Spotlight on Tricia Dower

In October of last year, we published Stony River by Tricia Dower, a coming-of-age novel that put the so-called innocence of the 1950s on trial for its dark secrets. Dower has since published a sequel through Caitlin Press entitled Becoming Lin, originally released in Canada and followed this year with a US release.

Recently, our managing editor Lisa Graziano asked Dower why she created the three very different teen girls with different, and unusual, lives to contrast with one another.

“Stony River was an expansion of a short story that appear in my Shakespeare-inspired collection, Silent Girl,” Dower explained. “In that story, Linda, Tereza and Miranda first appear. The story was inspired by The Tempest’s Miranda and the two other girls were created to react to the mystery and strangeness of her as well as to support the story theme of sexual awakening.”

In Becoming Lin, the character of Linda has grown up with hopes of trying to escape her parents and her hometown. She marries and follows a minister to Minnesota and begins to discover her true self in a study of marriage across Vietnam-era political uprising and the civil rights movement.

Residing in British Columbia, Dower is the author of these two novels and a previous collection entitled Silent Girl. Her novels have been built from a single story in that collection and expanded into the universes they are now.

To learn more about Dower and her work, visit her website and be sure to pick up these books for great summer reading.

Subway Stops in May!

May is N. West Moss month here at Leapfrog. Her collection of short stories, The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, was released earlier this month and has already made its way across the country to several delighted readers.

Moss recently sat down with American Microreviews and Interviews to talk more about the book, her process, and inspirations.

“Without trying to make it so, the park was appearing in almost everything I wrote, as though it was the canvas I was painting on,” Moss explains. “After it appeared in three or four of my stories in a row, I realized what was happening, and made a conscious choice then to write about the park, using the setting as both a backdrop and a character. If, in my mourning, I could not stop thinking about it, I would allow it into my stories.”

Both LibraryThing and Goodreads are doing giveaways of the book until May 18. Visit them for more information and enter to win. Each outlet will give 10 copies for 20 total copies up for grabs!

So far, we’ve heard reports of Subway Stops in Florida…

Hawaii…

and in the hands of these lucky ladies!

Get yourself a copy today for some great summer reading. And if you want to hear Moss read from her work, you can catch her at the following reading events:

• May 11th at 7:00 pm – Desmond-Fish Library, Garrison, NY
• May 16th at 7:00 pm – Book Culture, 536 W. 112th St, New York, NY
• May 18th at 7:00 pm – Watchung Books, 54 Fairfield St, Montclair, NJ
• May 23rd at 7:00 pm – La Rana Rossa, 154 Green St, New York, NY
• June 7th at 12:30 pm – Bryant Park Reading Room, 42nd St side of the park, New York, NY

 

Fiction Contest Closed & Past Winners

As of yesterday, our annual fiction contest has come to a close. We’ve received nearly 400 entries from a number of countries and we thank all of you that have submitted. Our team now focuses on the hardest part – narrowing down to our top list. The winner, finalists, semifinalists, and honorable mentions will be announced in the coming months, but for now, we’d like to take the chance to look at some previous winners of our contest.

The Quality of Mercy by Katayoun Medhat, our 2016 winner, will be released this September. Mercy tells the story of K – aka Franz Kafka – on the trail of clues to a murder in a small town. Along the way through the rural Southwest, K meets Robbie Begay, a Navajo tribal cop and through their journey, the unlikely duo reveals much about intercultural relations and the crossing of our own borders. With this being Medhat’s debut novel, the story sings with a depth of cultural wisdom that ensures more to come from this Iranian scholar,

The Solace of Monsters by Laurie Blauner was our 2015 winner. The novel is told from the perspective of Mara F., a Frankenstein-like creation made by a grieving scientist.  Throughout her travels and exchanges with her father, we are asked to think about how parts make up a whole; the repercussions of ethical, emotional, and moral issues; and what constitutes solace for different people. Blauner’s work has previously appeared in The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, The Colorado Review, and others. She’s the author of four novels, a novella, and eight books of poetry.

In 2014, we saw The Lonesome Trials of Johnny Riles by Gregory Hill take the top spot. This novel was the prequel to Hill’s East of Denver, which won the 2013 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction. Trials tells the gritty story of two brothers at odds in Stratford County. Hill is currenly working on the third book in the series, tentatively titled Zebra Skin Shirt.

To read more about these winners and more from our past contests, visit out website. Again, we thank everyone for submitting to our contest and your continued interest in being Leapfrogian.