blogging authors

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The Tango Singer: A Novel
by Tomas Eloy Martinez

Reviewed by Grady Harp, an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

Tomas Eloy Martinez is a superlative writer. He has written about his native Argentina in award winning books such as ‘Santa Evita’ and ‘The Peron Novel’ and though he has been on the faulty of Rutgers University (Latin American Program) since 1982, he first wrote THE TANGO SINGER in Spanish in 2004. It comes to us through the English translation by Anne McLean.

Many idiosyncrasies here, but at least we finally have access to what is one of the finest novels this reader has read this year! Martinez writes with a flowing, dancing style and with a technique that obliterates the lines between the past and the present in such a unique manner that his style is utterly mesmerizing.

Bruno Cadogan lives in Manhattan and is writing a dissertation on Jorge Luis Borges’ essays on tango and discovers a clue to understanding Borges’ words about the famous Tango singer Carlos Gardel (in early 1900s) in finding information about a current tango singer Julio Martel whose strange life and lack of recordings drive Bruno to fly to Buenos Aires in hopes of not only hearing Martel sing but to also engage him in conversation to further define his dissertation. Continue reading »

The Reality Diet: Lose the Pounds for Good with a Cardiologist’s Simple, Healthy, Proven Plan
by Dr. Steven A. Schnur, M.D.

After seeing many of his patients fail on fad diets, and suffer health-threatening side effects, Dr. Steven A. Schnur, founder of the largest cardiology practice in South Florida, developed a breakthrough program: The REALity Diet – a new eating plan sprinkled with a dose of reality.

A statement against fad or extreme diets, The REALity Diet concentrates on eating real food in the real world. Since the release of THE REALITY DIET in hardcover last year, thousands of people all over the country have been following Dr. Schnur’s proven plan, dropping pounds with great success - two pounds a week and up to 30 pounds in three months on average – and are continuing to do so in a way that ensures they are as healthy on the inside as they are on the outside. 

This is not a low-carb, low-fat, or high protein. It’s a diet rich with delicious foods from all food groups and high in one key fat-fighting ingredient – fiber. Not only does fiber stop hunger, it also significantly lowers the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other illnesses including breast cancer.  Continue reading »

Black’s Beach Shuffle
Author: Corey Lynn Fayman 

It’s 1999 in San Diego, California. Money is being made in new Internet companies like Amazon, Yahoo! and EBay. Eyebitz.com is another company looking to break into the Internet world.

Rolly Waters is an aging rock musician who has a part time day job being a private detective. His band has a few gigs a week around the city. This Saturday night his friend Fender gets the group a job playing for a gala that Eyebitz.com is having at a mansion in LaJolla near Black’s Beach.

But Rolly’s favorite guitar was left behind. When he returns in the middle of the night to retrieve it, he discovers a dead body in the pool. In a panic, he grabs his guitar and beats it out of there. On his way home he makes an anonymous 911 call to report the body.

The next morning Fender comes to Rolly’s home. Now he wants to take Rolly back to the Eyebitz.com offices for a private detective job. Rolly meets with the president of the company. Someone has stolen the encryption “Magic Key” needed to run their computers and their top secret proprietary software that is due to be released soon. Rolly is hired to locate and return the missing key. Continue reading »

Looker: A Novel
by Stanley Bennett Clay

Reviewed by Grady Harp, an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

Stanley Bennett Clay takes chances: he knows he takes them and unlike Captain Scott’s diaries from 1912 as he lay dying in the Antarctic in which he admits the chances turned out against him, the chances Clay takes work very much in his favor. Now with this third novel Stanley Bennett Clay shows a maturity of style and focus without a loss of the chancy topics he embraces. LOOKER simply works!

Clay introduces a huge cast of characters so rapidly yet so well defined that for a few chapters the novel seems as though it will be a series of short stories; we meet Brando, an entertainment lawyer whose celibacy is linked to his past lost love Collier; Selma Fant, the alcoholic wife of a councilman whose only child Earl-Anthony responded to his misunderstood childhood by transforming into a popular transgender singer Miss Zara; successful writer Omar who despite his longing for a relationship with Brando after his leaving the demanding Shane is a lothario `chickenhawk’ unable to forego his desires despite his nearing middle age; Jeanette Bell and her lesbian lover, highly successful novelist Clymenthia Teager; Vanessa Ellerbee and her downlow husband William who craves Brando; recently divorced Dee Dempsey whose bruised heart embraces those in need; Ramon Alexander and his abused wife Charlene; and Senior Father Lacey Cannon who holds court for all the pretty gay men in his community. And yes, there are more!

The story is too fine to condense in a review. Suffice it to say that Clay connects all the dots by a central story of a murder trial over a heinous event that occurred between Ramon and Jeanette, a climactic situation steered by Brando that alters the lives of each of the characters and brings about closure to the many open wounds and secrets and lusts and stories of each of the novel’s cast. Continue reading »

A Long Day’s Dying
by Frederick Buechner

Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

Frederick Buechner is now, at 80 years of age, highly respected and well known for his teachings and writings centered on the spiritual life.

