Pen on Fire#3 on Book Soup's list

This is so cool, especially since Pen on Fire was published in 2004. It's #3 on their trade paperback nonfiction list. Here's the link to Book Soup. (Scan down.) Thanks to all who made this possible, and thanks to everyone who, since the book came out in 2004, bought it and made possible a number of printings. Many thanks and a virtual hug.

Teaching a class at UC-Irvine Extension...

...beginning on Monday. Five weeks. Check it out here.

And tomorrow's show will be co-hosted by Marrie and me, and our guests will be Sara Gruen, author of Ape House, and Dennis Palumbo, author of Mirror Image. Tune in at 9 a.m. PT at KUCI-FM, 88.9 FM in Orange Co., California, or at iTunes at News/Talk radio.

Greg Breining and Literary Agent Jill Marr

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Greg Breining, author of Super Volcano: The Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Yellowstone National Park and literary agent Jill Marr.

Download audio.

(Broadcast date: April 28, 2010)

Pen on Fire Salon with Maile Meloy and Mona Simpson

Our next writers salon will take place on Tuesday, October 12, at 7 p.m. Our authors: Maile Meloy and Mona Simpson.

Maile Meloy's most recent book, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, was a national bestseller in hardcover and a California Book Awards silver medalist, and was named one of the top ten books of 2009 by The New York Times. She is also the author of the story collection Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and other publications. She has been shortlisted for Britain's Orange Prize, and has received The Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the American Academy of Art and Letters' Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007 she was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

Mona Simpson studied poetry at Berkeley, then worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia’s MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here, made into a 1999 film starring Susan Sarandon. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road. Her work as been awarded several prizes: a Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, a Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

If you'd like to read more or register, click here. Hope to see you on the 12th!

Pen on Fire Writers Salon: Dennis Palumbo and Daniel Pyne

Here are photos from our last salon. Fun night, great setting, wonderful authors.

Novella Carpenter

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer.

Download audio.

(Broadcast date: July 8, 2010)

Tomorrow's show: Claudia Dreifuss and Jeff Lindsay

Tomorrow on Writers on Writing, my guests will be Claudia Dreifuss, author of Higher Education: How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, published by Times Books, and Jeff Lindsay, author of Dexter is Delicious, published by Doubleday.

Tune in at 9 a.m. PT at 88.9 FM KUCI or listen online at www.kuci.org or at iTunes/Talk, News radio.

Thanks for listening!

Mission Viejo Readers Festival

I'll be here, too, with a ton of interesting authors. Come one, come all!

Salon at the Montage, Laguna Beach

I'll be here in October, as will many fine writers. Check it out!

Speaker Series: Susan Straight and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales, Highwire Moon and the forthcoming Take One Candle Light a Room (October 2010) and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles and Madeleine is Sleeping appear at the Pen on Fire Speaker Series at the Scape Gallery in Corona del Mar on October 27, 2009.

Download audio.

(Broadcast date: October 27, 2009)

Mary Roach and Jane Vandenburgh

Marrie Stone interviews Mary Roach, author of Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void and Jane Vandenburgh, author of Architecture of the Novel: A Writer's Handbook

Download audio.

(Broadcast date:August 18, 2010)

Today's Show

Greetings!

Join Marrie Stone this morning as she interviews John McNally, author of The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist and literary agent Ted Weinstein.

Tune in online at www.kuci.org or 88.9 FM in Irvine at 9:00 a.m. (PT), or listen to the podcast of the show that will be posted, right here, in the next few weeks.

Thanks for listening!