The All But True series returns on Wednesday, February 22, 2023, at 6:30 p.m. The program will be virtual, on Zoom, with preregistration required via the sponsoring bookstore, A Novel Idea on Passyunk. It's free (with a suggested $5 donation for the bookstore). Click here to register.

We're subtitling this program Two Brand-New Middle-Grade Novels, because, well, that's what the books are. Both are being published between February 2 and February 14, and they are both spectacular.

In Ona Gritz’s third book for young readers, August or Forever, ten-year-old Molly has always loved having a sister. Unfortunately, her older half-sister Alison lives on a whole other continent. Their video chats are great, and Molly is thrilled when Alison’s handwritten letters arrive in the mail like surprise gifts. Still, it’s not enough, not compared to what other siblings have. So when Molly finds out that Alison is finally coming to visit over the summer, she devises a plan she’s sure will get her sister to stay. But then Alison arrives with plans of her own, a fragile heart gets broken, and Molly stumbles upon a painful piece of her sister’s past. Molly has always loved having a sister, but this is the August when she’ll learn what it really means to be one.
 
“What a beautiful novel about sisterhood, about art, about hearts broken and hearts mended. August or Forever will forever chime inside my own heart.”
—Gayle Brandeis, author of My Life with the Lincolns
 
“Ten-year-old Molly is a narrator in whom young readers will surely see themselves, with her longings, foibles, and authentic voice.”
—Caren Lissner, author of Carrie Pilby
 
“As she learns to share her parents—and her bedroom—during an extended summer visit with Alison, Molly’s voice remains charming despite her flaws. Filled with a cast of well-drawn characters and settings, Gritz’s novel is an insightful read.”
—Laura Shovan, author of Takedown and, with Saadia Faruqi, A Place at the Table
 
In Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade, the debut novel from Kimberly Behre Kenna, 12-year-old Artemis Sparke gets fed up with humans. For relief, she heads to the nearby salt marsh to hang out with the birds, plants and mollusks who don’t make a big deal of her stutter. One day, she sees from the data in her science journal that the salt marsh is dying, and she discovers that the historic hotel where she lives with her mom may be part of the problem. But speaking up would mean confronting the cranky hotel owner who happens to be her mom’s boyfriend and boss. As Artemis conjures up help from deceased ecologists, she finds family secrets that could both save the marsh and destroy her life as she knows it.
 
“Warning: Artemis Sparke is pure energy! Equal parts ecologist, artist, scientist and historian, Art had me riding her tailwind on her mission to protect the delicate salt marsh of Long Island Sound. And, oh my, the stakes are high—environmentally and personally! Kenna’s well-crafted debut is a timely gift.”
—Leslie Connor, National Book Award finalist, author of The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle and Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?
 
“Handling mature issues (including divorce, parental alcoholism, and near-death experiences) with tact, Artemis Sparke and the Sound Seekers Brigade is a commanding novel with a powerful environmental message.”
--Foreword Reviews (starred review)
 
Part of the proceeds from sales of Artemis Sparke will be donated to Save the Sound, an organization dedicated to protecting the Long Island Sound.

The October All But True will feature authors Ananda Lima and Raena Shirali. Their poetry collections exploring complex identities are the two most recent winners of the prestigious Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press. This in-person reading, co-sponsored by the Philly writers' organization Blue Stoop, will take place at the bookstore A Novel Idea, 1726 E Passyunk Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19148, on Wednesday, October 19, starting at 6:30 p.m. ET.

Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks: Vigil (Get Fresh Books), Tropicália (Newfound winner of the Newfound Prose Prize), Amblyopia (Bull City Press), and Translation (Paper Nautilus). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The Common, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She has served as the poetry judge for the AWP Kurt Brown Prize, as staff at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program. She has been awarded the inaugural Work-In-Progress Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, for her fiction manuscript-in-progress. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.

