Steven C Eisner‘s The Minefields is being touted as a “21st-century business novel”, and isn’t shy about taking inspiration from the hit television show Mad Man. As part of the book’s blog tour, Read in a Single Sitting caught up for a quick Q&A with Eisner about his novel, which we’ll be reviewing shortly.

The Minefields is loosely based on Eisner’s life, he tells us: his own advertising agency, Eisner Communications, began to unravel shortly after being touted as the most creative mid-sized ad agency in the United States.

“when I realised that–and who would have ‘thunk’ that my life could have possibly taken a turn to be considered , tragically  Shakespearean–I knew I had something here and I went to work,” he says.

Eisner does most of his writing in his home, a mid 1830s Carriage House with old beams and windows that look out to the gardens.

“I write on a partner’s desk about the same vintage as the house. And it stands about where the horses ate hay two centuries ago and were given that ever so often sweet carrot. Matter of fact. On some days I enjoy a carrot.”

The Minefields, however, isn’t quite as sweet or quixotic as Eisner’s words might suggest.

“I think when all is said and done, it’s one powerful slug of the Boomer generation,” he says. “And it doesn’t go down predictably or easily. That’s what makes it such a ride.”

The author, however, is coy when it comes to admitting whether any of the characters in the book may  more than works of fiction.

“I’ll never tell. By the time I’m finished with them, they all get turned around some and super-charged.”

Scroll down for a little more about the book, and stay tuned for our review.

The Minefields by Steven C Eisner

Blurb: From an early age, Sam Spiegel single-mindedly pursued an entrepreneurial path that prepared him to transform a small-time ad agency into a regional powerhouse with national ambitions. A couple decades later, Sam had achieved almost everything he ever dreamed possible as the ad agency’s rainmaker, fountainhead, and unflappable pursuer of success. One final goal remained: To consolidate his gains by attracting an international advertising conglomerate and cash out. That’s when the nation is hit with the most unthinkable tragedy, and Sam begins to take stock of his own life, finding that he is growing weary of the relentless hunt. Unsatisfied in his marriage and embroiled in a mind-boggling professional crisis, everything Sam had achieved is put at risk.

RIASS stuff:

Have you ever bought a book because another author has blurbed it?

Book review: Once a Ferrara Wife by Sarah Morgan (in which I use the term “super sperm”)

I still have a couple of of bookish quote print-outs (designed in spiffy Art Deco style) left over from my wedding, so if you’d like one, just email your address details to readinasinglesitting@gmail.com and I’ll post one out to you!

I’m off on my honeymoon at the end of next week, so if you’d like your name up in lights with a RIASS guest post, just drop me a line.

Other bookish stuff:

Stina Leicht on the journey after publication: With the first book, you’ve all the time in the world. When it came time to write [my next] frankly, I panicked. The pressure to get everything as correct as I could get it had become too much. I didn’t know if I could finish the second book. I cried all over my agent’s t-shirt at the retreat last summer.”

Lev Grossman defends YA fiction: ”There’s one thing that young adult novels rarely are, and that’s boring. They’re built to grab your attention and hold it. And I’m not as young as I once was. At my age, I don’t have time to be bored.”

Catherynne M Valente responds to Christopher Priest’s denunciation of the Arthur C Clarke shortlist: ”The fact that so few books were submitted says more about peripheral issues than about the sins of the jury or the authors at hand: the tough-to-crack UK publishing scene and how much trouble science fiction as a genre is having right now, dominated by a few huge names (and therefore the style and ideas of those names), underselling as compared to fantasy, losing new blood to the enormous YA market which is all hopped up on SF dystopia right now (I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing), and torn between the desire to return to pulp roots and break new ground which might alienate the very vocal fans of those roots.”

Three Authors (Matthew Reilly, Sandy Thorne and Leah Giarratano) Offer Advice for Writers

How Creativity Works

15 writers’ bedrooms (Fortunately for his landlord, William S Burroughs didn’t apply cut-up approaches to his sheets…)

The prettiness that is the Chronicle Books office

The Art of Google Books: catching serendipitous things in the scanning of old books

The Stella Prize is hosting a lunch

What should I read next? (Thanks to Absurdly Nerdly for the link)

Game on: book covers are competing for supremacy over at Out of Print books

Take part in London’s biggest book club

Every Friday for the National Year of Reading 2012 Alphabet Soup magazine is posting a first line from a children’s book.

