Bloggers Night Out - Swag -

  

On Thursday night, the wonderful people at Random House invited assorted book bloggers and tweeters in the NY area to a get-together at the Random House offices.  We got to meet Ellen Sussman, author of  French Lessons, which is on tons of  Summer Reads lists.  Ellen, who is was so cool btw, talked a little about her inspiration for the book.


Check out the swag.  Forgive the blurry picture, phone has been acting a fool for the past couple days.



 

Book Swag #3

My latest acquisition Silencing Sam, courtesy of Pocket Books:

 From Julie Kramer's website:

When a widely despised gossip columnist is found shot to death, TV reporter Riley Spartz must secretly investigate a case in which she becomes the prime suspect. Amid murder, our heroine discovers news and gossip have more in common than she ever imagined.

Trouble begins when Riley publicly clashes with newspaper gossip writer Sam Pierce, throwing a drink in his face, after he implies in his 'Piercing Eyes' column that she cheated on her dead husband. When clues to the rumormonger's homicide lead to her, Riley is charged with the crime. The police seem unwilling to look any further for perpetrators though numerous local news makers have reason for revenge - even motive for murder.

Meanwhile, competition between journalists increases with newsrooms facing financial meltdowns. While Riley struggles to interest her boss in a story about rural wind farm bombings and dead bats, a new Channel 3 reporter spikes the station ratings with exclusive stories about the headless homicide of an unknown woman whose decapitated body is found in a city park.

Riley must fight to stay out of jail, ahead in the ratings, and even alive in a killer showdown not fit for television audiences.

Book Swag #2

Hosted by The Story Siren's In My Mailbox post where one reveals what they bought, borrowed, or got in the mail.

 


Sugar by Bernice McFadden
With her eponymous anti-heroine, debut novelist McFadden breaks the mold of a venerable stereotype. Here, the hooker with a heart of gold is instead a hooker with a past so tarnished no amount of polishing can change her fate. As a baby, Sugar is abandoned by her mother and raised by a trio of prostitutes who run an Arkansas bordello. Turning tricks at age 12, and leaving town four years later to try her luck in St. Louis and then Detroit, brings more degradation, along with an ever-hardening heart. Upon her mother's death in 1955, Sugar is willed a modest home in Bigelow, Ark., but when she moves into town, and supports herself the only way she knows, the female population rises in wrath against her. All except Pearl, Sugar's next-door neighbor, who more than a decade ago lost her beloved daughter, Jude, to a vicious rapist/murderer. Pearl is struck by Sugar's uncanny likeness to Jude, and is determined to become Sugar's friend in spite of vocal disapproval. Although the two women are opposites in nearly every way, they bring out the best in each other: Sugar convinces Pearl to loosen up and accompany her to a Saturday night juke joint, and Sugar promises to go to church for two months of Sundays.


To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal
Judith Whitman always believed in the kind of love that "picks you up in Akron and sets you down in Rio." Long ago, she once experienced that love. Willy Blunt was a carpenter with a dry wit and a steadfast sense of honor. Marrying him seemed like a natural thing to promise. But Willy Blunt was not a person you could pick up in Nebraska and transport to Stanford. When Judith left home, she didn't look back.

Twenty years later, Judith's marriage is hazy with secrets. In her hand is what may be the phone number for the man who believed she meant it when she said she loved him. If she called, what would he say?

TO BE SUNG UNDERWATER is the epic love story of a woman trying to remember, and the man who could not even begin to forget.

I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl by Kelle Groom

In stirring, hypnotic prose, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl explores the most painful aspects of Kelle’s addiction and loss with unflinching honesty and bold determination. Urgent and vital, exquisite and raw, her story is as much about maternal love as it is about survival, as much about acceptance as it is about forgiveness. Kelle’s longing for her son remains twenty-five years after his death. It is an ache intensified, as she lost him twice—first to adoption and then to cancer. In this inspiring portrait of redemption, Kelle charts the journey that led her to accept her addiction and grief and to learn how to live in the world.

   Through her family’s history and the story of her son’s cancer, Kelle traces with clarity and breathtaking grace the forces that shape a life, a death, and a literary voice.