iUniverse Tales of a Hollywood Housewife is a tour de force

Recently iUniverse reported on one of our books that had been hitting the heights in the Amazon bestsellers lists; Tales of a Hollywood Housewife: A Memoir by The First Mrs. Lee Marvin by Betty Marvin. Well the latest news is that it keeps on doing so!

Published in 2010, iUniverse Tales of a Hollywood Housewife seems to have had this deserved sales surge as another Lee Marvin biography, Lee Marvin: Point Blank by Dwayne Epstein was recently published using Betty for much of the source material. Added to this is the veryrecent rave review by KC in Classic Movies:-

“When I reviewed the marvelous Lee Marvin: Point Blank earlier this summer, I was especially charmed by the stories told about him by his first wife, Betty Marvin. She was the most important voice in the book, providing a clear-eyed, affectionately exasperated account of a man who had given her quite a ride.

Marvin had every right to be bitter, and she was, but she was also appreciative of the good aspects of their time together. I thought she was remarkably generous to her ex and I loved the way she expressed herself. She was tart, but loving. You don’t often see one source providing so much more information in a biography, but I could understand why Epstein chose to favor her voice. No one could tell the story better than her.

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iUniverse talks with the authors of The Legend of Anne Southern 3

In Part 2 of this series of book development blog posts, iUniverse author J. Rivers Hodge let us know how his book was received and how he developed characters. Now in Part 3 he describes to iUniverse Blog the development of another main character.

The Civil War comes to Georgia

“Anne Southern is the most refined and beautiful woman in the South. Allen Southern is the bravest soldier of the Confederacy. Maggie Edge is the most devout Christian. Joe Edge is the best young man. Ruse Blackburn is the meanest villain ever to walk across the pages of a book, sharpening his skinning knife—slip, slap; slip, slap; slip; slap.

The story begins with a visit to Blackburn’s butcher shop. There, Ruse Blackburn is humiliated by a young woman he desires, and the humiliation eventually causes Ruse to commit a horrible crime that almost gets him hung.

But, Ruse is offered a “deal” by Anne Southern’s father-in-law, an odd character called Pop. Ruse is dispatched to Louisiana to become William T. Sherman’s aide when the war begins. As the story unfolds, the reader will realized that Pop has more to do with the war than meets the eye.

Ruse eventually becomes the tip of the sword that is General Sherman’s army: burning, raping, and murdering its way across Georgia.”

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iUniverse talks with the authors of The Legend of Anne Southern 2

In the first part of this series of iUniverse blog posts from award winning author J. Rivers Hodge, we learnt about both his writing inspiration and the process of getting to the finished manuscript stage. Now in Part 2:
iUniverse asks how your novel has been received?

“We’d like to have more sales, but who doesn’t? The feedback from readers has been terrific. Everyone has given us excellent marks, not only for the story, but also the “look” of the book. More than one reader has noted how professional it appears, and more than one has complimented us on the content and color of the cover. That credit goes to iUniverse.

Also, The Legend of Anne Southern has won the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Regional Fiction and has recently been selected as a finalist for the Royal Palm Literary Award presented by the Florida Writers Association.

Florida Writers Assoc. RPLA LogoWe’ve worked book shows, book signings, and one shrimp festival. About half the readers, who pick up the book and talk to us, buy it. We have no way to compare that to a standard, but we think it’s pretty good.”

Click here to read the full article

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iUniverse talks with the authors of The Legend of Anne Southern 1

iUniverse recently talked with J. Rivers Hodge, award winning author of The Legend of Anne Southern with his wife and writing partner, Brenda.

They were the winners of the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Regional Fiction and have recently been selected as a finalist for the Royal Palm Literary Award presented by the Florida Writers Association.

