’s is an act of will, and I’m not exactly known for my flint and iron.  As such, I can’t relate my work to a cosmic roll of the dice and the ensuing biological avalanche.  My inertia or distraction, thank god, never kept a fetus from growing her fingernails or hooking up her little gall bladder pump to her small intestine.

It really comes down to what I imagine I can take credit for.  The word ‘pride’ has never sat snuggly in the hole that each of my daughters has scooped out of my heart. What I feel for them is far purer than what I feel for anything I’ve written.  They are a product of all their world, inside and out.  My writing is more of me than my children ever could (or should) be.  It’s mine.  They are not.

Of course that means a small, bound universe fails in its entirety when I don’t write it right, and it’s all my fault.  But I know the difference.  Ruin a child and you’ve committed the gravest sin.  Ruin a manuscript and, in godlike prerogative, you can stir the deluge, commission an ark, and try it again - albeit perhaps in the employ of a new pen name.  (And a new agent, if you’ve really mucked it up.)

The biggest challenge in handling my babies is doing it well.  With the writing, the fight is more of a joust with the Devil.  He whispers sweet stingingly that I don’t have to do it at all.  It’s much harder to rouse my artistic diligence than it is to surrender myself to the mostly-happy obligations of family life.  Praise for one certainly tingles in an entirely different place than for the other.  Same goes for the pain.

Of course, all of this may simply mean that I’m doing it wrong, either the mothering part or the writing.  Holy hell, what if it’s both?”

-Jamie Mason, novelist and AuthorScoop editor

***

“Are my books my babies? Well, now…you’re asking the least maternal person I know, who never wants children, so I’d have to give the potentially-controversial answer: I like my books more than I could ever love a child. There’s a definite connection with creativity and production, although with a child you have to take what God gives you. With books? In the main, I’m the one in control, barring recalcitrant characters and their unpredictable shenanigans.

I don’t get morning sickness. I get all-day excitement. The ‘new-book fizz’ in the pit of my stomach when I realise a new idea will fly, and the only cure isn’t ginger biscuits, but to sit down and write until the voices in my head shut up.

Gestation? I think I’d go mad if I had to wait nine months to finish a book! I’m a fast writer and the longest I’ve taken to write anything of note was five and a half months. The quickest novel I wrote took me two and a half. I’m impatient, and don’t like the thought of lumbering around with a steadily-increasing bookbaby waiting to make its way in the world. Luckily, timescale isn’t down to Mother Nature. It’s down to no-one else but me; a fact which greatly appeals to the control freak in me. Babies are a lottery and a thing apart. Books are entirely me and mostly under my control. I’m too much of a narcissist to present the world with something that’s down to chance and 50% its father’s issue. Either a narcissist or an approval-whore.

All of the above is not to say I’m a conveyor belt of prose, churning out product with little or no care for each book. I love each ‘baby’ individually and intensely while it needs me, but when they’re done, tire of them very quickly. “Okay, you’re done. Your story’s told, I’m going to kick you out of the nest now ’cause I have another batch of eggs waiting to hatch. Go. Make me some money.”

Is my book my baby? Well, I love my ‘children’ but it’s not unconditional. I pick them to pieces and criticise in ways no loving mother ever would. When my babies are born, they are ugly and I have no problems with telling them so. I see their potential, but wouldn’t think twice about telling them, “You’re not good enough.”

I think books are a more intimate production than a child could ever be, because they are 100% of me. They require no father, and don’t develop their own personality. They don’t make their own way in the world and change and grow - they’re static. Frozen pieces of Scarlett Parrish as she was at the time of writing. Like an embarrassing school photo plastered on the internet for everyone to point and laugh at.

I think publishing a book is closer to masturbating in public rather than having sex and producing a child.

I also think I’d be a terrible mother.”

-erotica author, Scarlett Parrish

Ellie Kemper, better known as Erin on NBC’s “The Office,” will publish her debut novel (co-written with her sister), in 2012. (New York Magazine)

Carolyn Kellogg has a bit of fun with the latest pronouncement of the death of fiction. (LATimes)

Peter Geoghegan examines how the dying art of letter writing robs us of the “loquacious letters and epistolary exchanges between authors.” (Guardian Books Blog)

Boris Kagarlitsky recaps Moscow’s Fifth International Book Festival. (The Moscow Times)

Catch up on the latest literary news with Book Buzz. (USAToday)

Henriette Lazaridis Power goes in search of the elusive omniscient. (The Millions)

Jessica Digiacinto wrestles with the nuances of writing sex scenes. (Lit Drift)

M. Rebekah Otto tries to find peace with the “suburban malaise” of New Yorker fiction. (The Rumpus)

Aisha Sultan offers some tips on getting the kiddos to read this summer. (Chicago Tribune)

R.I.P. Peg Zwecker, fashion writer. (KansasCity.com)

On this day in 1842, the writer-reporter-wit Ambrose Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. Those familiar with Bierce usually approach him through his Civil War stories and then stay to enjoy, or at least marvel at, his celebrated aphorisms and definitions. These offer a scoff for every situation, and can seem as bitter as they are brief, as in “Once: enough.” (Today in Literature)

“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”

-W.H. Auden

.

