Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Sarah-Jane Stratford | 20 Questions: RED LETTER DAYS
Author Guest / February 26, 2020

1–What’s the name of your latest release?  Red Letter Days 2–What is it about?  Two American women escape the Hollywood blacklist for England, where they are able to continue working and remain free, but find that they still aren’t as safe as they hope. It’s also very much about love, passion for work, resilience, friendship, and maintaining a sense of self and humour in the face of adversity. 3–What word best describes your main character(s)?  Plucky. 4–What makes your story relatable?  To my vexation, it is getting more relatable by the day, what with accusations of “communist”, right-wing attacks on the arts, and attempts to purge anyone who doesn’t tow the party line from the government. Also attempts to sequester passports from citizens, deny citizenship – you get the idea. But what matters is that then, as now, more people are pushing back and standing up for what is right. The political parallels aside, the story will also speak to anyone who has had a passion and pursued it; or found themselves alone and reached out to find friends they might not have expected to become part of their lives. And anyone who has ever fallen in love and found…

Andrea Simon | Longing for a 1950s Camelot
Author Guest / October 23, 2019

When I announced to my friends, family, and writing colleagues that I finally secured a contract to publish a novel-in-stories, Floating in the Neversink, about growing up in Brooklyn and the Catskill Mountains from 1955-1961, I received unexpected enthusiasm. Certainly, my older family members anticipated memories of gossiping on city brownstone stoops and grabbing a Chinese lunch on Flatbush Avenue, and my growing-up friends hoped to recapture memories of make-out parties in the Catskill day camp meeting house during humid summer nights. But I was surprised by the interest of the younger relatives and friends, my daughter’s Generation X and the Millennials. Some were movie buffs and loved cult favorites like Dirty Dancing, Sweet Lorraine, and A Walk on the Moon, romanticizing the summers of that era, or more recent movies like immigrant life in Brooklyn. Many had heard their parents’ and grandparents’ stories; others were obsessed by Amazon’s 1950s-set comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. But I suspected this interest was more layered: young and old were attracted to a time when life was seemingly more humanly connected. I looked for verification of my theory, and I lazily began on social media. I searched Facebook for groups relating to the…