Click here to read the full article

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iUniverse author Robert W. Barker: Writing for the Soul

“Recently a book I had written, The Devil’s Chosen, was awarded the Eric Hoffer Award for Legacy Fiction. The Devil’s Chosen examines the context and process of decisions during the Holocaust. The book was first published by iUniverse in 2005, and other than being an Editor’s Choice selection by iUniverse, this award was the first significant and independent endorsement of the quality and potential importance of this book. As every author knows, writing can be a very lonely endeavor, and writing about the Holocaust can be lonelier still. The Holocaust is such a sensitive and difficult subject, charged with so many deep and fierce emotions and conflicts. I had no idea how anyone would receive The Devil’s Chosen. The response has in fact been almost universally favorable, though some people find the book quite difficult to read.”

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iUniverse authors get B.R.A.G.GING rights

Excuse the pun, but the Better Readers Appreciation Group (B.R.A.G) has just awarded its latest round of Medallion Honorees and iUniverse Publishing is pleased that the following books and authors have received this prestigious award.
iUniverse Betrayal by Michele Kallio

Awarded in the historical fiction genre, this Canadian debut author has received excellent reviews, best summed up by Melysah Bunting for TheLitCritic:

“The book is a real page turner and has all of my favorite ingredients: history, intrigue, secrets, love, passion, betrayal and mystery. Although the chapters were told by different characters, I didn’t find it at all confusing and Kallio made me indentify with each of the characters. I didn’t like her portrayal of Jane Boleyn, George Boleyn’s wife, but that’s just me. All of the characters were believable and I enjoyed the contrast between the two historical periods and the lives of the two women. The story was drawn together beautifully at the end, with all the different threads and the reasoning behind Lydia’s dreams. I hope that Kallio will produce more novels as this was an excellent debut.”

Click here to read the full article

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iUniverse Author Patty Brant

iUniverse blog recently congratulated one of our debut authors on being a Finalist in the very tough 2013 Indie Excellence Book Awards-Mystery Category for her book Bitter Secrets and in doing so asked her to be a guest author on the blog. This is what she said on book awards.

2013 Indie Excellence Book Awards-Mystery Category -tough!

“When I entered the contest I thought – “Oh, well, it can’t hurt to try! And I was right. It sure didn’t hurt. In fact, when I was notified that I was a finalist, there was no pain at all!

I do have to confess to being more than a little surprised. With all the submissions they get from everywhere, it took a while to sink in. People who really know books, people whose lives are books, people in the industry thought my story made the grade.

Now, that was food for thought. And it is for me.”

Click here to read the full article

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Broken Glass and Other Stories

Herbert Spohn

iUniverse, 202 pages, (paperback) $14.95, 9780595377053

(Reviewed: July, 2013)

In this collection, Herbert Spohn draws on his experience of becoming an American after fleeing Nazi Germany as a boy, his observational skills honed as a mental health professional, and a deft hand for writing to deliver a short story anthology that is both assured and engrossing. While the 12 pieces that comprise Broken Glass and Other Stories can each stand alone, taken together, they make up a particularly satisfying volume.

Spohn’s stories generally move from specific observations to larger understanding and sometimes deliver moments of epiphany. A case in point is the title story, “Broken Glass,” in which a psychiatrist who senses that there is something sensible about a homeless man’s shard collecting dares to accompany the vagrant to a subway-tunnel hideaway. There, he finds that his witnessing of the man’s work is an act that gives the troubled man’s life some real meaning.

Finding meaning in human behavior also underlies the action in the rest of the book. For instance, in “Diary of a Blind Man,” a man must understand why he is sightless when doctors say he may be physically capable of seeing. Other stories examine the experience of fighting in a war against citizens of one’s own birth nation, coming to terms with workaholism, and more. A particularly clever short-short story is written in the form of a clinical report about “hyperempathy,” a state in which a person experiences overwhelming awareness of the emotions of others.

Arranged in an order that displays a range of mood and with smart, engaging dialogue, the stories amount to much more than the sum of their parts. With the exception of “Drunks” – which has a conclusion that “tells” rather than deftly “shows” the story’s mission – this is an accomplished anthology from start to finish.

Also available as an ebook.