J.K. Rowling launches eBook site Pottermore

E-Book Sales For Kids And Teens Surge

Angela Carter’s teenaged poetry unearthed

A Narnia-themed playroom

When a week or so ago an enormous care package filled with all sorts of Mills & Boon paraphernalia landed on my doorstep, I was quite chuffed, as my experience with M&B thus far has been a very positive one. M&B is brilliant at ensuring that its products are perfectly suited to its target audience (the feedback forms found in the back of M&B books and their reps’ regular engagement with readers are just a couple of indicators of how seriously M&B takes its role as provider of highly specific products for a highly specific audience.), and I’m always pleasantly surprised by the books I’m sent to read.

Unfortunately, even an M&B honeymoon has to come to an end, and with Sarah Morgan’s Once a Ferrara Wife… I’m sorry to say that M&B and I have hit our first rocky patch. This slim novella was my first foray into Morgan’s oeuvre, but as a caveat I should note that she’s a bestselling author with a number of books under her belt, so I suspect that many of my qualms may relate to a lack of author-reviewer chemistry more than anything else.

Once a Ferrara Wife… begins intriguingly enough: heroine Laurel is distressed and anxious as she flies into Sicily, and it’s not long before we find out why: Laurel has returned to Italy not only to attend a wedding, but also to finalise a separation with her estranged husband Cristiano. This is the first time I’ve come across a M&B book that has begun with the hero and heroine having separated, and though the ending is evident enough in the book’s title, I was curious to see how Morgan would trace the journey of her feuding couple as they inevitably redeemed themselves in each other’s eyes.

From the outset, however, I’m afraid that the structure of the novel seemed to work against me as a reader, with the backstory, as it was brought in, making much of the novel feel sort of temporally displaced. The crux of the narrative is not so much in the reconciliation sought in the now, but in puzzling out why the two main characters separated in the first place. As such very little actually happens in the present, and what does happen feels somewhat secondary and perfunctory compared with the drama (and we’re talking some serious drama) of the past. Indeed, most of what takes place is a series of arguments between Laurel and Cristiano about the events leading up to their separation, and there’s such a degree of repetition here that actually found myself checking back to see whether a chapter or two hadn’t been accidentally duplicated by the printer. The pages of this book veritably drip angst, and I found myself wishing that the characters would stop analysing and re-analysing their own and each other’s emotions and would just do something (okay, they do have the odd roll in the hay, but then it’s straight back to fighting like, um, an old Sicilian married couple).

In addition to inverting the traditional romance narrative, Morgan also strives to do the same with the personalities of the hero and heroine, with Laurel characterised as chronically closed off and untrusting, and Cristiano as the emotionally magnanimous one who is quite happy to regale Laurel about how much he loves her and wants to initiate a reconciliation. However, the extremes to which both characters are taken makes it hard to identify with either: Laurel is shut off to the point that the reader can’t sympathise with her, and Cristiano is so forceful in his professions of love (and studliness) that despite his uber-manly abs I’m rather glad that I wasn’t the one stuck with him in his swanky villa.

It wasn’t just Cristiano’s romantic protestations that unnerved me, however. It was the fact that Cristiano is apparently so virile that one glance from him could bankrupt the global contraceptive industry, as poor Laurel finds out in record time. There must be something in that Sicilian water, because there’s some serious super-sperm going on in this book.

In all, Once a Ferrara Wife… was a tad melodramatic for my tastes, and I suspect that it might have worked better as a short story or novelette than at its present length; I can’t help but feel also that the backstory could also have been worked in in a way that still allowed the present day narrative to progress. It may have been that I was misled by the hilarious tagline (“For better…or for bedding?) on the back of the book, but I was expecting something with a little more levity and a little less pregnancy, and I think this affected my overall reading experience.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars (okay)

With thanks to Mills & Boon UK for the review copy

Support Read in a Single Sitting by purchasing Once a Ferrara Wife… from

Amazon | Book Depository UK | Book Depository USA | Booktopia | The Nile

Other books by Sara Morgan:

RIASS stuff:

Have you ever bought a book because another author has blurbed it?

Forthcoming today: a review of Once a Ferrara Wife (a book with the tagline “For better…or for bedding?” How can you not love it?)

