Book Club Member?  Post your first name, city and state, and number of members in your book club to receive a free signed hardback of Good Things.  Note the postcard tucked inside.  If you like the book, and your club decides to pre-order the paperback, drop the postcard into the mail.  You’ll get a box of more good things, including personalized Club book marks, printed reader’s guides, a recipe for Torte a la Wieck and a 12 oz bag of Fair Trade coffee to energize the discussion!  I’m happy to join you, via phone or web, if our calendars are in sync.  One hardback request per book club, please.

Write Now

A Craft Intensive Weekend with the University of Miami Creative Writing Program’s distinguished faculty, featuring senior fiction writer Lester Goran.

FEBRUARY 27 AND 28, 2010
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
CAS GALLERY
1210 STANFORD DRIVE
UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA

Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Department of English, the College of Arts and Sciences, our community partners Books & Books and the MALS program at the University of Miami.

Join our MFA in Creative Writing Program’s faculty, alumni and graduate teaching assistants at the University of Miami for seminars and workshops designed to break through any writing block and get you writing the great American novel, poetry on and off the page, or the stories of your memoir. Learn what it takes to write what author John Gardner called that “vivid and continuous dream.”

http://www.as.miami.edu/english/creativewriting/lestergoran/writenow

A roundup of the latest reviews.

• Fiction Writers Review
  The honest passion to Ansay’s writing is one that I haven’t encountered in a while, one that pleasantly reminds the reader that it’s okay, at times, to be a little earnest. It is Ansay’s dedication to truth, both emotional and historical, that keeps the novel from reading like a stale formula of past and present, but rather a story that is very much alive, rich with imagery and text, transcending boundaries of time and narrative.
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin)
  Ansay is an adventurous writer whose work evades easy categorization. But if “Midnight Champagne” is primarily a comedy, brimful with character and incident, “Good Things I Wish You” is something else: darker and quiet, a meditation on art and love in the European mode.
• BookList (July 1, 2009)
  Spare yet sumptuous, precise yet lavish, Ansay nimbly sifts historical fact through an admittedly autobiographical filter to deliver a richly textured study.

A round-up Mother’s Day article/interview that mentions Good Things I Wish You, plus my daughter’s ideas about having a writer for a mom.