Author’s Current Residence

Topeka, Kansas

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True Successor

Joseph H. Levie

iUniverse, 235 pages, (paperback) $16.95, 9781475970692

(Reviewed: July, 2013)

True Successor is a work of alternate history, the genre that combines historical fact with broad speculation. In this case, the question is: what would have happened if the Roman Empire had survived instead of collapsing? The answers are numerous.

Set in 1812, the story opens in Sapoda, a town sandwiched between New Rome and the Mongol Empire. Mikhail de Reuter is a low-level officer stopping in to see his girlfriend when an abrupt change in fortune finds him serving the Emperor of New Rome while dodging a group of Mongols bent on his capture. Along the way, there are battlefield adventures, moments of political intrigue, and a few romances as well.

Author Joseph Levie creates a plausible world that gives historical fiction fans plenty to explore. Readers with little to no knowledge of Roman history may struggle to follow the plot, for fear of missing some of the imagined changes in the historical landscape, but the characters and setting will keep them engaged.

General-interest readers are likely to gravitate toward the few chapters that look at day-to-day life in New Rome, from commerce to community festivals; they’re among the book’s best, along with some well-choreographed battles. When the town is crowded, for example, “The rich do more than shop. Deals are done. Money changes hands. Backs are scratched and often knifed.” In passages such as this, Levie brings a sly humor to the story that keeps the high-stakes battles from overwhelming the novel as a whole.

There are a handful of sentences left unfinished in a way that suggests printer error rather than grammatical oversight, but they don’t detract mightily from the story. Levie balances a complex plot with enough well-wrought description to ground readers in his vision, making True Successor a nice addition to a genre that artfully re-imagines reality.

Also available in hardcover.

Author’s Current Residence

New York, New York

Source: BlueInk Review

via http://iuniversepublishing.wordpress.com/

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Essential Writings: A Journey Through Time, 2nd and Revised Edition

Helmut Schwab

iUniverse, 145 pages, (paperback) $14.95, 9781475960259

(Reviewed: July, 2013)

Helmut Schwab’s Essential Writings: A Journey through Time aims to distill the author’s previous essays on topics as diverse as the origin of the universe, human evolution, consciousness, and the search for spiritual meaning. The subtitle, “A modern ‘De Rerum Natura’” is a reference to Lucretius’s work of the same name, which spanned topics within the sciences as well as speculations about mind and soul.

Essential Writings emulates Lucretius’s approach from a time when science and religion were seen as simply branches of philosophy. The project is broad, aiming to explain many of the mysteries of existence and the human condition from the dawn of time into the future, and Schwab is skilled at synthesizing neuroscience, biochemistry, psychology, and philosophy of mind in a way that is accessible to a wider audience. Particularly notable is his economical explanation of the debate on free will.

Schwab’s treatment of politics and religion is nuanced and complex. He shares compelling arguments for agnosticism, if not atheism, but he finds relevant guidance in the moral teachings of religious traditions. His morality is grounded in virtues of personal fulfillment, service to others, and aesthetic appreciation. Readers may object to his implication that violence is endemic to (but certainly not exclusive to) Islam, yet he also demonstrates empathy for the plight of Palestinians.

Essential Writings is a niche book, with primary appeal for academics in philosophy or similar fields. It is overly ambitious in seeking to describe and justify a worldview about so much of our existence in so short a format, and the passages are too brief to be as effective as they could be. (Note: Schwab’s longer essays are available on his website.) In addition, it occasionally feels as if the author added threads of thought, ad hoc, to unrelated topics.

Despite such drawbacks, this project has commendable moments of real success grappling with complicated ideas that will interest its specific audience.

Also available in hardcover and ebook.

Author’s Current Residence

Princeton, New Jersey

Source: BlueInk Review

via http://iuniversepublishing.wordpress.com/

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The Hunted

iUniverse, 306 pages, (paperback) $18.95, 9781475980653

(Reviewed: July, 2013)

The Hunted is a brilliantly understated fusion of anthropological mystery, apocalyptic science fiction, and ecological thriller. Stellar character development, a fascinating storyline, and vivid description make this a stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed kind of read.

