Features

February 21, 2011 In his new novel, The Color of Night, Madison Smartt Bell takes readers into the mind of a woman who has channeled her own suffering into a terrible obsession with violence and death. Today at Chapter 16, read an interview with Bell and an excerpt from the book, which hits shelves April 5.

February 21, 2011 In his new novel, The Color of Night, Madison Smartt Bell takes readers into the mind of Mae, a woman who has channeled the incestuous abuse of her childhood into a mystical, eroticized obsession with violence and death. Televised images of the 9/11 attacks thrill her, spurring memories of a sojourn with a Manson-like cult and of a woman, Laurel, who was her lover and ally there. What follows is an excerpt from the book, which hits shelves April 5.

December 23, 2010 When novelist Richard Bausch was a child, his father would tell him about his days in the army, many of them spent slogging alongside hundreds of thousands of other Allied soldiers up the Italian Peninsula during World War II. These weren’t bedtime stories: what was supposed to be a quick conquest took nearly two years to complete, and 60,000 Allied soldiers, 50,000 Germans, and 50,000 Italian soldiers and partisans died in the process. It was the bloodiest theater in Western Europe. One of those stories became the basis for Bausch’s latest novel, Peace, which is dedicated to his father and which won the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.