(View entire post here)

I pass Elena Climent's wonderful mural, "At Home With Their Books," every day on my way to class at NYU. Climent did exhaustive research before she began painting the intimate work spaces of six New York writers (Washington Irving, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Frank O'Hara, Jane Jacobs, and Pedro Pietri). I love the way each room is made to look as if the writer might walk back into it at any moment - messy bedcovers in Wharton's room; the door to Neale Hurston's cottage left open; a manuscript page that has been blown off Irving's desk in a gust of wind.

The first time I saw the mural, I'm ashamed to admit that I felt a wave of envy that I don't have anything that could be called a "home" for the few books I've been able to ship between different parts of the world. Part of the problem is that I've moved around so much my whole life, between Australia, South Africa, the UK, and the States. And it doesn't help being a perennial student constantly searching for the holy grail of cheap accommodation!

Writing is not yet my day job, so I can't be fussy about memorializing where I write fiction - Blood Kin was written in bits and pieces on my roommate's computer in Cape Town whenever she wasn't using it - but what I have kept track of are the various rooms I've lived in: at my last count, 7 in the last 3 years. The only recurring dream I ever have is of moving into a strange new room again, and having to figure out which way to turn the bed to fit in a chest of drawers, or trying to stuff a suitcase in the space beneath a closet.

» Walter Mosley discusses the first book in his new mystery series, which follows Private Investigator Leonid McGill.

» Listen to other Penguin Podcasts.

» Read more about The Long Fall

Walter Mosley, The Long Fall, Podcast

(View entire post here)

When people ask me what I write, I tell them that I write ‘southern women's fiction'.  To clarify, I usually follow that with the (hopefully) more clear ‘grit lit.'  Although that frequently elicits a grin or two, it rarely seems to explain what it is that I try to create on the pages of my novels.

I stick with the adage of ‘write what I know' and I know the south.  Although I've only lived in the south for less than half of my years, I come from a long line of southerners.  My father's family has lived in the south since before the American Revolution and both of my parents were born and raised in Mississippi-my father on the gulf coast and my mother in the Delta.  I have relatives still living there who most people from other parts of the country would need a translator to understand.  But when I hear them speak, I simply feel as if I have found home.

(View entire post here)

As a literacy educator and director of an organization called LitLife, I have received calls and emails over the years from many moms, dads and grandparents asking me my advice about the best books to read aloud to their kids. Someone once said to me: "Pam, I had a baby and no one ever gave me a course on how to do any of this!" I think parenting is like this in so many ways: it is the one biggest thing you will do in your life that does not require any prerequisite, mandatory training of any kind, or a graduate degree! So you are in some ways on your own.

And yet, in another, beautiful way, you are not on your own at all. Your baby, your toddler, your school age child is right with you on this journey. Together, the reading experience is one of your first and possibly most important shared journeys of reward and discovery. Savor this together and join with your child on this most extraordinary exploration. Together you will have moments of transcendence, emotion and discovery through the pages of a beautiful book.

In writing my book, What to Read When, my dream was to offer you company along this profound journey, so that you feel less alone in searching for answers to your excellent questions. Libraries and bookstores are full of books, but there are millions of them and to match the right one with the right child at the right time is always a challenge, even for those of us in the field of education. I realized that many times when parents would call, they would preface their question with: "I just want to know what to read when..." And one day, I realized: "That's a great name for a book!" And so What to Read When was born.

Last week Greg Mortenson, bestselling author of Three Cups of Tea, was "Person of the Week" on World News with Charles Gibson, March 27.

View more information on Greg Mortenson here.

You can watch the interview and more on the World News website.

(View entire post here)

The three main characters in Blood Kin are the chef, the portraitist, and the barber of a corrupt President. Each man repeatedly performs an intimate yet non-political task for the President - nourishing him, rendering his image in oils to be hung in Parliament, grooming him - and I was interested in exploring whether this made them complicit in the President's wrongdoing. Are they inadvertently propping up his power and authority by performing these seemingly banal services? What is the moral fallout of their proximity to power and its abuses?

As humans, we are fascinated by "superfluous people in the service of brute power," as Ryszard Kapuscinski put it (see The Emperor, which is based on interviews he did with Haile Selassie's servants in Ethiopia in the years after Selassie was overthrown).

Think of the interest in Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, or his personal bodyguard, Rochus Misch; the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan; or the recent story about Zimbabwean dictator Mugabe's lavish birthday party for his cronies, which mentioned that "imported Ceres juice, soft drink cans, such as Fanta, Coke, Sprite and snacks flowed freely from the heavily guarded state house chef's cabin".