It all begins in the Amazon where the last remnants of an indigenous tribe (called the Ipanao) that has remained separate from the civilized world for thousands of years is discovered by a geological survey team — and almost all members killed. The survivors, all of whom have coffee-colored skin and jet-black hair, are brought to a medical facility and forced to undergo a series of tests. The results are mind-boggling: their DNA is radically different than that of modern humans.

Two Brazilian cultural anthropologists, David and Cecelia Goncalves, are brought in to assess the situation. Cecelia, seven months pregnant, falls in love with the orphaned Ipanao infant girl called Suyape. She quickly realizes there is something unusual about the baby, who seems to be able to communicate telepathically, but she keeps the information secret to save the child from further harm.

Fast-forward 17 years. David and Cecelia live in Brunswick, Maine, with their two daughters, Fabia and Suyape, whom the couple adopted before leaving Brazil. Suyape is a high school senior and actively promotes awareness of “non-contacteds,” people who live in tribes on the edge of civilization. By all outward appearances, she is a normal teenaged girl, until she begins experiencing bizarre visions and embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take her back to her native jungles.

The beauty of this novel is that it works simultaneously as a Da Vinci Codesque suspense, a science fiction thriller, and an anthropology-powered mystery — and beneath it all is the monumentally significant issue of environmental degradation and looming ecological collapse. This is a compelling and powerful read.

(The only criticism is the ill-conceived cover art, which inexplicably depicts a light-skinned, blue-eyed girl and is completely unrelated to the storyline.)

Also available in hardcover and ebook.

Author’s Current Residence

Haverhill, Massachusetts

Source: BlueInk Review

via http://iuniversereviews.blogspot.com/

via http://iuniversepublishing.wordpress.com/

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Atom

Stephen C. Sutcliffe

iUniverse.com, 173 pages, (e-book) $3.99, 9781469772769

(Reviewed: July, 2013)

Stephen C. Sutcliffe’s ambitious first novel covers a lot of territory. Negotiating its wide-ranging landscape, readers will be hard-pressed to peg a specific genre. Is it an action-packed adventure? Psychedelic mysticism? An apocalyptic manifesto? ATOM aspires to be all of these, with limited success.

The story is that of Michael Brethren and his buddies, privileged kids enjoying a parent-funded prolonged adolescence, and yet obsessed with the specter of nuclear war. They wonder, “What is it like to grow up in a world that can’t annihilate itself in a matter of days or hours?” The group, known as The Children of Atom, counter-intuitively decides it will make way for a more peaceful world in the most violent way possible: setting off a nuclear bomb at a public event.

It’s a curious idea, that the world must suffer one final nuclear explosion before choosing to shun such weapons forever. These characters don’t question themselves, however, and rather nonchalantly embark on a violent drug heist, which they accomplish with unbelievable efficiency, little remorse, and an excess of film-worthy explosions.

Sutcliffe attempts to mark an emotional evolution in Michael as events unfold —he has many dramatic moments of doubt—but Michael ultimately decides it’s “too late to dwell on right and wrong.” As the fate of 150,000 people hangs in the balance, readers might disagree.

Mired in melodramatic descriptions ranging from the cliché (a rainbow dancing in the mist) to the murky (“calliopes of manifold dissonance”) the action moves forward sporadically. Michael takes several unrelated side trips to play guitar, see a girl, and score some cocaine. Sutcliffe compounds the feeling of detachment by using the passive voice even in action scenes. Michael doesn’t crash into a lamp fixture while searching a drug lord’s study, but instead feels “his actions arrested by his collision with the faulty lamp.”

ATOM puts forth an intriguing idea, but ultimately fails to fully engage either its characters or its audience.

Source: BlueInk Review

via http://iuniversereviews.blogspot.com/

via http://iuniversepublishing.wordpress.com/

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In the Frightened Heart of Me: Tennessee Williams’s Last Year

Tony Narducci

iUniverse, 302 pages, (paperback) $21.95, 9781475965940

(Reviewed: July, 2013)

Tony Narducci had idolized Tennessee Williams for two decades when they met at a gay Key West disco in February 1982. Narducci offered his arm after having seen Williams stumble on the stairs. That simple act — the playwright stumbling, the young man propping him up — became the template for a complex and challenging friendship that lasted until Williams’s death almost exactly a year later.