RIASS will be participating in the forthcoming Lori Foster blog tour. You can check out the other participants here.

I still have a couple of of bookish quote print-outs (designed in spiffy Art Deco style) left over from my wedding, so if you’d like one, just email your address details to readinasinglesitting@gmail.com and I’ll post one out to you!

I’m off on my honeymoon at the end of next week, so if you’d like your name up in lights with a RIASS guest post, just drop me a line.

Other bookish stuff:

Aussie author Fiona MacCallum talks ideas and inspiration: “They say ‘You can take the girl out of the country but not the country out of the girl’. It’s certainly true for me. I write about rural and farm life because that’s what I know and that’s what I have a passion for. Also, by writing about it, in some way I’m probably still processing my thwarted ambition at a psychological level. Beats paying for years and years of therapy!”

Adults should read adult books, and should get off our lawns as well! ”You can’t take an adult seriously when he’s debating you over why Twilight vampires are O.K. with sunlight. If my parents had read “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing” at the same time as I did, I would have looked into boarding school.”

Rodney Libraries’ “5 fictional friendships mine could be like…if I were a halfway decent friend” ”Anne [of Anne of Green Gables] was a little intense, though, because I wouldn’t call my BFFs my ‘bosom buddies’ even though I guess that that is, in essence, what they are. Although there is no way in Hades I would ever stage Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott with them. No way, no how.”

What is the job of speculative fiction criticism? ”Reading SF, then,  is a constant shifting between familiarization and defamiliarization.  Of course, some works play with this shifting, while others try to erase it. It is difficult to reduce what fantastic literature does to one process or discursive maneuver. The easy contrast between Realism and SF, is, as Tidhar notes, a convenience, but also relates to the problem of criticism. This essentialization extends to characterizations of criticism, the idea that non-SF criticism performs the function that SF criticism does not.”

A radio interview with Kate Forsyth

Alana Woods on editing: the substantive edit

What does your author photo say about you?

Only vaguely bookish, but I laughed so hard I had to include it: Sex, Aggression & Humour: responses to unicycling

A Hunger Games themed wedding

A directory of book bloggers using Pinterest

Yike, this is setting a high bar for book launches

Adrienne Rich, influential feminist poet, dies at 82

I can only imagine the debate over the installation of this bookshelf

AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers exhibition in San Francisco

Pottermore eBooks Already Showing up on Torrents

RIASS news:

A review of Trash by Andy Mulligan: an ultimately uplifting novel in the vein of Millions and Holes

Have you ever bought a book because another author has blurbed it?

RIASS will be participating in the forthcoming Lori Foster blog tour. You can check out the other participants here.

I have a whole bunch of bookish quote print-outs (designed in spiffy Art Deco style) left over from my wedding, so if you’d like one, just email your address details to readinasinglesitting@gmail.com and I’ll post one out to you!

Other bookish stuff:

Are you a library or a press? ”University presses are generally expected to support themselves by sales of books (and sometimes journals), so their decisions about what to publish are at least in part based on market considerations. Library publishing programs, generally speaking, do not have to cover the costs of their publishing ventures in the same way. As a result, university libraries have more leeway to publish as a service rather than a business, by, for example, providing a repository for their institution’s research, or hosting space for online journals for their faculty.”

An interview with the lovely Favel Parrett: ”[Surfing] clears the mind enough to let connections in the writing become clear. The web is made clear in those moments – the joining of themes and ideas. A magic thing happens.”  (see also our interview with Favel)

An interview with Lincoln Pierce, author of the Big Nate books: ”I was so fascinated that there was this secret way that cartoonists had come up with to say something very specific without really saying it.”

Melissa Forster talks book clubs

The programme for the Sydney writers festival has been announced

Wearable books

Bronze Lorax stolen from Dr Seuss’s San Diego estate

Title trends: The ________’s Daughter

Kate Forsyth has started a blog. I love this post of handy-dandy writing tips.

Amazon is getting bigger…and bigger…

The content of their characters: The Hunger Games and racism

Should kids’ reading be monitored?

Five fairytale retellings coming to cinemas soon

Free spec fic short fiction

The Carnegie shortlist has been announced:

Some years ago I bought a book by an unknown author purely because it had a snazzy little blurb on it from Charles de Lint saying how fabulous the book in question was. Unfortunately the book in question wasn’t my cup of tea, perhaps because it wasn’t the light, de Lint-esque mythology-heavy romp I was hoping for.

