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Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
Like many students, Elayne Clift first read The Scarlet Letter in high school and has admired the character of Hester Prynne ever since.
“Hester Prynne has always been my literary heroine,” she says. “I just think she's the most extraordinary woman, and I love the story.”
Enough so that Clift has moved Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, from the Puritan setting of Hawthorne's original and has re-imagined the characters in a more modern setting.
Hester's Daughters, Clift's new novel, chronicles the lives of the female leads from Hester's birth in 1929 to an adult Pearl's journey to Africa in 2005.
F.D. Reeve says he has no idea how long it took him to write Nathaniel Purple, which will be published Jan. 1. “There was an earlier version which some friends remember, some years back,” the Wilmington-based author said of his 31st book, his first novella. “Much was transformed, and...
Regardless of how more traditional bibliophiles might feel about it, downloadable electronic books have become a major part of print publication. Kindles and Nooks are more popular than ever, and many people find a downloaded copy of a new or favorite book more convenient than carrying around a printed...
The Brattleboro Literary Festival is coming to town again in October, and 2011 marks its 10th anniversary. This year, for the first time, workshops will be offered for fiction writers and poets, in conjunction with Marlboro College. These workshops will be hosted by fiction author Nicholas Delbanco and poet Jeanne Marie Beaumont. Co-founders Suzanne Kingsbury and Sandy Rouse told The Commons about who and what to expect during this year's much-anticipated festival. Rouse, the festival's co-chair, discussed the theme and...
Ask any aspiring or recently successful author, and they will tell you exactly how difficult it is to get published in the current economic climate. That is why several Vermont authors - Archer Mayor, Deborah Lee Luskin, Joyce Marcel, and Vincent Panella - have all chosen to take the road less traveled. The four have experienced the ups and downs of taking responsibility for getting their own words into type, the type into pages, and the pages into books on...
It's been more than a year since The Commons first published an interview with writer Alexander R. Knight, author of the horror/science fiction short story volume Victoria's Place. Now Knight is back with a promising new “novelette” entitled After the Sun, a chilling horror story about a small group of people who end up trapped on the shoals of a lake after an apocalyptic event. The story, which Knight wrote back in 1998, had a promising start but a very...
Julian F. Thompson, author of 18 young adult novels, including The Grounding of Group 6, and the newly self-published author of Getting In, says he is one of a small number of adults who actually likes and gets along with teenagers. As such a person, he enjoys writing about and for them. He founded and ran an alternative high school for seven years, during which he learned more about the demographic he would later write for. “I started life as...
Lynn Levine, an author who has just released her second book, has been passionate about nature and wildlife since she was a junior in college. “Someone pointed out a tree to me and told me it had a name,” she recalls. “That just hit my heart. I had never known that plants had names.” Levine became a forester, and for 32 years, she has run her own business, Forest Care. “My job involves working with private landowners and their woodlands,”