Narducci was 34 to Williams’s 71, too young to put aside his own dreams and become Williams’s live-in companion as the writer exhorts him to do. Instead, the two travel and spend time together, in Narducci’s hometown of Chicago as well as Boston, New York and Key West.

Narducci’s poignant, well-written memoir (the title taken from Williams’s The Night of the Iguana), is based on his journal from that time, along with letters the two men exchanged. His description of a show staged by Williams and Vanessa Redgrave (in which Williams reads an essay with a loose denture bridge garbling some of his words) enlivens the narrative, as do cameo appearances by Mike Wallace and Andy Warhol, among others.

Narducci portrays his literary hero as alternately needy and lascivious, gracious and demanding; a pill-popping, wine-guzzling, emotional wreck prone to tears over his fear of dying loveless and alone. It’s a sympathetic portrait of a highly complex man, a man the author describes as an amalgam of Williams’s own fictional characters: “He was always protean: wise like Big Daddy, fragile like Laura, gentile like Blanche, persistent like Maggie, and fickle like Alexandra.”

Along with the last year of Williams’s life, Narducci’s memoir paints an indelible portrait of gay life on the brink of the AIDS epidemic, before the emerging “gay plague” is linked to unprotected sex. His bittersweet memoir is sure to captivate readers with an interest in Williams or in gay life on either side of the Great Divide that was AIDS.

Also available in hardcover.

Author’s Current Residence

Chicago, Illinois

Source: BlueInk Review

via http://iuniversereviews.blogspot.com/

via http://iuniversepublishing.wordpress.com/

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Long Journey Home

“Beautifully told, an amazing story of a family’s endurance and survival through the eyes of a young girl ”

“It is also a story of hope and of the strength of the human spirit

“She writes in an ‘it-is-what-it-is’ style that makes it very readable ”

“This simple, but amazingly moving and riveting book took me back”

iUniverse Long Journey Home getting rave reviews

Above are just a few readers’ comments from the many excellent reviews that this iUniverse Editor’s Choice Award book, Long Journey Home, has been receiving; and below is a 5 star review from Amazon that sums up the general feeling about this memoir of the Holocaust. iUniverse also recommends that you read our recent blog article, Lest We Forget, that covers more of our titles concerning these horrendous events.

Read more: iUniverse Book Review: Long Journey Home

via http://iuniversereviews.blogspot.com/

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Rescuing Hope

iUniverse author and campaigner for the victims of sex trafficking across the nation has been receiving deserved media and reader attention for “Rescuing Hope” the novel that Susan published to highlight the prevalence of this wicked activity within our borders. From Goodreads to Amazon to our own iUniverse Bookstore, “Rescuing Hope” has received a plethora of 5 star reviews. Here are just a few, but click on the links to see more:-

Amazon Books

“I couldn’t put it down and my heart broke throughout the story for both Hope and all the girls who are actually living out her story in real life. ” Mandi

Read more: iUniverse Book Review: Rescuing Hope

via http://iuniversereviews.blogspot.com/

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Inspector Paws and the Wonders of Europe

iUniverse Publishing has just received an extremely positive review from BlueInk Reviews for Inspector Paws and the Wonders of Europe by self-published author Rosemary Budd. This is icing on the cake to add to the 5 star ratings the book has been getting from readers.

Readers Views

“Very well written funny mystery from the view of the cat. A first novel but I’m sure there will be many sequels coming about Inspector Paws and his adventures.”

Michael J. Hyland Amazon Books

“This is an amazing book. It is well written and one of the less gruesome mystery book for teens.”