Raena Shirali is the author of two collections of poetry. Her first book, GILT (YesYes Books, 2017), won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and her second, summonings (Black Lawrence Press, 2022), won the 2021 Hudson Prize. Winner of a Pushcart Prize & a former Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University, Shirali is also the recipient of prizes and honors from VIDA, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue. Formerly a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine, Shirali now serves as Faculty Advisor for Folio—a literary magazine dedicated to publishing works by undergraduate students at the national level. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The Ohio State University and is an Assistant Professor of English at Holy Family University. The Indian American poet was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives in Philadelphia.

We're so happy that an All But True reading can be in-person once again that we anticipate a lively discussion. Everyone is invited to join in. Masks will be required except while speaking, and a $5 donation is suggested to support the bookstore. Register here.

The All But True series returns on Thursday, September 8, 2022, at 6:30 p.m. The program will be virtual, on Zoom, with preregistration required via the sponsoring bookstore, A Novel Idea on Passyunk. Click here to register.

For some time we've been watching developments in the exciting and disturbing genre of climate fiction, and we're happy to feature two of its leading proponents. The authors will read from and discuss their new books and answer questions.

Andrew Dana Hudson’s Our Shared Storm combines five interlocking novelettes to probe the possibilities of our climate future. The year is 2054, during global climate negotiations in Buenos Aires. Each story features a common cast of characters, but with events unfolding differently in each alternative universe. From harrowing to hopeful, these stories highlight the choices we must make to stabilize the planet.

“Hudson has found a way to strike together all the various facets of our rapidly changing climate future, sparking stories that are by turns, and often all at once, ingenious, energetic, provocative, and soulful. He is the face of this new movement in science fiction.” —Kim Stanley Robinson

”. . . fans of William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson will savor this thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action” --Publishers Weekly

“. . . a fascinating thought-experiment in imagining worlds to come” — Christopher Schaberg, author of Searching for the Anthropocene

The stories in Sim Kern’s Real Sugar is Hard to Find take on the most traumatic issues of our time: climate change, reproductive freedom, queer love, social privilege, and the ethics of bringing
children into a seemingly doomed world. Though the lives of the flawed characters are profoundly impacted by climate change and environmental degradation, the stories progress from dystopian to utopian, from the bleakest of futures to reasons for hope. Like Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners and Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Kern’s stories are unflinching explorations of our deepest fears, rendered irresistible by fantastic speculative elements and a dark sense of humor.

“Kern is a master at creating worlds that feel vast and lived-in with very few words, as well as balancing pathos with wry humor. The result is a searing, urgent, but still achingly tender work that will wow any reader of speculative fiction.” --Publishers Weekly

The February 2022 edition of All But True--Thursday, 2/10, at 6:30 p.m. ET--features two comical books of fiction about people of deep faith—whether that faith is spiritual or political or both.
 
All But True readings are curated by the Working Writers Group and sponsored by the bookstore A Novel Idea on Passyunk. During the pandemic, events are online and require preregistration. Here is the registration page:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/all-but-true-louis-greenstein-sam-gridley-online-tickets-241992314527
For questions, call the store at (267) 764-1202.

Louis Greenstein’s novel The Song of Life is a comedy about suffering and forgiveness. When 24-year-old Margaret Holly gets hit on the head with the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, she is propelled on a seven-year spiritual odyssey. Meanwhile, far away and long ago, the legendary warrior Arjuna prepares for the chariot ride with Krishna chronicled in the Gita. At the end of the novel, Margaret’s and Arjuna’s worlds collide in an unexpected twist.
 
“Sparkling with insight . . . a wholly original, deeply felt novel” —Robin Black, author of Life Drawing
 
“a humorous, profound, effortlessly narrated page-turner” —Michael Cocchiarale, author of None of the Above
 
In The Bourgeois Anarchist, a novella by Sam Gridley, Susie Alioto is a 66-yearold radical whose beliefs have never wavered, though her life is now middle-class. When a rally turns violent, Susie is drawn into a mysterious intrigue involving angry activists and devious capitalists, gentrification, arson, even mobsters. To complicate matters, she stumbles into romance with a man of dubious reliability. Meanwhile her son, an apolitical math geek, adds an offbeat and comic perspective on her cherished principles and inconsistent actions.
 
