Get ready for our next Algonquin Book Club event coming up on March 3 at 7:00 p.m. EST!  Tune into the live webcast to hear Stephen King in conversation with Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family. While online, you’ll be able to chat with other book club participants and submit questions to be answered during the event.  Make sure you take a look at the Algonquin Book club website for an excerpt from A Friend of the Family, a reading group guide, and more.

We have 10 copies of A Friend of the Family up for grabs to those who want to participate in the live webcast. Just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page to enter. Good luck!

About A Friend of the Family:

A skilled internist with a thriving practice in suburban New Jersey, Pete Dizinoff has a devoted wife, an impressive house, and a son, Alec, on whom he’s pinned all his hopes. But Pete never counted on the wild card: Laura, his best friend’s daughter—ten years older than Alec, irresistibly beautiful, with a past so shocking that it’s never spoken of …

* A Washington Post Best Book of the Year selection
* A New York Times Editors’ Choice
* A Bookpage Best Fiction of the Year selection

“Such an incisive diagnosis of aspirational America that someone should hand out copies at Little League games and ballet recitals . . . Horrifyingly plausible and deeply poignant, A Friend of the Family will leave you shaken and chastened–and grateful for the warning.” –The Washington Post

“Stunning . . . An unqualified success . . . Grodstein’s sentences are finely made and precisely fitted to one another and her story . . . If there’s any justice in the world, A Friend of the Family will be her breakout book . . . She has written a novel that will leave her reader sitting up, sifting the evidence in the dead of night.” –The Boston Globe

“Grodstein, with one previous novel to her credit, has succeeded in shattering the image of suburban happiness. Her perceptive portrayals demonstrate the thinness of the veneer that separates bliss from gloom . . . [The story] is told with great understanding and sensitivity, gripping readers so that they will find the book hard to put down.” –The Chicago Tribune

“Involving at every level: character, plot, language. One of the more complicated portraits of a father’s love for his son we’ve ever read.” —McSweeney’s

“A persuasive indictment of a certain kind of privileged narrow-mindedness . . . in the best tradition of parenting gone catastrophically awry.” –O: The Oprah Magazine

“Grodstein’s harsh, honest prose makes this haunting tale worthwhile.” –People

“Beautifully captures the ever striving angst of parents who will take any step to ensure their children’s lives are easier or better.” –USA Today

“Grodstein’s superb storytelling entices us to keep plunging deeper despite dread of an ominous undertow.” –Providence Journal

This was the year of displaced persons.

The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer. The untold story of Hungarian Jews forced to flee as Europe’s tragedy unfolds, renders the unthinkable poetic.

Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin. The story of Eilis who leaves her small village in Ireland in the 1950′s for Brooklyn, where she learns to live away from the only home she’s ever known.

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan. Manny, the manager of a Red Lobster, wishes his last shift would never end because after tonight, the restaurant will close its doors forever and he will be demoted to a position at a nearby Olive Garden.

These stories, fueled by hope and despair, where no one leaves of their own accord, are filled with longing for the people and places left behind. With each one, I felt the way a child feels when suddenly separated from his parents on the street–that first struggle with being disconnected, a rippling anxiety, and the hopeful glimpse of a familiar skirt, that isn’t your mother’s after all.

Martha Southgate, author of The Taste of Salt

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Ambitious and genre-breaking in an unexpected and surprising way, this novel’s acclaim is well-deserved. Egan swings for the fences and hits them.

Open City by Teju Cole. Another surprising, ambitious winner, this time from a debut novelist. An elegiac tone poem to post-9/11 New York City narrated by a fascinating, complex protagonist.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans. Like Egan, Evans has received great acclaim for her work. And like Cole, it’s her debut–in this case, a collection of short stories. Like Egan’s the acclaim is deserved; like Cole’s,it’s a book you shouldn’t miss.

Hillary Jordan, author of When She Woke

A Hundred and One Nights by Benjamin Buccholz. This debut novel about Afghanistan is a spike in the heart. To quote my own blurb for it: “Fearless and seductive. . . . A powerful testimony to the insanity of war and the undeniable demands of love.”

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. I’d follow Ann just about anywhere, including the muggy, buggy Amazon.

Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie. What a marvelous, joyful writer. “Do Not Go Gentle” has to be one of my favorite stories ever.

Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson was inventive, sharp, alarming, surprising, and occasionally heartbreaking. It was everything I love in a novel, plus art, plus bad parents, plus bad children. Read it in a day.

One of my students turned me on to David Gordon’s The Serialist, which features porn, savage violence, and grown men dressing like their mothers. While these are not the sorts of things I usually go for in a novel, The Serialist was surprising in the best ways – hyper funny and fun to read.

Jesse Browner’s Everything Happens Today was also a true pleasure – the story of a too-smart, too-sensitive Greenwich Village teenager who grapples with life, death, sex, and regret all in the course of a memorable day in which he keeps forgetting to walk the dog.

Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. The Amazon. A missing scientist. An  Anaconda about to swallow a boy. Patchett could write a grocery list and have me in a state of awe and this latest novel is absolutely enthralling.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. A thrillingly real look at a bonafide genius who could be as nasty and self-centered as he was brilliant about changing the world. Reading this, I had nightmares that Jobs was following me and yelling at me–but I’d read it again in a heartbeat.

Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson. A sympathetic portrait of a complicated, complex, and sometimes brutal man, Hendrickson’s bio shows the full beating heart of Hemingway.

Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies

Emily Alone by Stewart O’Nan, who became a new favorite. I went on to read several other novels by him including Wish You Were Here and Last Night at the Lobster.  A wonderfully detailed and absorbing portrayal of a old age and solitude.  It’s amazing how carefully and humbly and beautifully O’Nan casts his spell.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Eagan. I know this novel garnered a lot of praise and earned many awards, which I’d add, are well deserved! I felt mesmerized by these interlocking narratives and Eagan’s ability to capture so many different sensibilities.  I also felt as an older novelist that I was getting a glimpse of the styles, wild inventions, about the concerns of a new “postmodern” generation of novelists.

Room by Emma Donoghue. Hands down, this was my favorite novel of the year, and up there with other “permanent” favorites.  A haunting  novel  from the language and perspective of a five-year old—the voice slowly and quietly invaded my thinking so that even after I put the novel down, I was thinking about the world and hearing language in the style of young Jack —the last time I remember this happening  in such an absorbing way was with A Hundred Years of Solitude by García Marquez.

Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved Clara

Nothing I read this year gave me more pleasure than Steven Millhauser’s short story, “Getting Closer,” published in The New Yorker in January. As for books, my favorites in 2011 were the widely praised debut novels by Chad Harbach—The Art of Fielding—and Karen Russell—Swamplandia!. This year was also the centenary of Mervyn Peake’s birth, which the Overlook Press marked by releasing a gorgeous, illustrated edition of Peake’s peerless fantasy epic, The Gormenghast Trilogy. That was the book I most enjoyed rereading.

Robert Goolrick, author of A Reliable Wife

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield — If the words Garamond, Baskerville or Helvetica give you a thrill, this book tells you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about how and why type faces are what they are and how they got that way. Fascinating and odd.

Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrere — A memoir-as-novel that explores the effect on two lovers of the endless aftershocks of a tsunami in Sri Lanka. A wise, kind and infinitely sad work about the ripples and quakes of the human heart.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey — This book doesn’t come out until February, but when it does, you’ll find a brilliant first novel that continues to enchant long after the snow has melted. If Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marques had written a book together, this would be it.

Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here

The Ringer, by Jenny Shank: Please don’t judge this book by the cover. I happen to know that the author cried for two days when she saw it. As good as Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is (and I wrote a blurb for it which started with the word “spectacular”), The Ringer may be even better. Like Harbach’s Fielding, baseball serves only as a framing device for this promising debut about such durable American themes as race, class, and family. Make no mistake though, Shank knows baseball like the sister of the major league ballplayer she is.

Zazen, by Vanessa Veselka: At turns hilarious, unsettling, and improbably sweet, Veselka’s debut is, above all, a highly engaging, and totally unique experience, which will have you re-reading passages and dog-earing pages. But best of all, in the end, Zazen is that rare novel which dares to be hopeful in the face of despair, and succeeds. Veselka has a shit-ton of voice, and you know within the first paragraph that you’re in for a ride. She could write about dog turds and I’d happily read it.