Seana Collins iUniverse Bookstore

Read more: iUniverse Book Review: Inspector Paws and the Wonders of Europe

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Be a Millionaire Shopkeeper

iUniverse Publishing has an author, Joanna Bradshaw whose book, Be a Millionaire Shopkeeper, has been attracting a lot of media attention recently. The reasons being the book provides the ammunition for independent retailers to compete against the big retail chains and it is written by an acknowledged industry guru, Joanna Bradshaw, whose track record in the industry is second to none. Her 45 year career as a senior executive with giants Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, coupled with her entrepreneurial experiences as co-founder and president of HØME Ltd, bears witness that Jody, as she prefers to be known, has a matchless perspective of the retailing world.

Read more: iUniverse Book Review: Be a Millionaire Shopkeeper

via http://iuniversereviews.blogspot.com/

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iUniverse publishing badged “Malta Remembered” by Margaret Dexter

This is what BlueInk said:

“Margaret Dexter’s memoir of a year spent living in Malta is both a fond family history and globetrotting travelogue.

In 1963, husband Stillman’s business was booming and he decided the family should live in England for a year. They leased their Santa Barbara home and dove into the experience hungrily, arriving in time to see The Beatles before they were household names. Returning home, they found the business bankrupt and their own prospects grim. To rebuild a nest egg, Stillman took work that placed him in Libya. The separation from his family was too much to endure, so wife, kids and two poodles moved to Malta, which enabled frequent visits. They once again settled in and were loving life when the political climate in Libya forced the family to move yet again. Ever resilient, they packed up and made landfall (eventually) in Connecticut.

Dexter is an assured writer who is selective in choosing her anecdotes and curates them well. Her depictions of travel by train and ocean liner reveal the grit and glamour of both.

The author also captures her family’s quirky personalities neatly on the page. While living abroad, the family is used to being treated with friendly curiosity by neighbors. But when they settle in Connecticut, nobody seems curious about their time in Malta, and Dexter’s choice to bring home their right-hand drive Renault only makes things worse. “The wariness toward new people in their midst made us more than aware that we were those strangers with the weird car—and if Georg (the family’s standard poodle) sat beside me he appeared to be driving.”

Continue Reading: iUniverse joins with BlueInk in praising Malta Remembered

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I’ve Got Some Lovin’ To Do

“I’ve Got Some Lovin’ To Do: The Diaries of a Roaring Twenties Teen (1925-1926)” by iUniverse published author Julia Park Tracey has recently won two book awards from The San Francisco Book Festival and the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Also she has received a Rising Star Award from iUniverse Publishing. This earns it a special place in the iUniverse Book Reviews website. “I’ve Got Some Lovin’ To Do: The Diaries of a Roaring Twenties Teen (1925-1926)” is available at the iUniverse Bookstore.

Read more: iUniverse Book Review: I’ve Got Some Lovin’ To Do

via http://iuniversereviews.blogspot.com/

via http://iuniversepublishing.wordpress.com/

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Becoming Alice

According to the iUniverse overview:

“Six-year-old Ilse watches Nazi soldiers march down her street in Vienna, Austria. It is the beginning of an odyssey that will take her to Riga, Latvia, and finally to Portland, Oregon. “Becoming Alice” chronicles her Jewish family’s harrowing escape and struggle as immigrants to fit into the American landscape. The added problems of growing up within a troubled family cloud her childhood and adolescence.”

“Strongly recommended a deftly written memoir that will hold the reader’s rapt attention from beginning to end.”

-Midwest Book Review

“Her ability to authentically capture the bewilderment and pain of dislocation through a child’s eyes – including the disharmony in her immediate family – makes for engaging reading that will resonate with young adults everywhere.”

-Beth B. Cohen, Ph.D., author of Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in America, 1946-1954

“Becoming Alice”, by iUniverse published author Alice Rene, received four stars from the Clarion Review. It also received an Editor’s Choice Award and a Star Award from iUniverse Publishing. This earns it a special place in the iUniverse Book Reviews website. “Becoming Alice” is available at the iUniverse Bookstore.

Read more: iUniverse Book Review: Becoming Alice

via http://iuniversereviews.blogspot.com/

via http://iuniversepublishing.wordpress.com/

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