“an engrossing tale of an aging pacifist’s struggle to live her ideals” —Alan Drew, author of Shadow Man and Gardens of Water

“Susie is an irresistible force. . . . She carries the baggage of years of living and experience with almost reckless, youthful abandon.” —Ellen Prentiss Campbell, writing in Tiferet

The moderator for this event will be Miriam Seidel, librettist, art critic, and author of the novel The Speed of Clouds.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the All But True series, which began at the late, lamented Musehouse in 2011 and has shifted venues a couple of times since then. In our usual readings that pair two fiction authors, plus a couple of Small Press events that included poetry and nonfiction writers as well, we’ve played host to 81 tremendous authors. We’d like to thank them all. Here they are in alphabetical order, or as close as we can come to it without repeating third grade.

On August 2, 2021, at 7 p.m. Eastern, the All But True series presents two award-winning historical novels about musicians fleeing persecution. The series is still on Zoom, via the bookstore A Novel Idea on Passyunk. Go here to register.

In Jennifer Steil’s Exile Music, winner of the Grand Prize in the Eyelands Book Awards, Orly is just ten years old when she flees Vienna with her musician parents to escape the Nazis. They end up in La Paz, Bolivia, where they are haunted by all they left behind—friends, relatives, and a life in music. Orly adapts well, but as she matures, she questions her own identity and sexuality. Then war criminals arrive, and a family secret puts Orly and her parents once more at risk.

​Marjorie Sandor’s novel The Secret Music at Tordesillas, winner of the Tuscarora Award in Historical Fiction, is set in 1555. Juana I of Castile has died after 47 years in forced seclusion. Her last musician, Juan de Granada, refuses to depart with the other servants, forcing two functionaries of the Inquisition to interrogate him in the empty palace. But is it really empty? Or is there a heretic hidden on the premises, secretly practicing the forbidden rites of Judaism? Only Juan knows the answer, and his subversive tale is at once a ballad of lost love and a last gambit to save a life.

Jennifer Steil is a writer, teacher, and secret ballet dancer who lives in many countries (currently Uzbekistan, France, England). In addition to Exile Music, she is the author of the novel The Ambassador’s Wife, which won the Phillip McMath Post Publication book award and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Best Novel Award; and The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, a memoir about running a newspaper in Yemen.

Marjorie Sandor’s previous books include the linked story collection Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime, winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, and The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction. She is also the editor of The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows, an international anthology of short fiction. Recently retired from the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University, she lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with her husband, writer Tracy Daugherty.

The phrase "ordinary people" took on special literary meaning with Judith Guest's novel of that name in 1976. Since then, many writers have grappled with an underlying question: to what extent can fiction succeed in conveying truly ordinary folk without putting us ordinary readers to sleep?

The key, of course, is to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, and that's the great achievement of the two novelists who will visit the All But True series for a virtual event on July 1 at 6:30 p.m.

On the outside, the aged Ms. Hazel Hicks could be taken for a stereotype—what in her day would have been called a spinster. Yet, as David Huddle reveals in his novel Hazel, she’s the most remarkable person in her small Vermont town. With fictional techniques as varied as Hazel’s personality quirks, the book explores her long life from multiple angles. "Hazel’s would seem to be the life story of one who has no life," says novelist Castle Freeman, Jr. "Nevertheless, owing to her creator’s utterly assured, sympathetic, multifaceted storytelling, she is never a tragic figure, or even a pitiable one. Rather, she appears with the contradictions, self-inflicted wounds (and blessings) the reader recognizes as belonging to life."

In The Nature of Remains, Ginger Eager portrays multiple characters in a hardscrabble Georgia town. This book was selected for the AWP Award Series in the Novel, and it's easy to understand why. Eager takes us  below the small-town surface to see class struggles, gender discrimination, domestic violence—all the "typical" problems of contemporary American life. Yet the characters emerge with an individuality that makes us root for them even when they’re clearly in the wrong. Novelist Paula McLain compares this book to "the wrenching simplicity of Kent Haruf and the dark southern lyricism of Daniel Woodrell."

