AM: Lara, so great to have the opportunity to interview you about The Haunting of Crescent Hotel. Just to orient our readers: this interview takes place the week after Halloween. I wish I had done the interview earlier, so that it could run on or around Halloween, but among the many merits of this book […]
June Read of the Month: “Abraham Anyhow,” by Adam Van Winkle
June 1, 2017 by 1 Comment
Reviewed by William Bernhardt I am particular about how Oklahoma is portrayed in fiction. Perhaps I’m unduly defensive, but at this point, having written more than almost thirty novels set in Oklahoma, in a variety of time periods, I think I’ve earned the right. I chafe when I hear editors, upon hearing that the novel takes […]
January Read of the Month: “The Ocean’s Edge,” by William Bernhardt
January 4, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Carl Sennhenn No one perhaps would suspect, surely not expect, the author of acclaimed and prize-winning mystery novels to write and publish poetry. But William Bernhardt, the author of the successful Ben Kincaid series, has done just that with two volumes of poetry, The White Bird and now The Ocean’s Edge. If The […]
November Read of the Month: “Don’t Try,” by Nathan Brown and Jon Dee Graham
November 2, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by William Bernhardt Though many contemporary poets pen wonderful work, this is not an age characterized by innovation. The free verse/blank verse modern poem looks much the same from one page to the next. Consequently, when a couple of artists jointly produce something genuinely innovative, we should all sit up and notice. This is just […]
August Read of the Month: “Punch,” by Ray McManus
August 3, 2016 by 2 Comments
Reviewed by William Bernhardt I should have seen it coming. The book opens with an epigraph from Philip Levine that provides fair warning: “You’ve never done something simple, so obvious…because you don’t know what work is.” That quote is a clear indicator of the informative and enlightening pleasures to be found in Ray McManus’s fascinating […]