New Door Books - News

News from the writer's long road . . .

2/12/2020

Writers will appreciate this kind of note. David Sanders has been submitting his novel Busara Road, and a screenplay based on it, to a variety of contests. Here's today's update:

"It's nice to have a day when a couple of things finally move forward. I've now just gotten word that Busara Road, as a novel, has advanced to the semifinalist round of the ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Contest (was named a quarter-finalist in January)."

In the writing/publishing biz, a day when "a couple of things" move forward sounds to us like an almost miraculous event!

"Our readers are so thankful"

1/23/2020

Those who have followed David Sanders's novel Busara Road from its earliest stages know that the road has taken many twists and turns. In one of its incarnations, the story became a screenplay, and in that form it was recently named a semifinalist in the Cinequest Screenwriting Competition.

Said the judges, "We truly enjoyed immersing ourselves in your story and getting to know the characters in your script. Our readers are so thankful for the opportunity to have read your work."

Who knows when a film will be made? Filmmakers are hard to predict. But instead of waiting for Netflix, you can read the book that Foreword Reviews called "a beautifully written, slow-burning drama that touches on devastation and collective memory, culminating in the piercing discovery that knowing the truth comes at a personal cost."

Busara Among the Snowflakes

1/21/2020

The website Snowflakes in a Blizzard, dedicated to books that might otherwise be overlooked, features a couple of our authors this week. One is David Sanders, author of Busara Road, which we published in 2019. Click here or on the image for a link.

Another author featured is Nathaniel Popkin, whose novel Everything Is Borrowed we published in 2018. In this case the site discusses his new fiction from Open Books, The Year of the Return.

Congrats to both authors and props to Darrell Laurant, who curates the snowflakes.

Literature of Transformation and Loss

12/12/2019

In a new column, Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron comments on often-ignored aspects of the city's long construction boom. Journalists write about the grand (and not so grand) new buildings, but they have neither the space nor the time to keep track of what's been lost. "As you walk down the street," Saffron notes, "the absence of a familiar signpost will hit you out of the blue. When did that little repair shop close? What happened to all the Toynbee tiles that used to be embedded in Center City streets? Where did the guy who was always smoking on his front stoop go?" And she goes on to say that the job of tracking such subtractions has fallen to writers and poets. One of them is our author Nathaniel Popkin:

After 20 years of nonstop change, it’s not surprising that Philadelphia has begun to produce a literature of transformation and loss.
Three recent books speak directly to this topic — Justin Coffin’s Fishtown Forget Me Not, Thomas Devaney’s Getting to Philadelphia, and Nathaniel Popkin’s Everything is Borrowed…
In Popkin’s Everything is Borrowed, the desire to chronicle the past becomes a disabling obsession for the novel’s main character, Nicholas Moscowitz. That’s a real problem since he’s an architect and has been commissioned to design a project in Queen Village.
Yet he can hardly look at the site without seeing the people and buildings that once populated it. The book features several real-life sites, including a former synagogue on Sixth Street where the Star of David was chiseled off during an apartment conversion. As Moscowitz conflates the city’s past with moments from his own past, he is forced to come to terms with what it means to impose your own mark on a place. Popkin’s latest novel, The Year of the Return, is set in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, and also uses Philadelphia as a backdrop for reconciling the past and present.

The past doesn't simply disappear, however; as Moscowitz learns, you can't just bulldoze it away. That's one theme emerging from all of Popkin's novels, as well as from his work in film and with Hidden City Philadelphia.

Kirkus Reviews

12/10/2019

It took a while, but Kirkus Reviews has finally published its assessments of our two most recent books:

On HOMING: "Vividly detailed, present-tense prose … filled with adolescent angst, sadness, fears for his future, and anger at his parents.… The author has found peace, but pain and a sense of great loss permeate these pages. A thoughtful, moving account."

On BUSARA ROAD: "Sanders presents an engagingly written story with a dramatic historical underpinning.... A sensitive and vivid coming-of-age account in a compelling setting."

HOMING in on Narberth

12/4/2019

SRO: HOMING launches

11/25/2019

The bird is on the wing! Yesterday Mark Lyons launched his exceptional memoir HOMING to a standing-room-only crowd at Mt. Airy Nexus.

By the end of the event, the stock of books was sorely depleted, as were the chocolate cake, pepperoni roll-ups, and red wine. (Plenty of carrots and celery remained, however. Our readers must gravitate toward the decadent.)

If you're not in the photos here, you'll have another chance soon: Mark will be reading at Narberth Bookshop on Thursday, December 5, 7 p.m. If you love celery and carrots, we'd especially like to see you, since your cohort was underrepresented the first time.

Home at Last

11/8/2019

For more about the book, go here.
For more about the launch party, here.

Speeding to PHILCON

11/8/2019

Miriam Seidel, author of The Speed of Clouds, is appearing this weekend at PHILCON as a panelist: How climate change will change the climate of science fiction (Friday at 5 pm); Alternative history in the age of alternative facts (Saturday at 1 pm); and Compassionate Representation (Saturday at 10 pm). She will also do a reading (Sunday at 1 pm). Crowne Plaza Cherry Hill, Cherry Hill NJ.

For Bay Area fans . . .

10/22/2019

Nathaniel Popkin will be in the Bay Area in early November promoting his new novel, The Year of the Return, published by Open Books. Check out the book on Amazon but, if possible, buy it instead at one of his readings:

November 8, 7 PM, Wolfman Books (with Shanthi Shukuran and Rachel Howard), Oakland
November 9, 7:30 PM, Writers With Drinks (with Annalee Newitz and Aubrey Hirsch, hosted by Charlie Jane Anders), San Francisco