Authors Electric

 Mine was Tom Robbins. The sticker of Tom Robbins stuck on my computer stand. This was not because I thought Tom Robbins had a hot bod or face. I don't remember ever giving much thought to whether he was physically attractive at all. His  writing  was hot. And funny. Funny has always been dangerous for me. I have been "in love" with many funny men who have not much to recommend them in the looks department. Make me laugh, though, and apparently my standards become extremely negotiable. I wanted to live inside the strange, funny, sexy world of Robbins' books. More specifically, I wanted to be a character in one. And eventually, somewhere between the sentences and the weirdness and the sheer pleasure of encountering a mind that did not seem to travel by any of the usual roads, I developed a crush on the man who was making all of it up. “Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice.” Learning mo...

Hey there Legends~ Every June, Pride Month arrives in the USA accompanied by celebrations, parades, rainbow logos, and, inevitably, sadly, stateside, more than a few complaints that we no longer need it or never should have had it. Grrrr those irk me no end! As someone who spends much of her life around books and writers, I find myself returning to a simpler question: Whose stories get told? Publishing has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes are easier to find than they once were. Many authors are able to write openly about experiences that previous generations were forced to hide. Readers can discover stories that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to publish in earlier eras. That progress is worth celebrating. At the same time, Pride Month serves as a reminder of how recently much of that progress occurred. Many writers still remember a publishing landscape where LGBTQ+ characters were expected to meet tragic ends, w...

  The New York Times today published a fascinating interview with author George Saunders .  Saunders, born December 2, 1958, is an American author known for short stories, essays, novellas, novels, and books for children. His work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and GQ . From 2006 to 2008, he also wrote a weekly column titled “American Psyche” for the weekend magazine of The Guardian. Saunders is a professor at Syracuse University and has received multiple National Magazine Awards for fiction, winning in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004. He earned second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His debut collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and received the World Fantasy Award for his short story “CommComm.” His later collection, In Persuasion Nation , was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award in 2013 and w...