Two Small Birds, novel by Dave Newman

On Friday, January 24, 2014, Writers Tribe Books, an independent publisher in Los Angeles, released Two Small Birds, a novel by Dave Newman.

BOOK DESCRIPTION: Dan Charles reads Whitman the way some people read the Bible. He works three jobs. He attends college. Dan’s older brother sells industrial parts and wants out. Dan wants something. In Two Small Birds, the brothers take flight in the worst possible way. This is the story of what it means to be family, to be working class, and to dream of being a poet in a world that refuses books. Set in tiny apartments and roadside diners, truckstops and warehouses, dive bars and worse hotels, Two Small Birds is a story of misdemeanors and perseverance, the jobs we take and the lives we lose. It’s the story of love, and whoever is in charge of that.

REVIEW:

There are writers who understand America and there are writers who understand an America most writers don’t write about. This short-money, low-end, no expectations, working class just-skating-by America is the one Dave Newman lays bare in his achingly beautiful, badass and authentic novel, Two Small Birds. Call it Truck Driving America. What Newman has created in this big-hearted, gritty book is a kind of road novel, where the road is one you and everybody you know just want to get the hell off of, before it kills you or works you to death. Readers will hear echoes of Raymond Carver, Daniel Woodrell and Denis Johnson, but in the end Two Small Birds earns Newman a place of his own in the pantheon. Two Small Birds is really a book to love.” JERRY STAHL, author of PERMANENT MIDNIGHT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dave Newman is the author of the novel Please Don’t Shoot Anyone Tonight and four poetry chapbooks, most recently Allen Ginsberg Comes To Pittsburgh. He’s worked as a truck driver, a book store manager, an air filter salesman, a house painter, and a college teacher. More than 100 of his poems and stories have appeared in magazines throughout the world, including Gulf Stream, Word Riot, Smokelong Quarterly, Wormwood Review, Tears in the Fence (UK), and The New Yinzer. He has been the featured writer and on the cover of both 5AM and Chiron Review. Anthologies include Beside the City of Angels (World Parade Books) and The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (Autumn House Press). In 2004, he received the Andre Dubus Novella Award. He lives in Trafford, Pennsylvania, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela, and their two children.

When a writer visits Santa, New Yorker cartoon by Donald Reilly

CAPTION: “I really don’t have any special requests. I just wanted to write about the experience.”

Credit: New Yorker cartoon by Donald Reilly

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Room

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” VIRGINIA WOOLF

Adapted from theguardian.com: Novelist/essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and husband Leonard bought their house in Sussex, U.K.,  in 1919. Two years later, Woolf had a small writing room in the garden constructed out of a wooden toolshed below a loft. She wrote there in the summers, and liked it very much, though it was not ideal for concentration. She was always being distracted — by Leonard sorting the apples over her head in the loft, or the church bells at the bottom of the garden, or the noise of the children in the school next door, or the dog sitting next to her and scratching itself and leaving paw marks on her manuscript pages. In winter, it was often so cold and damp that she couldn’t hold her pen and had to retreat indoors. She wrote there with a board on her lap. In this writer’s lodge, Woolf wrote parts of all her major novels from Mrs Dalloway to Between the Acts, many essays and reviews, and many letters. 

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night, quote by E.L. Doctorow

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” E.L. DOCTOROW

Photo: BAZZAE73, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Writing a Novel Is Like Having a Dream, Quote by Haruki Murakami

“For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.” HARUKI MURAKAMI, author of THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE

Illustration: Portrait of Haruki Murakami by Bradley Wind

Free Today: Kindle Version of Debt, a novel by Rachel Carey

The Silver Birch Press release DEBT, a novel by Rachel Carey is available for free at Amazon.com on Friday, July 26, 2013. You can download the Kindle — which retails for $6.99 — at Amazon.com.

So remain debt-free today (at least when it comes to this novel) and download your Kindle version of DEBT for free!

Literature Is Entertainment, Quote by T.C. Boyle

“Literature…is just entertainment like rock’n’roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn’t capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn’t work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterization, the structure, all that’s irrelevant if you’re not getting the reader on that level — moving a story.” T.C. BOYLE, novelist and short story writer

Writing a Novel, Quote by William Saroyan

“I don’t have a name and I don’t have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.”

WILLIAM SAROYAN, when asked the name of his next book.

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William Saroyan (1908-1981) was an American writer of Armenian descent who grew up in the Fresno, California, area, where many of his stories (plays, novels, short stories) take place. He is best known for his play The Time of Your Life — winner of the 1940 Pulitizer Prize — and his novel The Human Comedy (1943). Saroyan enjoyed a long and prolific career — and was the author of over 25 books, around 30 plays, and numerous short stories. In 1943, he won an Oscar for Best Story for the film version of his novel The Human Comedy. 

Getting back to the Saroyan quote at the top of this post…this was one writer who could feel confident when he sat down with a typewriter and white paper that he could come up with a story — he had lots of practice doing just that.

PHOTO: William Saroyan and typewriter, awaiting the arrival of some white paper.

Now Available: Kindle Version of Debt, a Novel by Rachel Carey

Last week, Silver Birch Press released DEBT by Rachel Carey — one of the best novels we’ve read in many years. Read our original post here. 

We’re happy to report that a Kindle version of the book is now available at this link. The Amazon.com page also includes the “look inside” feature where you can enjoy a passage from this debut novel by Rachel Carey.

A review on the Amazon.com site captures much of what I love about this novel — characterizing the author as a 21st Century Jane Austen (here, here!) — so I’m including it below.

5.0 out of 5 stars Money is the root of all humor February 8, 2013

By katherine tomlinson

In Rachel Carey’s debut novel, Debt, money (or lack thereof) and class hold roughly the same importance they do in a 19th century novel of manners. She has taken the conventions of chic lit (all the fancy restaurants and mindless consumption you see in books like Bergdorf Blondes) and mixed them with a subtly snarky style that evokes a 21st century Jane Austen.

She is keenly observant, pricking her characters’ pretensions with subtle gibes that are so sharp you almost don’t notice them until they draw blood.

The characters–and there are a lot of them–are all fully realized. There’s the entitled Nadya–it’s her world, you just live in it–and the totally adorable Clyde. Our narrator is would-be novelist Lillian whose work in progress is so downbeat it even depresses her and who is beginning to regret the way her student debt is piling up without her having much to show for it. That would depress anyone.

But this is a comedy, a multi-layered farce that treats money the way Sex and the City treated sex. Carey has a good time tweaking pop culture–there’s a hilarious running gag involving a blog called “shopacovery”–and everything about Lillian’s pretentious writing teachers will resonate with anyone who’s ever taken a writing class.

This book is subversive and sly and extremely entertaining. If you loved books like Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Devil Wears Prada, you will love Debt.

Chocolate Cake and Inner Peace, Quote by Dave Barry

“My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M’s and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.”

DAVE BARRY

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Dave Barry‘s new novel, Insane City — which the publisher has characterized as a “dark comic masterpiece” — will be released on January 29th. Check it out at Amazon.com.