As a courtesy to the arts community of Greater New Haven, the New Haven Review staff preview here writing projects that continue to place local writers on the national literary map.
Author and Westville neighborhood resident Mark Oppenheimer is busy at work on Wisenheimer: Memories of an Articulate Childhood (Free Press, 2009), a hilarious yet self-deprecating look at a smart-alecky kid who finds his true calling: high school debate. From New England to Canada, England to Australia, Oppenheimer records his quest for international debate glory and ever more plastic, spray-painted trophies.
Hamden writer Chandra Prasad, a Connecticut Book Award 2008 fiction finalist (On Borrowed Wings), is preparing a fictional biography of aviatrix Amelia Earhart. In Breathe the Sky, Prasad explores Earhart’s fascinating career and personal life as a staunch promoter of equal rights for women, part-owner of an airline company, good friend to Eleanor Roosevelt, influential fashion designer and record-breaking aeronaut. Prasad even includes a wonderful scene in which Earhart visits New Haven to give a lecture.
Meanwhile, corporate managers eagerly look forward to the next book from the pen of prolific business writer and Whitneyville resident Bruce Tulgan. In Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y (Jossey-Bass, 2009) Tulgan takes a hard look at how Generation Y — those born between 1978 and 1990 — may well be the most demanding workforce in America and yet its most high-performing ever.
For fans of Gone with the Wind, Westville author and historian Marc Wortman’s The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta (Public Affairs, 2009) brings to life the story of America’s most terrible urban siege, exposing the many paradoxes of this slavery-dependent Southern city with a pro-Union mayor.
Science fiction aficionados with a distinctly literary bent are also warmly welcoming the latest work from Hamden denizen Brian Slattery, another Connecticut Book Award 2008 finalist (Spaceman Blues). With Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America (Tor, October 2008), Slattery offers a brilliant dystopian tour de force that imagines an economically devastated America in which slavery has reemerged with a vengeance.
But, of course, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, with many other projects that space does not permit us to describe. If there are projects you’re aware of, please feel free to contact us at editor@newhavenreview.com.
Bennett Lovett-Graff is publisher of the New Haven Review, a literary journal and Web site that hosts parties, sponsors speakers and supports and celebrates the literary activities of the Elm City.
For more information, visit www.newhavenreview.com or e‑mail publisher@newhavenreview.com.
This column was originally published in The Arts Paper, a publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.