Author - John Coyne

From the Boston Globe, June 12, 2011: Toughest job you’ll never love by Adam Langer Globe Correspondent (Luci Gutierrez for The Boston Globe) For the past 50 years, the Peace Corps has provided fertile material for a roster of impressive alumni, who include such authors as Kent Haruf, Bob Shacochis, and Paul Theroux. But I wouldn’t expect to see the name Christopher R. Howard, author of “Tea of Ulaanbaatar,” on a Peace Corps recruitment brochure any time soon. Using his brief stint as a volunteer in Mongolia during the late 1990s as his jumping-off point, Howard has produced a debut novel that won’t attract many socially conscious do-gooders to the Corps, but could well appeal to marginally employed slackers seeking to indulge in sex tourism and drug abuse. The Mongolia of [Christopher] Howard’s novel is a memorably bleak, fetid, and sinister place, a likely contender for the world’s least inviting . . .

Cynthia Morrison Phoel (Bulgaria 1994-96)  will be reading from Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, on Sunday, June 26, at 2:00 p.m. Of the book, Dallas Morning News contributor Anne Morris wrote: “It’s not unusual for a returning Peace Corps volunteer to write a book . . . Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s debut collection of six stories set in a Bulgarian village represents that kind of fiction at its best.” For more information, check out www.cynthiaphoel.com, or read the review of her great collection of stories on our site.

Thor Hanson (Uganda 1993–95) who wrote the wonderful The Impenetrable Forest a few years ago, his Peace Corps memoir of Uganda, has a new book, Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, published by Basic Books this month. In a review in this weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Rosen, the editorial director of NextbooksInc. writes “Mr. Hanson may be a scientist but he writes like a man who believes in the value of a story.” Rosen goes onto say a lot of wonderful things about Feathers, including, “. . . Mr. Hanson knows it isn’t just the bird at the far end of the binoculars but the human being at the near end that matters, and he is writing as much about the human urge to understand, appreciate and appropriate the wild world as he writing about feathers, which he calls, in his subtitle, a ‘natural miracle.’”

One Hand Does Not Catch A Buffalo: 50 Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories: Volume One, Africa Edited by Aaron Barlow (Togo 1988–1990); Series editor Jane Albritton (India 1967–1969) Travelers’ Tales May 2011 452 pages $18.95 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–2002, Madagascar 2002–2003) ONE HAND DOES NOT CATCH A BUFFALO: 50 Years of Amazing Peace Corps Stories: Volume One, Africa is the first of a series of four anthologies celebrating and recording Peace Corps’ accomplishments and contributions to the world through its first half century of life. The idea for this massive compendium came to Jane Albritton in 2007, and must have seemed to anyone willing to listen to her at the time an endeavor nearly as gargantuan, daunting, and Quixotic as the founding of the Peace Corps itself. Four volumes to cover the regions of the world where Volunteers have served — Africa, The Americas, The Heart . . .

The Gambling Master of Shanghai and other tales of suspense by Joan Richter (Staff spouse — Kenya 1965–67) Peace Corps Writers April 2011 255 pages $15 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000–02; Madagascar 2002–03) JOAN RICHTER LIVED FOR TWO YEARS in East Africa, where her husband was deputy director of the Peace Corps/Kenya program, and later she consulted for Peace Corps/Washington on the role of staff wives overseas. But mostly, Joan Richter is a writer. Joan Richter’s The Gambling Master of Shanghai and other tales of suspense, is a finely wrought collection of seventeen stories, a page-turning illumination of an enviable, forty-year writing career. The book is handsome in design and illustration, and boasts a brooding cover of a birdcage in a darkened alleyway that perfectly captures the disturbingly noire tone of these master works. It’s clear that Peace Corps Writers, which chose to publish Ms. Richter’s collection as . . .

Publishers Weekly has a short piece this week on the new Concord ePress  which is re-publishing two novels by Richard Wiley.  The Concord Free Press was cofounded in 2008 by novelist Stona Fitch with the purpose of giving away books for free to readers, who in turn are asked to make a charitable donation to a group or person.  Concord Free Press does not pay the writers who publish with them; the books are published in limited editions of 3,000 and bookstores that work with CFP give the books away. Now the press has launched the Concord ePress, a digital publishing program that will offer titles for sale, split the money 50/50 with writers and use its share to support its free paperback print editions. CeP is releasing e-book editions of two of  Wiley’s novels. Other writers publishing with CFP include Russell Banks, Tom Perrotta, Francine Prose, Hamilton Fish, Joyce Carol Oates and more. The . . .

At this year’s BookExpo held in New York at the Jarvis Center, I slipped into the Google Books panel discussion to “parse the significance of the e-book explosion and to explain Google Books’ position in it” as Publishers Weekly BEA Show Daily stated on Thursday, May 26, 2011. In the crowded room, four publishing execs were quizzed on the impact and importance of the e-book format. First question up was one of discovery. We know that ‘traditional’ readers find out about new books and authors by “browsing in a physical store.” What we have today is a “system that’s ‘good for hunters, but not as good for gatherers.” You can find a book, if you know what you want, one of the panelists stated. Google Book’s director of strategic partnerships, Tom Turvey, made the comment that “all book recommendation engines suck” and that there ‘isn’t an algorithm that can compete . . .

The Caddie Who Won The Masters by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962–64) Peace Corps Writers $13.50 316 pages 2011 Review by Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979–80) IN JOHN COYNE’S SPLENDID new golf novel, The Caddie Who Won the Masters, all of the action, from first page to last, takes place at Augusta National Golf Club, site of what is arguably the most famous golf tournament on earth. Because of this, and because of Coyne’s intricate knowledge of the golf course and Masters’ history, Augusta itself shares the spotlight as the book’s main character. For those of us lucky enough to have walked those hallowed grounds, it seems perfectly appropriate that the manicured fairways and slippery greens should leap out of the background of the story and take center stage. The plot revolves around the other main character, Tim Alexander, an aging amateur who earns a Masters’ appearance by virtue of a single . . .