Damascus, by Joshua Mohr: The third novel from San Fransisco’s Joshua Mohr is his best to date. Mohr is the bard of the underbelly, and the Mission District is his playground. Part Harry Crews, part Charles Bukowski, and part Franz Kafka, Mohr will make you squirm, laugh, recognize, and take pause. Behind his wayward and dissolute characters, burns the clear-eyed moral vision of a very unique artist.

Robert Morgan, author of Boone

On China by Henry Kissinger. This is an extraordinary survey of Chinese history and culture from the beginnings to the present day. Part memoir, part meditation, part analysis and prediction, Kissinger’s magnum opus gives us a detailed and authoritative narrative of how China and the United States and the West reached the present state of their complex relations.

The Penguin Book of English Verse by Paul Keegan. Just when you thought there were no surprises to be found in the canon of English poetry along comes this selection to reveal new examples from both the famous and obscure. Poems are showcased more than the poets. Both refreshing and comprehensive.

Wildflowers & Plant Communities of the Southern Appalachian Mountains & Piedmont by Timothy P. Spira. The photographs are stunning, the text vivid, learned, succinct and alive. Need I say more?

Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle

Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne. The truth about the West is always more amazing than the myth.

White Fang, by Jack London. Who tells a better nature story?

Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero, by Chris Matthews.  JFK was….elusive, but Matthews reminds us why, in 1969, when Americans were polled on who should be added to Mount Rushmore, they picked the 35th president.

My Lewis renaissance has also included a visit to his boyhood home in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, site of the real “Main Street” which launched his career, along with a visit to the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Museum, which featured everything from manuscript pages full of marginalia, to his actual Nobel commendation, not to mention dozens of unflattering photos, a video presentation, and Lewis’s writing desk–well worth the price of admission (free!). Additionally worth noting to potential tourists: you fill find no shortage of feed corn in Sauk Center, Minnesota, and the liquor store is only four blocks from the museum. Oh, and if you wanna have cheese fries at the “Sauk Hop” diner, make sure you tell them to melt the cheese.

Expect a few updates on my Summer of Lewis at Three Guys, One Book.

– Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here

When I was asked to name my all-time favorite summer read, I immediately went blank on when I’d read my favorite books. So I’m going to cop out a little here and name my favorite reading experience of this summer. It is Stoner, by John Williams. This wonderful novel was recently reissued by the invaluable NYRB press. It tells the story of how one man, raised on a hardscrabble farm, is awakened to the life of the mind. Things don’t proceed so well from there–but the novel is so exquisitely written and so particular, sharp and compassionate in its observations that it made me happy to have read it, even though many sad things happen. Winter, summer, spring or fall, it’s a book I will long treasure.

–Martha Southgate, author of The Taste of Salt

My favorite all-time summer book is The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin, which I read on a long car ride to the Delaware shore when I was maybe ten or eleven. My little sister was reading it too, but we only had one copy between us, and I remember being stuck in Jersey Turnpike traffic tussling over that single paperback while our little brother slept and our parents warned us to stop bickering or else. Or else! I think it’s the only book I’ve ever read that was worth getting pinched over, or yelled at in the parking lot of the Molly Pitcher rest stop. Give it to a kid you love before the summer’s through.

– Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family

I can’t get enough of stories about extended families who reunite in their summer homes along the Atlantic coast. I am reassured by their familiar patterns — the matriarch arriving early to stock the pantry and pull fresh sheets, the middle child, sensible and good, who picks up a pie from a farm stand on the way, the black sheep who never calls, arrives late, and still finds her favorite cereal in the cupboard the next morning despite years of bad behavior – returning to each other again and again unbroken.

This summer it was Stewart O’ Nan’s Wish You Were Here where at first I was the prowler staying at the motel in town, not yet tied up in their history. At dusk, I was poised outside their crowded screened front porch watching them lean back in their chairs with their cocktails, eating wheat thins with shrimp dip, knowing that I’ll take that step inside soon but hanging back anyway. And by the last one hundred pages, I’m the uninvited guest, sitting in the parlor sipping tea, with everything I know about them between us.