Per my earlier post about misleading book covers raising my ire, I’m a reader who’s easily burnt. This is largely because I’m a very poor writer, and books in Australia are an expensive addiction. If I’ve foregone food for a week for a book and the result isn’t what I hoped for, I get grumpy. (And hungry.)

I do pay passing attention to author blurbs, and if I’m on the fence about a book, they may convince me to make a purchase. But often I see them as little more than a quick way to fill in a gap in cover design. There are a few reasons for this.

The first is that an author in a particular genre/subgenre has blurbed a book that’s very removed in content and style from the work of that author. (Imagine, for example, Stephenie Meyer blurbing a feminist manifesto, or Dean Koontz blurbing Bambi.) This automatically makes me doubt the weight of the review.

The second is that the blurbing author seems to suffer from blurbohyphergraphia (a condition I just made up wherein someone is struck by the compulsive need to blurb). If I’m seeing your name on more titles by other authors than I am on your own books, it may be time to rein in that effusive praise a little: you don’t want to dilute your blurb currency.

The third is when the blurb is from an author I’ve never heard of. Or when it’s from a TV magazine.

The fourth is when the number of pages given over to blurbs takes up more than a page of the book, and these blurbs contain many ellipses and a judicious sprinkling of parentheses. I always wonder whether a qualifier or hedging statement has been removed to give a blurb a boost, and I can’t help but wonder why a book needs three pages of quotes to convince me to buy it.

The fifth is that the blurb is a) a back-handed compliment or b) an awful, awful cliche. An example of the first is a book that’s an “ambitious debut” or that’s written by an “author to watch”.  (And what’s with those literary books that are described as “warm” or “witty” when they’re clearly meant to be Serious Works of Fiction?) An example of the second is anything that claims the book is: a “tour de force” or an “examination of the human condition”.

The sixth is a blurb containing any of the following words: raw; visceral; subversive; stupendous; unputdownable; page-turner.

Goodness. From the above, I suppose that author blurbs don’t carry much weight for me at all as a reader except on very rare occasion. What about you? Do you buy or pick up books based on author blurbs? And what are your pet blurb peeves?

Last week I received a book pack from Mills & Boon that in my mind was a total, erm, boon. Not only did it contain some spiffy books, but also a Mills & Boon Wills & Kate commemorative mug! And a pen so pink that it veritably glows in the dark! Both now have pride of place on my desk, and as I was making my morning coffee today, I began wondering about the degree to which I like to show my love of books beyond the books themselves.

There’s this entire website, of course, but beyond that I have a mountain of Taylor & Francis/Routledge reusable bags that I tote my groceries around in, some bookmarks from New Holland, and a notebook from the Journal of Philosophy, just to name a few. (My favourite is pencil from the Journal of Economics made from recycled money) I’m quite happily a walking advertisement for all things bookish, and feel quite chuffed when I walk around with my Reader’s Feast bookstore canvas bag or slip a cute Leunig bookmark from Readings into one of my books.

I’m not alone: one of my bookish friends has a love affair with Penguin gear so strong that she’s been asked whether she works there, and another has so much branded publisher gear that it wouldn’t surprise me if Vogue takes note and leaps on this nerdy trend.

What about you? Do you like to rock out with your book gear out? What’s your favourite piece of publisher fashion?

RIASS news:

A review of Trash by Andy Mulligan: an ultimately uplifting novel in the vein of Millions and Holes

RIASS will be participating in the forthcoming Lori Foster blog tour. You can check out the other participants here.

I have a whole bunch of bookish quote print-outs (designed in spiffy Art Deco style) left over from my wedding, so if you’d like one, just email your address details to readinasinglesitting@gmail.com and I’ll post one out to you!

Other bookish stuff:

Why is the Middle East important to British Publishers? ”Due to the large expat population, much of what British publishers sell in the region is in English, and not translation. However the rights business is growing and there are more translations.”

A slow books manifesto: “In our leisure moments, whenever we have down time, we should turn to literature—to works that took some time to write and will take some time to read, but will also stay with us longer than anything else. They’ll help us unwind better than any electronic device—and they’ll pleasurably sharpen our minds and identities, too.”

