It only took me five years (nothing gets past me!) to discover that the Author's Note at the back of the print edition of Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander was not included in the e-book, both published in the spring of 2008. HarperCollins is releasing a complete e-book soon, but for those readers who bought the e-book already, I am posting the essay, one of my better efforts at nonfiction, here.
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Friday, May 3: 7-10 PM. "Between the Covers" erotic romance reading series. Happy Ending Lounge, 302 Broome St., NYC. I'll be reading from Phyllida, and giving away PDFs and ePubs of Recognition ("Lady Amalie's memoirs," no. 1) as well as an unpublished comedy story.

I finished reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second book in Hilary Mantel's planned trilogy about Henry VIII and his crew as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, two days after our book club's discussion. Now I'm reeling from self-imposed Tudor overload. Wanting to know more about the standard interpretation of Cromwell and his character (as opposed to Mantel's partisan approach), I started with Wikipedia. But I also needed my regular nightly fix of TV, and what more logical than The Tudors, the over-the-top (and I don't just mean breasts spilling out of tight bodices) cable series starring the acting world's physical antithesis of Henry, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, four seasons ready for binge-streaming on Netflix. And to put the cherry on this sex-and-violence sundae, ( Read more...Collapse )

As regular readers and viewers of my Facebook author "fan page" have probably noticed, most of my posts are about writing, usually links to articles in publications like the New York Times. But what generate the most interest are photos (Facebook is a visual medium) and posts that in some way address the substance or theme of my own writing: male bisexuality, and the m/m/f ménage. ( Read more...Collapse )

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Rating and reviewing a book like Wolf Hall is a challenge on many levels. It's serious historical fiction written by an intelligent, talented author, about a well-known period of English history (Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, divorce, male heir, rise of Protestantism, break with Rome) as told by a relatively unfamiliar main character, Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief minister and, as we might think of him, "enforcer." There's an excellent, lengthy, substantive review by "~Geektastic~" on Goodreads, just a couple of reviews below mine that lays out all the historical background and discusses the novel in terms of historical accuracy and character development. It's pointless for me to rehash such a masterly job, so in my "review" I will focus on one controversial aspect of Hilary Mantel's work: the narrative style. ( Read more...Collapse )

For my last blog meditation of the year, I want to revisit a favorite topic: the use of language in fiction, especially historical fiction. Yes, I've written about this a lot, but the issue keeps sitting up and jumping off the slab each time I think my last autopsy has established a cause of death. ( Read more...Collapse )

"Alice" is a fictional character, the author, Fay Weldon, signs her letters to this nonexistent niece "your aunt Fay" and most of the book reads more like essays than a novel. Sounds ghastly, right? It probably is if you read it at the wrong moment. ( Read more...Collapse )

By a strange confluence of programming during last month's Jane Austen Society of North America's annual general meeting (JASNA AGM), I would come home after a full day of sessions about the seduction of conversation, coded sexual references in Austen's fiction and gendered ways of speaking, and watch a couple of episodes of Season 2 of The Walking Dead, the popular zombie-apocalypse cable TV show--my own version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. ( Read more...Collapse )

The House of Mirth, published in 1905, is Edith Wharton's first major work of fiction, and it established her reputation as a brilliant novelist and harsh critic of her society. Because I came to it after reading The Age of Innocence, which shows Wharton at the height of her power, I can't help giving Mirth four stars, where Innocence rated five. ( Read more...Collapse )

Last year I presented a "paper" at the 3rd annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. IASPR is a group of scholars, mostly professors and people earning graduate degrees in English literature, who study popular romance fiction along with the classics. As a novelist, I'm sort of on the fringe of a group like this, and I was pleased that my proposed topic passed peer review. ( Read more...Collapse )