When you visit your public library in April, here’s what the cover of the new issue of the complementary magazine BookPage will look like! Is this not the most beautiful thing ever? Joan Wong’s irresistable cover strikes again! Oh, and there will also be a feature article with me somewhere in there.
Here’s a 5 minute excerpt from the audiobook for A Reunion of Ghosts narrated by actress Kirsten Potter. I have read this section many, many times at past readings over the gazillion years it took me to finish the book. It is extremely humbling to hear a professional do it. From now on, at readings, I think I’m just going to play Kirsten’s version and lip sync.
A Reunion of Ghosts is also on Barnes & Noble’s list of the best fiction of March 2015–and the list is illustrated with a large photo of a detail from the gorgeous cover by Joan Wong. (It’s actually the first Advanced Reader Copy version of the cover. Know how I can tell? The first sister has no hands in the early version. When I received the next version, suddenly her hands had been added.)
…checking Facebook during your class’s break and seeing that your colleague and pal Jesse Lee Kercheval has posted the news that your forthcoming novel is an Amazon Best Book of the Month.
Very grateful for this MUGging. MUG (Manhattan Users Guide) names A Reunion of Ghosts as one of seven books they recommend for spring:
What: A Reunion of Ghosts
Who: Judith Claire Mitchell
When: March 24
Why: A dark, comic novel, partly inspired by poison gas inventor Fritz Haber. Mitchell’s story is of three sisters on the Upper West Side, and the familial and personal consequences of their Haber-like great-grandfather.
Caroline Goldstein at Bustle.com includes A Reunion of Ghosts as one of the “13 of March 2015’s Best Books To Spring Clean Your Bookshelves and Make Room For.” I’m super grateful, but I will add that if you’re like me and can never throw books away, I’d suggest doing what I do, namely, just dropping your copy of Reunion (available at bookstores March 24) on the floor near your bedside…along with all the other books whispering, “Read me. Read me.”
Our relative degrees of tidiness aside, I have to say that Ms. Goldstein’s write-up of A Reunion of Ghosts is one of the most cogent I’ve seen. I mean, I’m happy she likes it, of course, but I’m also taken with how deftly she’s summed up the crazy, all-over-the-place plot. Thank you, Caroline, and may all the books on your bookshelves be neat and alphabetically arranged:
Three sisters — Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter — gather in their family apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the last bastion of old New York Jews, in the waning days of the 20th century. This “triumvirate of feminists,” this “partnerless, childless, even petless sorority” congregates here to carry out the Alter family curse that is their birthright: they’re all going to commit suicide, here, together. Suicide is in their blood, less a curse than a genetic inevitability. But first, the three sisters, forming a darkly humorous Greek chorus, write their suicide note — the triumphant, tragic, and memorable story that is A Reunion of Ghosts. From their German-born great-grandfather Lenz (death by morphine) to their mother Dahlie (death by drowning), the sisters’ story spans generations, the Atlantic, and all manner of misfortune. But what could be a story of pure devastation is, in Mitchell’s empathetic hands, a wry and tender examination of family ties.
Lovely news: A Reunion of Ghosts is an April 2015 IndieNext Pick! Thanks to Jen Steele of Boswell Book Company and the other independent booksellers who nominated it. Congratulations, too, to Aline Ohanesian whose novel Orhan’s Inheritance is the number one pick for April. I spent some time with Aline at Winter Institute and cannot wait to get ahold of her book, which is about the Armenian genocide, a subject that concerns me and was actually the focus of my first novel, The Last Day of the War.
Came home from campus today to learn that the UK edition of A Reunion of Ghosts had arrived. Heartfelt thanks to 4th Estate Books and Jo Walker, the designer of the jacket. Here’s me in my living room being happy:
The UK edition of A Reunion of Ghosts poses in the offices of 4th Estate Books, my English publisher. I hadn’t realized how gorgeous the spine would be. And yes, that’s London out the window. And yes, I’m very excited.
EarlyWord, a site for librarians, includes A Reunion of Ghosts in their “The Next Big Thing” column, citing member Janet Lockhart’s “short but succinct review, ‘Gorgeous writing. Highlighted whole pages.’ ” It’s certainly nice to get some librarian love.