Brook Street Press will change that in introducing this reprint of Buechner’s brilliant 1950 novel A LONG DAY’S DYING written just prior to his ‘finding Christianity’, and while the novel was highly acclaimed when it was first published, it has all but disappeared from his bibliography of biblically oriented works of fiction and non-fiction.

This novel is simply brilliant, a reader’s delight, and a hugely successful work despite the fact that it demands much from those who enter its realm.

Buechner writes in a dense, near stream of consciousness style that is reminiscent (in the finest sense) of the works of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Michael Cunningham, and William Faulkner. Strange company, this? Well, just try to jump into Buechner in media res and see if the clues are not there. Continue reading »

Walkin The Dog
by Darwin Demers

You and your family have lived quietly in your neighborhood for years. You have a good job, do your best to raise your kids well, and have friendly relationships with your neighbors.

One day a new family moves in next door. Within days, the father comes to your door complaining that your boys aren’t playing with his. He ends by ominously telling you he hopes this doesn’t become a problem. Before long you’re having one confrontation after another thrust upon you by this bully. Your attempts to reason with him only bring more conflict

You suffer through years of verbal abuse, intimidation, and threats. Pushed to your limit, with nowhere to turn, what would you do? Continue reading »

Ditching Debt and Money…It’s Not Just for Rich People!
by Janine Bolon

Ever wonder how some people manage to get it together financially and then keep it that way and others don’t? This book tells you how to manage your finances now and in the future using the 60/40 principle.

The 60/40 Principle is the backbone of a simple system Bolon created to help her own family gain financial independence. It worked so well that she now spends her time teaching this principle to others. Thousands of people are now discarding debt and winning wealth.

Bolon’s book, Money . . . It’s Not Just for Rich People relates five simple principles that govern how money runs or ruins your life and gives you step-by-step instructions and real examples to help you move from fiscal deprivation to wealth accumulation.

Ditching Debt is a 50-page book that gives you three simple exercises that can change your fiscal outlook in as little as three months if you follow the instructions as outlined. It was created for those readers who feel that Money…It’s Not Just for Rich People! was beyond their current situation. Continue reading »

Wearing the Spider
by Susan Schaab

Harriet Klausner is Amazon’s #1 Reviewer

Evie Sullivan is a senior lawyer in the law firm of Howard, Rolland and Stewart and is on the fast track to make partner. She devotes most of the hours in the day to her clients, which leaves little time for a social life. Before her world starts to fall apart, she meets lawyer Joe Baton on a plane ad the two instantly click.

When she returns to her office she is informed her name is on a file but Evie never had dealings with the case or the client. She also finds that on a trip to Chicago she was billed for a hotel room she never stayed at and though it lists her as making calls to Brazil she knows nobody there.

She discovers that she is an attorney of record for a client that she knows nothing about and there is something in the wording of the file that seems to be illegal.

An attempt is made on Evie’s life and she begins to believe one of the partners Alan is stalking her because she once violently rejected his advances. With the help of Joe, she tries to find a way to restore her good name.

The romance between Joe and Evie is quick but believable as he becomes an intricate part of the plot as he works double time to extract Evie from Alan’s machinations. Alan is the best kind of villain, one readers love to hate. There are a lot of action scenes in this fast paced thriller but it is the heroine who makes WEARING THE SPIDER special. She refuses to succumb even when it looks like all things Alan did to destroy her will ruin her.

No Matter What
by Jordana Ryan

Haunted by her involvement in her parents death at the age of ten, Cassandra has never been confident in the love that others felt for her—not her adoptive parents, her friends and certainly not the man she loved with all her heart.

So, after giving herself to her high school sweetheart on prom night, she flees from the overpowering fears and all those who supported her.

And then after four years of sleeping with one strange man after another—whose names she couldn’t remember or never knew—she decided enough was enough. It was time to return to face those she’d left behind, particularly Brenden Carter.

Brenden should hate Cass for running away from their love and with his daughter, but somehow even after years of telling himself he hated her–and doing a lot of womanizing himself–Cass’ smile still managed to get next to him.

Will he be able to forgive her for leaving him when he needed her most? Continue reading »

Grief: A Novel
by Andrew Holleran

Reviewed by Grady Harp, an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

Andrew Holleran may not be the most prolific writer on the scene (’The Beauty of Men’, ‘In September, the Light Changes’, ‘Dancer from the Dance’, ‘Nights in Aruba’) but he most assuredly one of our finest.

His extraordinarily well-crafted novels, novellas, and short stories can be appreciated on many levels - interest of theme (Holleran is one of the few writers who find writing about gay life as natural a topic for creating universal themes as any other), quality of prose (liquid, rich in imagery and atmosphere, and creatively eloquent), and pertinence of philosophy.

In a brief 150 pages Holleran relates via an unnamed narrator the experiences of life in its brevity and death in its finality. Having moved from Florida where he had been the caretaker of his ill mother with whom he never discussed his life as a gay man and suffers from her loss as well as his own regret that he never allowed his mother to know him, our narrator accepts a university job in Washington, DC teaching a seminar on AIDS and its impact on literature. Continue reading »