Friday, January 6, 2012

Opening Sentence of the New Year: Soldiers in Hiding


It gives me pleasure to hinder American tourists occasionally.
-- Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley.
A Bambara proverb goes thus: "go to the village where you don't have a house, but take your roof with you." 
-- from the new Introduction by Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Soldiers in Hiding won the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award.  This edition is published by  Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, with a new preface by the author.




A Few More Pages hosts Book Beginnings every Friday.  The event is open for the entire week.

2 comments:

  1. Hindering tourists sounds like a good thing, regardless of what this book is about. For instance, why in the world would you choose to go hiking in Iraq while we're at war there?

    ReplyDelete
  2. re: book review request by award-winning author

    Dear Rose City Reader:

    I'm an award-winning author with a new book of fiction out last month.
    Ugly To Start With is a series of thirteen interrelated stories about
    adolescence published by West Virginia University Press.

    All the stories in my collection have been previously published in
    well-regarded print and online literary magazines such as The Iowa
    Review, Passager, The Bitter Oleander, Confrontation, Salt River
    Review, The Foliate Oak. and The Cortland Review.

    Can I interest you in reviewing it?

    If you write me back at johnmcummings@aol.com, I can email you a PDF of my book. If you require a bound copy, please ask, and I will forward your reply to my publisher. Or you can write directly to Abby Freeland at:

    Abby.Freeland@mail.wvu.edu

    My publisher, I should add, can also offer your readers a free excerpt of my book through a link from your blog to my publisher's website:
    http://wvupressonline.com/cummings_ugly_to_start_with_9781935978084

    Here’s what Jacob Appel, celebrated author of
    Dyads and The Vermin Episode, says about my new collection: "In Ugly to Start With, set in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, Cummings tackles the challenges of boyhood adventure and family conflict in a taut, crystalline style that captures the triumphs and tribulations of small-town life. He has a gift for transcending the particular experiences to his characters to capture the universal truths of human affection and suffering--emotional truths that the members of his audience will recognize from their own experiences of childhood and adolescence.”

    My short stories have appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals, including North American Review, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. Twice I have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. My short story "The Scratchboard Project" received an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2007.

    I am also the author of the nationally acclaimed coming-of-age novel The Night I Freed John Brown (Philomel Books, Penguin Group, 2009), winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers (Grades 7-12) and one of ten books recommended by USA TODAY.

    For more information about me, please visit:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Cummings

    Thank you very much, and I look forward to hearing back from you.

    Kindly,

    John Michael Cummings

    ReplyDelete