Author - John Coyne

Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979-80) has written thirteen books, including Golfing with God and Revere Beach Boulevard. He has a novel coming out this December from Crown. It is entitled Vatican Waltz. This is a Catholic novel in the sense it is about a woman who believes she is called by God to be the first female Catholic priest. In the course of the novel, the woman, Cynthia Clare Piantedosi, reaches out to other unreceptive officials within the Catholic establishment and is met with ridicule. (Hello? Being Catholic, I could have told the protagonist that.) Unable to tune out the divine messages, she leaves behind all that she knows, letting the power of her unswerving faith drive her all the way to the Vatican in pursuit of a destiny she doesn’t full understand. (Well, perhaps Pope Francis will be more understanding.) The book has already received positive reviews from the Chicago . . .

[By Heart is a series on the Atlantic Blog edited by Joe Fassler in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. Here is the last by Fassler and Shacochis. Joe Fassler: Is a writer obligated to address the way that powerful institutions affect how we live and what we feel? Or is it enough to conjure life on the scale of garden, bed, and kitchen table? Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, is more qualified than most to answer these questions, to sort out the relationship between what he calls “the literature of political experience” versus “the literature of domestic experience.” For years, he wrote the “Dining In” column for GQ-short, wistful celebrations of the meals prepared and shared with a beloved woman. (He collected these essays, which include recipes, in a book aptly titled Domesticity.) But Shacochis’s fiction, and his globe-trotting work as a . . .

Omnivoracious by Neal Thompson on November 04, 2013 Over drinks at Seattle’s Brave Horse Tavern, Shacochis described his encounter in Haiti years ago with the “haunting” and “unpleasant” woman who became the inspiration for the main character in his new novel, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, which was an Amazon Best Book of the Month pick in September. The National Book Award-winning author met the woman–“blonde, young, infuriating,” as he calls her in the opening line of the book–while covering the US occupation of Haiti for Harper’s Magazine. She claimed to be a photojournalist and asked Shacochis to give her a tour of a voodoo temple; during the drive there, she said she’d lost her soul. “I knew her for less than 36 hours, and I forgot her name within days,” he said. “But what happened in that temple disturbed me so much it haunted me for five years. “I just never . . .

JFK’s Last Hundred Days The Transformation of a Man and The Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke (Tunisia 1968) The Penguin Press, New York 415 pages August 2013 $29.95 Reviewed by Bonnie Lee Black (Gabon 1996-98) “That’s the trouble with all you historians!” JFK railed at his aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had praised FDR effusively in his New Deal trilogy. “You made all those New Dealers seven feet tall. They weren’t that good. They were just a bunch of guys like us.”                                                                                                                         — JFK’s Last Hundred Days In this his newest book, Thurston Clarke focuses on the three months leading up to John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination at the age of 46, fifty years ago this month. Clarke, author of eleven widely acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, paints an honest portrait of the fascinating, complex, and elusive man who served less than two years of his . . .

In 1992, The Peace Corps Experience Award was initiated. It is presented annually to a Peace Corps Volunteer or staff member, past or present for the best short description of life in the Peace Corps. It can be a personal essay, story, poem, letter, cartoon or song. The subject matter can be any aspect of the Peace Corps experience – daily life, assignment, travel, host country nationals, other Volunteers, readjustment. In 1997, this award was renamed to honor Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965-67) whose Living Poor has been widely cited as an outstanding telling of the essence of the Peace Corps experience. • Sarge Shriver often said that the real benefit from the Peace Corps experience would be the children of RPCVs who would raise their children with a better understanding and compassion for world problems because of having had the Peace Corps experience. Briefly in the early ’70s, the Peace Corps . . .

This coming Saturday, November 2, 2013, at 1 p.m. in Washington, D.C. at the famous Politics & Prose Bookstore (5015 Connecticut Avenue in NW Washington, D.C.) Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1990-93) will read from his new book, Julia & Rodrigo. In this novel Mark returns to the Guatemala of his Peace Corps years in a story of young love in a violently divided landscape. Julia is part of a wealthy, Evangelical family and Rodrigo is a Catholic soccer star. Will this Romeo and Juliet fare better than their prototypes? Mark is the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1998, and now the Gival Press Novel Award. He directs the West Virginia University Creative Writing Program. As Mark wrote me recently in an e-mail, “I started writing the book soon after I COS’d in 1995! It’s a Romeo and Juliet story set during the Guatemalan civil war.” Check out P&P’s . . .