– Donia Bijan, Author of Maman’s Homesick Pie

Sabrina and I hiked through France this summer, where we were assaulted from all sides by dazzling landscapes and storybook villages. Seeking shelter from this bombardment of the picturesque, I ducked into Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, only to find myself equally besieged by beauty. This dark but lively, vast multi-generational saga is a world unto itself. The book broke and mended and broke my heart a thousand times. I have a frail constitution and a low tolerance for such an embarrassment of riches. As battered by the wonders of Mann’s book as I was by the French countryside, unable to escape either, I went mad. But for those with a greater capacity for splendor than I, I recommend (caveat notwithstanding) the alternative universe of Buddenbrooks.

– Steve Stern, Author of The Frozen Rabbi

WM: You’ve had three books published the last few years, so no doubt you’ve experienced that wobbly What’s The Next Book feeling. I’m going through that again right now—I have an idea, a few pages, a lot of talk, but it remains to be seen whether or not it’ll “take” (like a skin graft or organ transplant or something). How does that work for you? I mean, I know that The Wilder Life was at one time just a blobby concept and I had lots of outlandish notions about what it was going to be, but it’s hard to remember all that tentative stuff once the vestiges are edited out. Have you had a different process for starting each of your books, or have you come to recognize the steps?

LG: Okay, so to answer your strikingly relevant question, I’ve just come down with a serious case of the Next Book Terrors, and while I’m doing my best to push the fear out of my mind and press forward, I’m actually very freaked out that all my ideas are bad ones and this new book will fall apart. The advice I would give my students in this situation is that a draft is only that, a draft – it’s supposed to be imperfect and full of misdirections and strange ideas and narrative cul-de-sacs that will eventually be edited out. The problem is, as you’ve mentioned, it’s so hard to remember that your earlier drafts of earlier novels were once just as imperfect as your current draft is, since a) it’s been so long since you wrote them and b) they’re all cleaned up now and stylish in their beautiful covers. But anyway, I’m doing my best to take the advice I give so casually to my students. Right now I’m just pressing forward with the draft of my next novel, because what else is there to do? And eventually it will be something readable and maybe even good – won’t it? Won’t it? What about you? How do you get started on your next project? And how do you push away The Fear?

WM: New projects are weird. Just like you tell your students, I try to tell myself that nothing in my fledgling work is too important yet—it can all change, it can all be cut. And yet at the same time, everything is important at this stage. My proto-manuscript sometimes contains of dozens of separate documents, each one containing a tiny fragment from a moment I Sat Down To Work On The New Thing. (If you “start” a project enough times, you stop worrying about false starts.) All these little documents are like seedlings and I know not all of them are going to make it, but I nurture them all for a while, putting them in folders, afraid to throw them out. I still have a file full of the stunted paragraphs that didn’t grow and make it into The Wilder Life. It’s hard having to just forge ahead knowing at some future point some of my ideas will be abandoned, will in fact seem very stupid in retrospect. But I’m trying to get around this by insisting to myself that nothing I’m doing right now can possibly be more ridiculous than the resolution to WATCH EVERY SINGLE EPISODE OF LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. No, really: I thought that would be part of my last book, and I took the notion very seriously. For about a month. But of course my better judgment prevailed, and knowing that something in me had the sense to give up on taking diligent notes on Season 4 (that’s when Melissa Sue Anderson’s character goes blind!) helps ward off The Fear. Somehow I’ll find my way. Of course, it’s not just fear and uncertainty and mind tricks. Starting something new can be fun, right?