A long-time teacher at Bread Loaf and the University of Vermont, David Huddle is the acclaimed author of more than 20 books—poetry, stories, essays, and longer fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories, and he has been awarded two NEA fellowships.

Ginger Eager’s short fiction, reviews, and personal essays have been published in The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Jabberwock Review, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and shortlisted in The Best American Nonrequired Reading series.

This virtual event is sponsored by A Novel Idea on Passyunk, one of Philly's great indie bookstores. To register for the event, go here.

We now have the registration link set up for the upcoming All But True virtual event at 6 p.m. on November 30. Click here to register.

The suggested (not required) $5 donation is to benefit our wonderful host bookstore, A Novel Idea on Passyunk, which has managed to survive the pandemic with aplomb and good cheer.

It's been a while since our last event! A little thing (actually a microscopic thing) called a virus got in the way, and then our host bookstore went out of business during the pandemic. But we've overcome all that, and now the All But True series is back, virtually, with the assistance of A Novel Idea on Passyunk, which besides being a great idea is also a wonderful indie bookstore.
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The next event, online, is on November 30 at 6:00 p.m. Called Past Present: Time Travel & Historical Fiction for Middle Grade Readers, it features debut novelists Nicole Valentine and Jennifer Robin Barr. Info about registering to join the event will come soon. Meanwhile, here's a description of the two featured books:

In Nicole Valentine’s A Time Traveler’s Theory of Relativity, 12-year-old Finn copes with abandonment and grief by clinging to concrete facts in his physics books, until he learns that the women in his family are Travelers, able to move back and forth in time. His mom is trapped somewhere in the timeline, and she’s left Finn a portal to find her, if only he can leap beyond logic.

Goodbye, Mr. Spalding, Jennifer Robin Barr’s middle grade debut, tells the story of Jimmy and Lola, two enterprising 12-year-olds in Depression-era Philadelphia, who conspire to stop a wall from being built at Shibe Park—a wall that would block their rooftop view of Athletics’ games and cut into their family’s incomes. But the effort strains the friendship, and the pair must work to rebuild their relationship.

Nicole Valentine earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She teaches writing workshops for children’s writers at the Highlights Foundation in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. She was also the founding Chief Technology Officer of Figment.com, an innovative website for teen fiction writers and readers, which sold to Random House in 2013. (Author photo by Nina Pomeroy Photography.)

On Thursday, December 12, 2019, 6:00 p.m., the All But True series presents two spectacular books of flash fiction.

In her debut fiction collection, FAMILYISM, Tori Bond explores the weird moments that make up family life. These very brief stories, averaging less than three pages, offer a unique blend of irony and tenderness. We meet a “sweet sadistic” bartender lonely for his wife; a couple arguing about the lack of verbs in their relationship; a wife who may have left her identity in the refrigerator, and another who contemplates sex with a stranger who happens to be her husband.

“Bond knows the vagaries of the human heart and explores it with warmth and wit and savage intelligence.”
—Kathy Fish, author of WILD LIFE

Dedicated to “those who don’t quite fit in,” Nathan Alling Long’s collection of 50 flash fictions, THE ORIGIN OF DOUBT (a finalist in the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards), brings us a postmodern collage of searchers, outcasts, travelers, immigrants, lovers and parents—doubters of all ages. The stories reveal the subtle currents of longing, anger, and hope hidden beneath our ordinary conversations.

“Each story is a gem, a glimpse into moments of yearning and unexpected perception, instants that many of us might otherwise miss.... These are stories of male and female desire, of love and longing and loss. They are told to us like secrets, each simple moment a revelation that generates surprise and wonder.”
—Patricia Smith, author of THE YEAR OF NEEDY GIRLS

“[Long’s] stories, intense and sensual, demand repeated reading. Like prayers, they trigger reflection.”
—Julia MacDonnell, author of MIMI MALLOY, AT LAST!

The event includes author readings, discussion, book signings, and free refreshments.

The venue, as usual, is the lovely bookstore at 130 S. 34th Street in Philadelphia. This was Penn Book Center, but the store has a new name and logo, reflecting its new owners and commitment to the community: People's Books & Culture.