Archive - August 30, 2010

Reviewer Mark Brazaitis is the author of three books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Steal My Heart, a novel that won the Maria Thomas Fiction Award given by Peace Corps Writers. His latest book is The Other Language: Poems, winner of the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. His short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Witness, Notre Dame Review, Confrontation, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University. • Hunting Hemingway’s Trout by Lauri Anderson (Nigeria 1965–67) North Star Press of St. Cloud Inc. $14.95 139 pages 2010 Reviewed by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991–93) IF IMITATION IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF FLATTERY, writing a book in the spirit of an author one admires must be the second highest form. I think Ernest Hemingway would . . .

Naomi Wolf, bestselling author and feminist (in the third-wave) and a political consultant to Clinton, Gore, and others, as well as author of  the international bestseller, The Beauty Myth, is offering an Internet course “that offers participants the key content of the non-fiction workshop” that she has successfully taught in college classrooms. The Internet workshop will focus on key issues for writers of nonfiction, among them are:  1) how to turn an opinion into a publishable op-ed piece; 2) what a really marketable nonfiction book proposal looks like; 3) how to increase the chances that your book-which will be published into an environment full of competing messages-will  attract as much attention as possible; 4) what actually happens in the publishing and book promotion cycle. And more! She is offering sessions in September and October. Each session consists of three live classes, and each class is two hours long. You may register for . . .

Leita Kaldi Davis worked for the United Nations and UNESCO, for Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Harvard University. She worked with Roma (Gypsies) for fifteen years, became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal at the age of 55, then went to work for the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti for five years. She retired in Florida in 2002. She has written a memoir of Senegal, Roller Skating in the Desert, and is working on a memoir of Haiti. • Henry Walters & Bernard Berenson: Collector & Connoisseur by Stanley Mazaroff (Philippines 1961–63) Johns Hopkins University Press $40.00 212 pages May 2010 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) Stanley Mazaroff has written a fascinating account of the relationship between Henry Walters, founder of the legendary Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and Bernard Berenson, the world’s greatest connoisseur of Italian paintings. Walters opened his Italianate museum in 1909, . . .