LG: Now you’re talking. That Mary-goes-blind episode was television at the top of its hysterical form. In fact, although at this point my memory basically consists of a toddler screaming the Dora the Explorer theme song on a loop, one image that survived parenthood’s shriveling effect is of beautiful Melissa Sue Anderson in the dark (maybe an attic?) looking all blond and gorgeous and spacy-eyed screaming, “Pa? Pa!!!” Even now, I shiver. I was obsessed with the Little House books as a kid, especially the food passages – the hog killings, the butter churnings, the county fairs. (I also liked it whenever Ma made a dress for Laura out of “lawn,” which I imagined as maybe something Lady Gaga-esque, Laura covered in blades of grass.) But the food passages were really the best; I read them again and again and imagined each feast with the careful attention of the proto- foodie. Now, as an adult, I read cookbooks like they’re novels and my favorite non- reading activity is cooking (if I may brag for a moment, I make pretty amazing toffee, do very nice things with leafy greens, and if I’m not in one of my inconsistent vegetarian periods my leg of lamb is superlative). It’s interesting to me, though, how much I’m the same person I was at 8: back then my favorite things were reading, writing, and eating, and now, if you throw in sleeping, my favorite things remain precisely the same. I think novelists are born, not made: we were the kids making up outrageous stories to our teachers in the third grade, not to get out of trouble, but just because outrageous stories made life more interesting. We were the ones mumbling to ourselves, hiding in corners with books, eschewing ballet class for the pleasures of Little House. I’m slightly more socially bearable than I was when I was a kid, but deep down, I know I’m still that dark-haired, happy little weirdo. And that knowledge makes me smile.

WM: Let’s hear it for weirdos, all right. And those Little House books made me so detail- oriented that I wanted our kitchen cabinets to be filled only with glass jars of preserves and canned beans and tomatoes. Somehow, all our boxes of Lipton Cup-of-Soup Mix and Cap’n Crunch were inauthentic to me—a sentiment that seems almost Michael Pollanesque (though I still ate the cereal). I wasn’t exactly trying to pretend that my family lived in a Dakota shanty, it’s more that I was trying to realign my reality—I wanted to see my own world with the kind of charmed sight that Laura Ingalls seemed to have when she looked at her world. Which brings to mind your comment about novelists being born, not made. I’ve always thought that became the kind of writer I am sort of by accident—after all, who ever dreams of becoming a “nonfiction writer?” (I know that “memoirist” is a lovelier term, but for me the term calls to mind wizened ladies-of-letters writing about their wealthy and conflicted childhoods in colonial Africa.) And yet, as long as I can remember, I’ve always tried to make life fit into a story: I’d mentally organize each day of summer vacation into a chapter, or try to recognize Important Plot Points when they happened, and so on. But of course, the effect I was after was something I found in fiction—a constructed life that nonetheless felt lived. And so I wonder: to what extent do you live in your own novels?

LG: I’m relieved to say that I don’t live in my novels particularly. I mean, I steal certain details from my life and insert them into my novels (usually geographic details, which is why I’m forever writing about New Jersey instead of Hawaii or Rome) but I don’t use real-life events in my books, or at least not real-life events that have happened to me. And this is because – and prepare yourself for a high-falutin’ Writerly Theory here, for which I apologize in advance – I believe happy lives are made up of short stories, not novels. Short stories are tiny moments that change people, that reverberate, that reveal, but that usually don’t totally upset the ship. We live short stories every day. Novels, on the other hand, are Big Huge Events that Permanently Rewrite Everything. I prefer a life filled with tiny moments. Big Huge Moments freak me out. I don’t know how I got this lucky, but my life is a really happy one. My novels aren’t necessarily happy. But they have to be lived by other people. And yet you write what you live! You’re telling the truth, as opposed to me, who makes crap up for a living. I have so many questions about that process (How do you decide what is true about your own past? Do you worry about offending people you write about? What made you get started?) but I think my biggest question is, Does writing memoir help you make sense of the life you’ve already lived? Do you learn as you write? And also, is now the right time to tell you I’m a really big fan?

WM: The feeling is mutual. I am reading A Friend of the Family and am having that awesome uncanny feeling that great fiction always gives me—that giddy “how is it that I am in the soul of a doctor named Pete who lives in New Jersey?” sensation that comes with becoming totally and wonderfully absorbed. It’s funny, because with The Wilder Life I learned so much about navigating back and forth between life on the page and off it. Yes, it’s strange having to decide what is true about my past, especially with this book, when I was writing about such recent experiences (often only weeks after the fact). But what I learned is that these decisions are almost never final—what you figure out at the time of writing is just one truth, and in time it coexists with all the other truths. It’s a lot like when I discovered that seeing the real Plum Creek in Minnesota didn’t displace the Plum Creek in my head. The former taught me a lot about the latter, of course, but “making sense” of something is an eternal process. I just bought a tiny original Garth Williams illustration from Little House in the Big Woods, and it shows Grandpa Ingalls carrying buckets of maple sap on a yoke—first walking towards a big tree, and then walking away. It’s a single scene with two little Grandpas, sort of like in a medieval painting, and I love that. I guess I could just write a journal or go off to an ashram to make sense of my life, but writing memoir lets me be in many different places at once, so that I can inhabit both the mystery and the resolution.

