A body, gutted like a deer, lies under a tree among the leaves of early fall. On this grisly note William Heffernan begins his 14th novel, Beulah Hill. The year is 1933. When Samuel Bradley, the young constable of the little Vermont community of Jerusalem’s Landing, begins to investigate the murder, he knows at once that this will be no ordinary inquiry. The body lies on Beulah Hill, known on official maps as Nigger Hill.... Read more

In the follow-up to his 1999 novel, The Story of a Million Years, Burlington writer David Huddle turns his attentions to Vermont small-town life. More specifically, he focuses on Claire McClelland, a Bennington therapist, in a sequence of short works that together comprise a novella-length work of fiction.... Read more

I like to keep all my fantasies as reality. My fantasy island is St. John, and I get to go there in reality as well!

MEEOW.... Read more

Reading The House of Mirth and eagerly awaiting the movie, I wish I could commission Edith Wharton to write about today’s society.

At the age of 10, baseball-obsessed Noel Weather-spoon tries to stretch a triple into a home run in a Little League game. He knocks down the opposing catcher, who is carried off the field in a coma, never to recover. Noel, a severe asthmatic, never really recovers, either. And so newcomer Lee Durkee sets the stage for his first novel, Rides of the Midway, which despite this inauspicious beginning is far from a simple tragedy.... Read more

In Shelby Hearon’s latest novel, Ella in Bloom, Ella is a widow with a 14-year-old daughter, trying to make ends meet in the picturesque Louisiana town of Old Metairie. Having run away while in college with a deeply unsuitable boy, who dumped her soon afterwards, she has always been the black sheep of her genteel family in Austin, Texas. And she’s been permanently in the shade of her older sister, Terrell, who married well and was a pillar of Austin society until her tragic death in a plane crash.... Read more

Remember to renew your birth-control prescription; eat BBQ and hope for better days.

Bend at the knees, stroke from the shoulders, and drink a little water.... Read more

The George W. Bush Recession-Induced Diet.

The Canteloupe Diet — three a day. I heard it on the radio, so it must be true!... Read more

What is the true cause of violence? Is it an integral part of the human animal, or is there another explanation for our blood-spattered history of atrocities, pogroms, wars and murders? This is the question at the heart of The Babel Effect, a new “thriller” by Vermont-based author Daniel Hecht, and the follow-up to his best-selling Skull Session.... Read more