.

.

I’m pretty sure Glenn Beck’s been braced for this type of review for his first novel, THE OVERTON WINDOW.  I’m pretty sure he’s donned his cup, so go ahead and read what The LA Times had to say.  One has to assume that Mr. Beck is impervious to pain.

The Washington Post showers praise on the paperback release of The Man Booker Prize winner for 2009, Adam Fould’s THE QUICKENING MAZE.

Can’t claim to know a lot about zombies or comics, but the artwork samples and review of Brian Keene’s THE LAST ZOMBIE might intrigue those so inclined.

Laurie Wagner Buyer earns a high-praise review in January Magazine for her memoir, WHEN I CAME WEST.

The Scholastic Channel poses 5 questions to children’s author Pam Muñoz Ryan:

Alec Michod chats it up with “unclassifiable” novelist Jennifer Egan. (The Rumpus)

Peter Temple takes the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award (and $42,000) for his novel Truth. (The Trust Company)

Laura Miller looks at the “democratization of slush” in the “brave new self-published world.” (Salon)

M.A. Orthofer dissents. (The Literary Saloon)

A collection of signed Faulkners and some of the author’s personal items fetch over $800,000 at auction. (AP)

Kerri Macdonald profiles street poet Robert Samuel Snyderman. (NYTimes)

Katherine Jackson planning the release of a Michael Jackson coffee-table book to coincide with the one-year anniversary of his death. (Newsday)

Apple moves three million iPads in eighty days. (GalleyCat)

Ben Greenman laments the lost art of letter-writing. (The Daily Beast)

Neil Gaiman’s introduction to Stories underscores the divide between literary and genre fiction. (Guardian Books Blog)

“On this day in 1961 John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent was published. The book was written during Steinbeck’s despair that fame or friends had led him away from “true things” to “shiny easy things,” and with a hope that he could “slough off nearly fifteen years and go back and start again at the split path where I went wrong.” The first reviews were mixed, though Steinbeck would get the Nobel the following year.” (Today in Literature)

“Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.”

-Robert Frost

.

.

.

Journalist Julie Kramer strikes a third success with SILENCING SAM, a Riley Spatz mystery with no small amount of verisimilitude gained from Ms. Kramer’s time as an investigative reporter with WCCO - TV in Minnesota.

ARCHITECTS OF POWER: ROOSEVELT, EISENHOWER, AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY, by Philip Terzian, draws parallels from what we want now to what we wanted then.

The Los Angeles Times likes the windup, but isn’t so sure about the delivery of Mark Kurlansky’s treatise on Dominican baseball players, THE EASTERN STARS.

And some people will no doubt benefit from THE COMPLETE IDIOTS GUIDE TO ADULT ADHD.

Allison Winn Scotch has struck NYTimes bestselling gold with TIME OF MY LIFE and THE DEPARTMENT OF LOST AND FOUND.  Now she’s back with a third ringer, THE ONE THAT I WANT.  Summer reading is in full swing and THE ONE THAT I WANT crops up on recommended lists all over the place.

We’d like to thank her for taking the time to be part of our “5 Minutes Alone” interview series.

AuthorScoop: What was your very first publication credit?

Allison: My first publication credit is kind of nebulous because the first thing I wrote - professionally, aside from my college paper - was ghost-written. I was working in PR, ghostwriting for celebrities, when I was hired to ghostwrite a book for The Knot on wedding flowers. Though my name was supposed to be on the spine (I can’t remember in what capacity, but in some capacity), it wasn’t, and thus…no one really knew that I did it. (Trust me, I won’t go into the details but I was IRATE.) Anyhoo, the upside was that this gig led to my first bylined piece, which was an article for Bride’s, also on wedding flowers. So even though I don’t have a lot of positive memories of that very first experience, I’m grateful for it because it definitely opened a lot of doors.

AuthorScoop: Tell us about your latest release.

