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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.

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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.

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

Here is more information about What to Read When - read an excerpt.

The books to read aloud to children at the important moments in their lives.

In What to Read When, award-winning educator Pam Allyn celebrates the power of reading aloud with children. In many ways, books provide the first opportunity for children to begin to reflectively engage with and understand the world around them. Not only can parents entertain their child and convey the beauty of language through books, they can also share their values and create lasting connections.

Here, Allyn offers parents and caregivers essential advice on choosing appropriate titles for their children-taking into account a child's age, attention ability, gender, and interests- along with techniques for reading aloud effectively. But what sets this book apart is the extraordinary, annotated list of more than three hundred titles suitable for the pivotal moments in a child's life. With category themes ranging from friendship and journeys to thankfulness, separations, silliness, and spirituality, What to Read When is a one-of-a-kind guide to how parents can best inspire children through reading together. In addition, Pam Allyn includes an indispensable "Reader's Ladder" section, with recommendations for children at every stage from birth to age ten. With the author's warm and engaging voice throughout, discussion questions to encourage in-depth conversations, as well as advice on helping kids make the transition to independent reading, this book will help shape thoughtful, creative, and curious children, imparting a love of reading that will last a lifetime. 

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I had to hand dig my way through six-foot drifts down to the shop to get out my tractor so I could clear the ranch road yesterday-then I had to do it again today. I've got one of those old 8N tractors from 1948 when they thought that a front dump able to hold twice as much as a handheld snow shovel was quite the achievement.

I'd like to talk to those guys.

I struggled up to the house and collapsed on the porch, my furry Russian hat pushing down over my eyes in a dramatic interpretation of 'portrait of the artist as dead rancher'. My wife came out and asked if I wanted a cup of coffee, and I replied that I preferred to die de-caffeinated.

It's been a long winter, and to use the terms of the local paper The Buffalo Bulletin, the current storm "all but shut down the town and made life miserable for everyone". My romance with the American West, and life in general was creeping toward ebb. I stumbled in the house, tacking against the wind, peeled off my Carhartt, my wool muffler, my Sorels, and slumped down in front of the computer to answer emails.

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

Here is more information about Blood Kin:

Listen to a podcast and view the reading group guide!

Rarely does a debut novel attract the sweeping critical acclaim of Ceridwen Dovey’s Blood Kin. Shortlisted for two prestigious awards, this tale centers around a military coup in an unnamed country, with characters who have no names or any identifying physical characteristics. Known simply as the ex-President’s chef, barber, and portrait painter, these three men perform their mundane tasks and appear unaware of the atrocities of their employer’s regime. But when the President is deposed, the trio are revealed as less than innocent. A deeply chilling yet sensual novel, Blood Kin illustrates Lord Acton’s famous quip, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and marks the beginning of an illustrious literary career.

Awards:
Sunday Times Fiction Prize
University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing
Australia-Asia Literary Award Longlist
Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlist  

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Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, and Artelia Bendolph was born on August 7, 1927. I am fairly sure they never met though they grew up just thirty miles from each other in the Black Belt of Alabama. Harper Lee came from Monroeville. Artelia Bendolph was raised in Gee's Bend, a place accessible by a ten-minute ferry ride or an hour over rough back roads to Camden.

Harper Lee was known as "Nelle," but I don't know if Bendolph had a nickname or not. There is not much written about her. She wasn't famous. The picture of her is more famous than she ever was. I know that she left Gee's Bend for Mobile approximately the same time Lee left Monroeville for New York City. Lee moved to New York to become a writer. Bendolph left to find a job in Mobile to send money home.

Harper Lee was white.

Artelia Bendolph was black.

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Nostalgia is a trickster. It can turn a decade like the 1950s, when racism, McCarthyism, Cold War fear and sexism did great damage, into a golden dream when everyone got along and life was peaceful. The softening of memory takes place in both individual and collective ways. Whether it's in our own minds, or the mass media, the old days get more credit than they deserve. This happens because most of us prefer to remember the good, and there is almost always enough good to supply the ingredients for an entirely happy story.

In the case of baseball, Brooklyn, and the period just after World War II, the memories of vibrant neighborhoods where kids grew up happy and safe and the play-by-play calls of the games at Ebbets Field spilled out of radios up and down the block are real. No one has to exaggerate the achievements of Jackie Robinson and no one needs to embroider the shared memories of World Series games won and lost. Brooklyn truly did go deliriously mad when the team finally beat the Yankees for the 1955 championship   

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We'd like to thank all of you who attended our "New Think/Old Publishers" panel two Sundays ago, and apologize for the confusion over the purpose of our visit to SXSW. We are particularly grateful to all of you who stayed to share your ideas, concerns and, most important, your frustrations regarding access of information and connecting with our publicity groups and authors.