Lillian Dunkle, the Ice Cream Queen of America, lives in a Park Avenue apartment and has a home in Bedford but began life as Malka Treynovsky in Vishnev, Russia. Susan Jane Gilman’s new novel, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street, opens in 1913 when, at age six Malka came to America with her parents and her three sisters and ended up in an Orchard Street tenement. Shortly ... Read More...
War of the Words: Amazon vs. Hachette
Once again, Amazon model of e-reader books and higher margins has escalated into Walmart-like bullying against vendors who won’t play their way—namely, continually lowering their prices until said vendor goes out of business, at which point Amazon/Walmart buys up the broken pieces or moves on to another target. With no stake in any brick and mortar locations, just warehouses ... Read More...
Mercy Snow
I’m not a mystery/thriller aficionado so I can’t pretend to know all of the various plot types but from my limited experience there are two ways to go: the-questions-keep-coming, working up to a sonic boom of truth or the reader is in on the mystery and it’s a race to the finish to see if anyone in the cast will figure it out in time. Both ways work, depending on how well ... Read More...
Portlandia: A Guide for Visitors
In 2011 the realm of sketch comedy was turned on its ear through the wacky genius of Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen. In a small Pacific Northwest town called Portlandia they birthed a roster of characters that were found to be unanimously funny by millions in America and funny in that too-close-to-home way for those of us who live in that real world city, Portland. In an ... Read More...
The Panther
Just when you thought it might not happen, John Corey, in all his irascible, ornery, and often spot-on political incorrectness, returns. And this time he’s the hunter…or is he? After an absence of two years Nelson DeMille brings Corey back to wrap-up the story that began in The Lion's Game and continued in The Lion.There, Corey kills a Middle Eastern terrorist, who, though not ... Read More...
The Gluten-Free Table
Imagine that your father is a well-loved chef known throughout the world but you can’t eat his food. This was the dilemma faced by Jilly and Jessie Lagasse when both realized, after years of illness without diagnosis, that they were gluten-intolerant and, in Jilly’s case, had celiac disease. This began a process of learning and re-invention, not only for the girls, but for ... Read More...