Welcome to the Algonquin Book Club! Each year we’ll be featuring four Algonquin Book Club selections at literary events held around the country and simultaneously webcast on our site. For each event, an Algonquin author will be interviewed by a notable writer. The line-up for 2011 includes:

3/21: Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies) interviewed by Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I’m Dying

4/26: Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants) interviewed by Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help

8/18: Heidi Durrow (The Girl Who Fell from the Sky) interviewed by Terry McMillan, author of Getting to Happy

10/20: Robert Goolrick (A Reliable Wife) interviewed by Patricia Cornwell, author of Port Mortuary

And already scheduled for March 2012: Lauren Grodstein (A Friend of the Family) interviewed by Stephen King, author of Full Dark, No Stars

For our first event, on March 21, 7:00pm  EST, Algonquin author Julia Alvarez will be interviewed about her beloved classic, In the Time of the Butterflies, by the critically acclaimed author Edwidge Danticat. You can tune in to the live webcast here. And the best part? At the same time you can also chat with others who are tuned in to the webcast. And if you live in Miami, you can catch the event live at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

Have you already read In the Time of the Butterflies? We’d love to hear what you think. Or is this your first time being introduced to the book? If so, pick up a copy and read along with us!

Be sure to check out our Algonquin Book Club site, which currently features an original essay from Julia Alvarez about the novel, along with a description of the book, author bios for Julia and Edwidge Danticat, a reading group guide, book club tips and ideas, and wine and recipe pairings centered around the book–including some recipes from Julia herself, as well as some recipes that were favorites of the three Mirabal Sisters, the main characters portrayed in the book.

We’ll be giving away autographed copies of In the Time of the Butterflies and Algonquin Book Club tote bags over the next three weeks. To be entered to win them all you have to do is leave a comment on our Algonquin Book Club blog posts, or tweet about it on Twitter using #AlgBookClub, or tell us your thoughts in the Discussion section on our Facebook page.

And most importantly, if you have any questions for Julia Alvarez, post them in any of the aforementioned places and we’ll submit them to the moderator to potentially be asked at the live event.

Happy reading!

Heidi Durrow (in center with black scarf), Caroline Leavitt (to Heidi's right), and other authors at AWP

AWP doesn’t really stand for awesome writers party, but it sort of should. I’m in the midst of my vintage beaded sweater and red cowboy boots tour but I’m reporting from the confines of my Chicago hotel. Held in two huge hotels (there were actually guides along the way to shepherd all the lost souls who were wandering around looking for a cookie crumb trail to get them where they needed to go), this AWP seemed bigger and better than any other I’ve attended. I happily spent an hour roaming the book stalls and chatting up the staff of literary magazines, independent publishers and more.

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Who wouldn’t want to have the charismatic, hilarious Lizzie Skurnick as moderator for your panel? Well, we would for our panel of Algonquin writers and writers who’ve appeared in New Stories from the South, but Lizzie got lost in the maze of the hotel (you had to transfer from one hotel to the next), and showed up about ten minutes late, but not to worry. The wonderful Tayari Jones took control until Lizzie showed up and then Tayari gave a gorgeous reading of her novel, Silver Sparrow. Rahu Mehta read from Quarantine, and Lauren Grodstein from A Friend of the Family, and Kevin Knight read a story from New Stories from the South. I, of course, read from Pictures of You. The loveliest thing was we all declared this reading our official Valentine to Algonquin Books, who saved our lives, shined up our careers to a new glowing luster, and absolutely were gods and goddesses to all of us.