Allison: I wanted to take the themes I explored in my last book, Time of My Life, and flip everything on its head, while still delving into the concept of how we – and my characters – can create more fulfilling, fleshed-out lives. So for The One That I Want, it was this whole concept of, “What happens when you think you have a perfect life, and it totally gets shattered to pieces?” In this day and age, not an entirely uncommon – unfortunately – scenario. In The One That I Want, Tilly Farmer is thirty-two years old and has the perfect life she always dreamed of: married to her high school sweetheart, working as a school guidance counselor, trying for a baby. One afternoon at the local fair, everything changes. She wanders into a fortune teller’s tent and meets an old childhood friend, who gives her the gift of clarity. Tilly starts seeing things: her alcoholic father relapsing, staggering out of a bar with his car keys in hand; her husband uprooting their happy, stable life, a packed U-Haul in their driveway. And even more disturbing, these visions start coming true. Suddenly Tilly’s perfect life, so meticulously mapped out, seems to be crumbling around her. And as she furiously races to keep up with - and hopefully change - her destiny, she faces the question: Which life does she want? The one she’s carefully nursed for decades, or the one she never considered possible?

AuthorScoop: Aside from your own hard work, who (or what) else do you feel has contributed to your success?

Allison: I think that I’ve surrounded myself with really good, solid, high-quality people. My agent is a dear friend and trustworthy and hard-working and full of kindness and integrity. Too many authors settle for the first agent who offers, which, in my opinion, can be a mistake. Your agent has to be your biggest advocate, and if he or she isn’t, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. The same holds true for my editors. I opted to leave my first publishing house because it wasn’t the right fit for me. I ended up taking a lower advance from an editor and imprint who I thought were better long-term career fits, and they were. As an author, you’re pretty solitary in a lot of what you do, but having the right support around you - and for me, that means nice, dedicated, funny, honest, hard-working people - is really important.

AuthorScoop: At what time of day or night do you do your best writing?

Allison: Well, in an ideal world, I’d probably have the luxury of writing at night. I’ve always been a night owl, and tend to get big spurts of energy after 8pm. BUT. I have two young kids, so I DON’T have this luxury! I need to be in bed fairly early if I’m going to have the stamina to get through the day, so to that end, these days, I write in the mornings. I drop my son off at school, then head home to write for a few hours. Trust me, it’s not always easy, but I’ve found that if I don’t get it out of the way before lunch, I’ll procrastinate the whole day through.

AuthorScoop: Finally, what advice would you give to new or unpublished writers?

Allison: Never assume you are as good as you think you are. What I mean by that is that many new writers - and I CERTAINLY fell  into this category, so I know of what I speak - think their first work (or works) are genius. And the simple truth is that they’re not. That there is SO MUCH to learn about writing fiction that sometimes, those early manuscripts are just there as a learning tool. There’s no shame in that. I have one and a half unpublished manuscripts too, and I still take heavy notes and constructive criticism from my editor and agent. I revel in that. I love that they help me take my work to the next level: that’s what they’re there for. So be  open to constructive criticism and be okay setting aside a manuscript and starting fresh. It’s not a failure, it’s a stepping stone.

***

You can snag Allison Winn Scotch’s, THE ONE THAT I WANT, anywhere you can land a new book - in brick and mortar bookstores or online, with ease, from the handy link at www.allisonwinn.com.

From the YouTube description:

Interview with bestselling author Joanne Harris at the President Hotel, Moscow, on community curation and life beyond publishers:

Roy Greenslade looks at Patrick Nicholson’s 30 year journey to publication. (The Guardian)

Sam Tanenhaus continues his conversation with former New Yorker fiction editor Charles McGrath on the subject of John Updike’s archives. (NYTimes)

Check out the fascinating story of the “writer who couldn’t read.” (NPR)

Carol Rumens returns with text of, and commentary on, a new poem of the week: Thomas Hood’s “A Parental Ode to My son, Aged Three Years and Five Months.” (Guardian Books Blog)

Andrew Hammond looks at the rising profile of Saudi Arabian novelists. (Reuters)

M.A. Orthofer catches up on the eReader price wars. (The Literary Saloon)

Andersen Press is pushing back against reports that a forthcoming book sexualizes Anne Frank. (theBookseller.com)

James Fallows shares six ways of looking at the Nook. (The Atlantic)

Jo Parfitt shares five rules for writing your life story. (Absolute Write)

“On this day in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that found Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to be obscene. This landmark decision came three years after the book’s first publication in America, thirty years since its publication in Europe, and a hundred years since Comstock began to patrol the mails for such “vampire literature.”" (Today in Literature)

“Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.”

-Napolean Hill

.

.

.