Tottenville Blog

• Review: ‘Monstress’ (from NPR Books)

  1 Feb 2012

  by Lysley Tenorio

  Tenorio has taken a uniquely Filipino-American perspective, polyglot and glittering with cinema dreams, and used it to make a bold collection of stories of the rejected, the helpless and the lost. “Montress” is the debut of a singular talent. -Alexander Chee

• Actors Write, And So Can You!

  9 Jan 2012

  With last week’s news of James Franco’s forthcoming novel, Actor’s Anonymous, getting picked up by Amazon publishing, here’s a list of some other brave actors and celebrities who moonlight as authors.

• Tottenville Picks: Paper Conspiracies

  12 Dec 2011

  by Susan Daitch

  An underworld of intrigue thrives at the center of Susan Daitch’s new novel surrounding the Georges Méliès film L’affaire Dreyfus… An engrossing novel for the age of censorship and redaction.

• National Book Award Winning Debuts

  16 Nov 2011

  In light of Tea Obreht’s NBA nomination for The Tiger’s Wife, we got to thinking about the other debut novels that have received the honor.

• Interview with Margaux Fragoso

  18 Oct 2011

  by Krystal Anada Sital

  Fragoso plumbs the depths of the human condition with her first book, Tiger, Tiger. Undoubtedly painful, inherently suspenseful, and convincing, this gut-wrenching memoir promises a story of a woman who succesfully reclaims her life.

• Interview with Emma Straub

  13 Sep 2011

  by Miranda Popkey

  Emma Straub’s debut, Other People We Married, is a story collection to be savored. Read it too quickly and you’ll run the risk of missing the small moments that come to shape Straub’s characters and her stories.

• Interview with Helen Phillips

  15 Jul 2011

  by Reese Okyong Kwon

  Helen Phillips’s debut collection of one-page fabulist stories, And Yet They Were Happy, is thronged by wonders. It is the work, as Amy Hempel has said, of a “deeply interesting mind.”

• Story Theory: Confessions of a Literary Darwinist

  14 Jul 2011

  By R. Salvador Reyes

  In the beginning, I just wanted to write. Why should I care how humans had come to love literature and art? I didn’t care. Until I asked the question.