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Of course, part of the fun of AWP is mingling with other writers, and the night I arrived, I was thrilled to meet up with Eleanor Brown (I was her first blurber for the The Weird Sisters and we had become fast friends on FB before we met), the incredible Algonquin author Heidi Durrow (The Girl Who Fell From the Sky), Rebecca Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters), Sarah Pekkanen (Skipping a Beat), Tanya Egan Gilbson (How to Buy a Love of Reading), Barbara Drummond Mead (the president of Reading Group Choices), Therese Fowler (Reunion), and Siobhan Fallon (You Know Where the Men Have Gone). Over dinner, we talked about how to stretch two outfits through a week of tour and why you have to resign yourself to being sort of dirty no matter what you do, why such a group of smart, literate women really loves trashy reality TV shows like The Bachelor (I admitted to Rock of Love), and then we all recited the worst Amazon review we had ever received in our literary lifetimes (yes, we still remember them word for word).

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I had to whisk out again to get to Chicago so I didn’t have a chance to see any of the great presenters (which still makes me yearn), but I can’t wait for the next AWP.

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–Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

Thanks, USA Today, for writing about the Algonquin Book Club series, featuring Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies) with Edwidge Danticat, Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants) with Kathryn Stockett, Heidi Durrow (The Girl Who Fell from the Sky) with Terry McMillan, Robert Goolrick (A Reliable Wife) with Patricia Cornwell, and Lauren Grodstein (A Friend of the Family) with Stephen King. For dates, times, and venues, click here.

We’ll have many more great pairings in 2012, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, please join us for our first Algonquin Book Club selection: In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez. We’ll be hosting the live webcast of Edwidge Danticat interviewing Julia Alvarez on March 21, 7:00pm, at the amazing Books & Books in Miami. In the weeks leading up to the live event, you can join the conversation with others via Facebook, Twitter, and our blog. To sweeten the pot, each week we’ll be giving away Algonquin Book Club tote bags, Advance Review Copies, new books hot off the press, and other swag.

Questions? Comments? We’d love to hear your feedback! Email michael(at)algonquin(dot)com.

We were absolutely thrilled that Flyleaf recently hosted an Algonquin Book Club evening with special guest Heidi Durrow, author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, her debut novel now out in paperback.

Heidi Durrow

The room was packed to the gills, with audience members noshing on cheese and sipping on winter beer. Algonquin’s Marketing Director Craig Popelars started off the night as only he could, with an inspiring ode to book clubs written to the tune of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby.”

Craig Popelars

Heidi Durrow, winner of Barbara Kingsolver’s prestigious Bellwether Prize, dazzled the audience with her dramatic reading and then had a lively Q&A with the audience.

The audience at Flyleaf

Afterward, Algonkians Chuck Adams, Kathy Pories, Ina Stern, and Michael Taeckens took to the stage and discussed various titles that are perfect for book clubs, including Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound, Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family, Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife, Jonathan Evison’s West of Here, Caroline Leavitt’s Pictures of You, Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon, Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle, and Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. They also discussed the particulars of the Algonquin Book Club, a new program that will be launching later this month with beautifully designed catalogs and a brand new website (more details to come, so stay posted!).

Kathy Pories, Chuck Adams, Ina Stern, and Michael Taeckens

The evening concluded with more partaking of wine and cheese, tons of audience members lining up to have Heidi sign their books (Flyleaf sold out of every copy!), and people loading up on Algonquin titles and other offerings, thinking about their future book club reads.

Heidi Durrow autographing her book

People waiting to get their books signed by Heidi

Thank you for a great evening, Heidi and Flyleaf!

–Megan Fishmann, Publicist

..
“Um, you’ve got to be kidding me,” my mother said, or something along those lines. “Honey, Santa Claus is make-believe. He’s like a fairy tale for Christian kids.” “What?” “It’s true,” she said. “He’s no more real than the tooth fairy.”

..

“THE TOOTH FAIRY!?”

..

Anyway, I guess when you believe in something like Santa Claus for so many formative years, it’s hard to get your head around the fact that he doesn’t exist, and that the pitter patter of what you once thought were reindeer hooves landing on your neighbors’ roofs are actually just lunatic squirrels.

..

