Interview: A conversation with JULIETTE WELLS to celebrate 200th anniversary edition of EMMA by Jane Austen

Who doesn’t love Jane Austen? She is timeless and tells timeless stories about timeless women. I have read almost all of Austen’s novels and Emma is one of my absolute favorites.

Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen’s most unique characters because she is independently wealthy and doesn’t really ‘need’ anyone which I absolutely love. Not to mention the story of match making has the upmost potential to be comical and a bit of a blunder. This story has been remade time and again, including pop culture icon film, Clueless.

Penguin is releasing a 200th anniversary DELUXE edition of the book! I am thrilled to be able to offer not only a giveaway for the book but a conversation with the author as well!

Please welcome Juliette Wells wrote the introduction of the EMMA:200TH ANNIVERSARY ANNOTATED EDITION, to The Lit Bitch!

Editor and Introducer of EMMA: 200th-Anniversary Annotated Edition

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition; on-sale September 29, 2015; 9780143107712; $16.00)

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Special Feature and GIVEAWAY: WHEREVER THERE IS LIGHT by Peter Golden

From the author of Comeback Love comes a sweeping, panoramic tale of twentieth-century America, chronicling the decades-long love affair between a Jewish immigrant and the granddaughter of a slave.

Julian Rose is only fifteen when he leaves his family and Germany for a new life in 1920s America. Lonely at first, he eventually finds his way first by joining up with Longy Zwillman and becoming one of the preeminent bootleggers on the East Coast, and later by amassing a fortune in real estate.

Kendall Wakefield is a free-spirited college senior who longs to become a painter. Her mother, the daughter of a slave and founder of an African-American college in South Florida, is determined to find a suitable match for her only daughter.

One evening in 1938, Mrs. Wakefield hosts a dinner that reunites Julian with his parents—who have been rescued from Hitler’s Germany by the college and brings him together with Kendall for the first time. From that encounter begins a thirty-year affair that will take the lovers from the beaches of Miami to the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village to postwar life in Paris, where they will mingle with Sartre, Picasso, and a host of other artists and intellectuals. Through his years serving in American intelligence and as an interrogator at the Nuremberg trials, what Julian wants most is to marry and find the joy that eluded his parents. Kendall craves her freedom, and after trading her oil paints for a Leica camera, becomes a celebrated photographer, among the first American journalists to photograph the survivors of a liberated concentration camp. Yet despite distance, their competing desires, and the rapidly changing world, their longing for each other remains a constant in the ceaseless sweep of time.

Captivating and infused with historical detail, this is the epic tale of three generations, two different but intertwined families, and one unforgettable love story.

See the Raffelcopter link at the end of this post for a chance to win this stunning book! The giveaway begins at midnight on Oct. 1 and ends at midnight on Nov. 1.

Continue reading “Special Feature and GIVEAWAY: WHEREVER THERE IS LIGHT by Peter Golden”

Spotlight Feature: THE BEAUTIFUL AMERICAN by Jeanne Mackin

02_The Beautiful AmericanThe Beautiful American
by Jeanne Mackin

Publication Date: June 3, 2014
NAL/Penguin Group
Formats: eBook, Paperback, Audio
352 Pages

Genre: Historical Fiction

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As recovery from World War II begins, expat American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There, she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter’s life. Lee suffers from what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920’s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee’s magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will Nora’s reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals, and break years of silence?

A novel of freedom and frailty, desire and daring, The Beautiful American portrays the extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional woman.

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Review: The Determined Heart: The Tale of Mary Shelley and Her Frankenstein by Antoinette May

Mary Shelley was the daughter of the iconic feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin. She has not had a normal childhood….she’s been exposed to all kinds of brilliant literary and philosophical figures.

But she has also suffered tragedy, Mary never knew her mother. Her mother died shortly after giving birth to Mary, so the only family she has ever known was her half sister Fanny and her father. Well, Mary’s life is about to get more complicated and uncomfortable when her father remarries. William has only ever really loved one woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, so when he remarries his neighbor Mary Jane Clairmont she is pretty jealous of Wollstonecraft’s memory.

Mary Jane brings her daughter Claire to the household and it’s clear that Mary’s life is going to now include a jealous step mother and a spoiled step sister both of whom bring constant conflict to the family dynamics.

At a very young age, Mary meets a romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she falls deeply in love with. They elope and the fallout from that elopement will define Mary’s future. Mary and her new husband soon find themselves destitute, in constant debt, ostracized by society, and worst of all, Mary is embroiled in a torturous love triangle as Percy takes Mary’s stepsister Claire as a lover.

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Review: The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne (Verlaque and Bonnet #5) by M. L. Longworth

This book combined three of my favorite things…..art, France, and mystery. Judge Antoine Verlaque is enjoying his life and work in the small town of Aix-en-Provence. Provence was once home to the art worlds most famous painters, Paul Cezanne.

A friend in Judge Verlaque’s cigar club asks him to visit René Rouquet, a man who not only lives in Cezanne’s old apartment, but thinks he found a previously unknown Cezanne portrait. When the Judge and his friend arrive at Rouquet’s apartment, they are shocked to find him dead…..and the canvas is missing.

After tracking down the canvas, the Judge and his girl friend Marine Bonnet, begin looking into the canvas’s authenticity. The woman in the portrait is clearly not Madam Cezanne, so the natural question is ‘who is the women in the portrait’?

Continue reading “Review: The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne (Verlaque and Bonnet #5) by M. L. Longworth”