(View entire post here)

Penguin blogger Jessica Lee answers the question: What was your strongest/favorite memory of reading during your childhood?

Mine was at the library. When I was 7, I remember spending hours at the Commack Branch Library on Indian Head Road in Commack, NY. On weekends or weekdays over the summer, my mom would drop me off and leave me there for hours - my childhood playground. She would do her errands and come pick me up when it was closing time; I’d say that was the smartest form of babysitting a parent can get – free and educational. I would take my summer reading lists, book reports, projects and bury my head in all of the books in the children’s & educational research sections before scouring the magazine racks looking for the latest issue of Bop, my guilty pleasure. Unbeknownst to my mother, I developed a passion for books at this playground. Because English was her second language, my mother didn't read aloud to me because of our communication barriers and she didn't know the classic American children’s books, but she provided me with the opportunity to learn the Western culture while retaining my Chinese roots at home. I never thought these formative years would land me in the publishing industry; I now get to work with books, market books, yearn to learn more, and of course read the latest books. Books offer a salvation, they educate, they give us joy, they let our imaginations run wild, and most importantly, they make a difference. Books have helped me cross the bridge into the Western culture and have opened my eyes to so many more things my mother was unable to have in her childhood. For that, I owe her the world.

(View entire post here)

Walter Mosley Kicks Off National Media and Bookstore Tour for The Long Fall

This Tuesday, Walter Mosley kicked-off his three-week national media and bookstore tour for the first book in his brand new series, The Long Fall, with a flurry of national media and two packed events in New York City. The standing room only crowds at Barnes & Noble Union Square on Tuesday night and Hue-man Bookstore on Wednesday night were eager to hear about Mosley’s new series and character, Leonid McGill, which have already received critical acclaim from the national press.

On the morning of Riverhead Books’ release of The Long Fall, profile pieces ran on the front of the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times and in the widely circulated Metro papers of New York, Boston and Philadelphia, each piece highlighting Mosley’s choice to set his new series in contemporary New York City and the dynamics of his new and intriguing character, private detective, Leonid McGill. The features were preceded by reviews in The New York Times daily and Sunday Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and O, the Oprah Magazine, and were followed by selling reviews in The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Associated Press, all of which herald The Long Fall as a excellent continuation of Mosley’s “extraordinary body of work.”

The critics unanimously agree that Leonid McGill is “as complex and rewarding a character as Mosley’s ever produced” (Publishers Weekly). McGill is “tantalizing” (USA Today), “someone you can definitely settle down with” (New York Times Book Review) a “hero who seems to have been around forever” (Washington Post), and “a worthy successor” to Mosley’s widely loved Easy Rawlins. “Fans will not be disappointed” (USA Today) and “will find themselves looking forward to the next one” (Associated Press).

(View entire post here)

Karen White is our guest blogger during the week of March 30th. If you have any questions for Karen White, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on The Lost Hours.

The award-winning author of The Memory of Water delivers a gripping tale of family, fate, and forgiveness.

When Piper Mills was twelve, she helped her grandfather bury a box that belonged to her grandmother in the backyard. For twelve years, it remained untouched.

Now a near fatal riding accident has shattered Piper's dreams of Olympic glory. After her grandfather's death, she inherits the house and all its secrets, including a key to a room that doesn't exist-or does it? And after her grandmother is sent away to a nursing home, she remembers the box buried in the backyard. In it are torn pages from a scrapbook, a charm necklace-and a newspaper article from 1929 about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River. The necklace's charms tell the story of three friends during the 1920s- each charm added during the three months each friend had the necklace and recorded her life in the scrapbook. Piper always dismissed her grandmother as not having had a story to tell. And now, too late, Piper finds she might have been wrong.

(View entire post here)

Sometimes I think I don't like magic. Or, at least, capital M Magic - the whole paraphernalia of wands and spells and wizards in towers - sometimes doesn't sit well with me. It gets a bit overwhelming, a bit portentous,  even a bit silly and I'm not quite sure where to put myself in thinking about it.  After all, it's messy and illogical, uncontrolled and irrational and it can seriously derail the plot of a book.

And yet, and yet.... I've been a fan of fantasy books as long as I can remember. I started in early childhood with Through the Looking Glass and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,  progressed to The Hobbit and A Wizard of Earthsea and have never stopped. And I love to read about wizards' colleges and orders of mages, about curses and dark conjurings, about books of lore and old rituals, I love books by Sharon Shinn, Katherine Kurtz, and Susanna Clarke. I love books where magic behaves and makes sense. So I do like magic. I just like it to have rules and to know its place.