It had become a habit with me, as we finished our yearly Christmas dinner of wonton soup and General Tso’s, to silently curse Santa for ignoring me yet again, and old habits die hard. Even now, as night falls on Christmas Eve, I look up at the sky and imagine a sleigh in the distance, shooting through the heavens, and I feel a little heartbroken for the Jewish kids who don’t know any better, and this Jewish woman who does. So to cheer myself up, I make Jewish Christmas Eve Lasagna and eat it, accompanied by a big glass or two of wine, surrounded by friends and family of all religious persuasions. It’s not as good as a fat man dropping Nintendo game systems through wide brick chimneys, but it’s much better than almost anything else.

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JEWISH CHRISTMAS EVE LASAGNA

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11/2 pounds of mixed wild mushrooms, scrubbed

Roughly chopped mixed herbs (I usually use rosemary, oregano, and thyme)

a clove or two of garlic, chopped

a shallot, chopped

your best tomato sauce (jarred, homemade, whatever you like)

fresh mozzarella (the better quality the better)

fresh ricotta (same here)

boiled lasagna noodles

olive oil

salt and pepper

..

Preheat your oven to 350. Saute the shallots and garlic in the olive oil, and then, when they’re fragrant, throw in the mushrooms. Saute them til they turn color and lose their liquid; drain the liquid, season with salt and pepper, and set aside. Spoon some tomato sauce on to the bottom of your lasagna pan. Layer the noodles, a thin layer of your fresh, good-quality ricotta, then a layer of your mushrooms (use about half), then layer the noodles, sauce, ricotta, mushrooms, another layer of noodles and then sauce. Top the whole thing with slices of fresh mozzarella. Bake, covered, for twenty minutes or so, and then uncover and let the mozzarella brown, maybe 8 or so minutes more (or run the lasagna under the broiler for a minute or two).

..

Eat it and then open lots of presents you bought for yourself: cashmere scarves, hardcover books, trips to Hawaii, the good stuff. And follow everything with the cookies and milk you set by the fireplace – you know, just in case.

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LAUREN GRODSTEIN is the author of the collection The Best of Animals and a novel, Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, which was both a Breakout Book selection from Amazon.com and a Borders Original Voices pick. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, and French. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.

Recently, I had the pleasure of grabbing a drink with Lauren and several other Algonquin staff members in New York City. We chatted about the usual topics: top advances in the industry, James Franco’s “Three’s Company” multi-media project, favorite independent bookstores in major cities. Eventually, we got around to talking about the paperback edition of A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY.

“How do you feel about the cover?” Lauren asked us.

“For the paperback?” Kathy Pories, her editor, responded. “I’m bananas about it. Why?”

“Well,” Lauren said. “I love it. I honestly do. But I also loved the hardcover as well. I mean, you’ve got two entirely different angles here. On one hand, there’s the doctor, wading out alone into the ocean, completely overwhelmed and—“

“In over his head?” I interjected.

“Exactly,” Lauren said. “But on the other hand, for the paperback, you’ve got the next door neighbor’s alluring daughter, her face practically screaming sex with that seductive glossy mouth and eyelash-batting eyes…”

And she was precisely right. Both covers—which all of us at Algonquin love—perfectly convey the message of her suspenseful and evocative story.

Lauren’s question got me thinking. Do other authors typically like their paperback covers more than their hardback ones? What about people in the publishing industry–do they tend to favor paperback redesigns? Are readers more inclined to pick up a book (let’s pretend price isn’t a factor here) if the new cover is more appealing?

I posted the question on Twitter and heard back from another of my favorite authors I worked with, Jon Clinch. “Finn‘s cover got changed for the paperback,” he wrote. “Although the new design probably stands out better on the shelf, I think it lacks the gravity of the original.”

.

When I was employed at Random House, I worked on David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, one of my favorite authors as well as one of my favorite books. The hardback jacket looked like this; the paperback cover looks like this. I have to say, I’m a much bigger fan of the hardback jacket.

I once met with an author who told me that the one thing she fought for in her contract was control over the book jacket. (Granted this was nearly fifteen years ago, so I’m not sure if this is even an option for the vast majority of authors today.) I love that instead of holding out for more money, she fought for control over how her book was presented, and over how her story’s emotional content was depicted in the cover art. I guess you’ve got to choose your own battles, right?

–Megan Fishmann, Publicist