Ebooks: a more civilised way of scribbling in the margins? ”Of the thousands of dog-ears I’ve made in books over the years, the ones I might actually return to are those that I can search for when I need them.” (see also our post on annotated books)

Stop by the Sue Lawson Forget-Me-Not blog tour

An interview with Lena Coakley, author of Witchlanders

Sophie Higgins, children’s book buyer for Dymocks, stops by the Walk-a-Book blog: “I have an ongoing disagreement with my friends about books. A lot of them will only read what I would call ‘high’ literature and the classics (at least their bookshelves are full of them.. I contend it is doubtful whether they have all been well read!). I think that reading should primarily be about whatever it takes for you to escape to another world for a bit.”

The Miles Franklin longlist has been announced

Are you a re-reader?

Kindle Freebie: Mills & Boon New Voices Insider: Blogs, hints and the inside scoop from Mills & Boon editors and authors

The Harry Potter eBooks are finally for sale (and are topping the Amazon charts)

Katniss Everdeen, Meet Hermione, Ramona, Jane Eyre and 6 other unforgettable female characters by female authors

When my husband and I were holidaying in Indonesia last year we went out for an early morning walk along the roads and fruit plantations. As we did, we were surprised by the amount of activity going on around us: dozens of people, from the very young to the very old, were picking through the rubbish in the gutters or that had accumulated in stacks around the orchards. They were collecting small pieces of salveagable material–tin cans, bits of plastic, paper–that could be returned for a small sum. What struck us most about these people was that they seemed to be part of an endless cycle: living at barely a subsistance level, and with little access to health care or education, how was anyone supposed to rise above their present situation?

It’s this exactly that Andy Mulligan’s Trash examines. Set at the Behala rubbish dump, it follows the lives of three boys whose lives are inextricably tied to the tip. From the outset, the novel underscores the continuing cycle of poverty and lack of opportunity for these boys and their families: they live there, work there, and are so infused with the grot and grime of the tip that it’s impossible for anyone to see them as anything other than tip boys. But despite these circumstances, they exhibit an utterly dogged determination to get through their days and to survive. It’s a sort of curious contrast against the apathy of western cultures, and at the same time it points to a huge disconnect between the ruling classes and the poorest classes of this fictitious society: where life is meaningless to those who have everything, it’s immensely important to those who have nothing.

These issues are explored with beautiful subtlety as the narrative takes a turn that while inevitable, is utterly welcomed by the reader. Raphael, who spends his days systematically working through the new loads of rubbish dumped at the tip to little avail (the majority of the material they paw through is euphemistically described as “stuppa”), finds a wallet. In the wallet is a sum of money that for the boys is astronomical, and a key. When the police arrive at the tip later that day, Raphael realises that his find is worth far more than he initially thought. The boys, then, are faced with a momentous decision: to walk away with the initial sum, or to take a gamble in getting to the bottom of the mystery they appear to be facing.

Of course, there wouldn’t be a book if the boys took the blue pill, so the stakes are promptly raised. And what a journey that follows. Mulligan takes us into a world of systemic corruption, flagrant disregard for life, and horrific brutality. But against this desultory backdrop is the determination of Raphael and his friends to not only solve the mystery they’ve been saddled with, but also to do what they can to set things to rights.

Trash, despite its darkness, is a surprisingly uplifting read in the vein of Millions and Holes, and it’s very moving to watch its characters rally themselves and try and try again to achieve their ends. They’re a weird example of Pavlovian conditioning working against itself: these kids have faced so much in their lifetimes that no matter how awful that which they’re facing they’re able to overcome it. Behala and the wider context of the book may be location agnostic, but it’s very, very easy to extrapolate it to Central or South America or to South East Asia, and there’s a realism here that chills. I do feel that the subtlety of the earlier chapters is undermined a little by the additional points of view (and appendix) brought in to clarify and explicate things, and that the ending is a little saccharine, but overall this is a tremendous read.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (excellent)

Support Read in a Single Sitting by purchasing Trash from

Amazon | Book Depository UK | Book Depository USA | Booktopia | The Nile

Visit Andy Mulligan’s website

Other books by Andy Mulligan:

RIASS news:

Phew! What a weekend. The nuptials are done and dusted, and the hubby and I are back in the office for the next two weeks (and counting down the days until we fly out for Argentina). Pics shall follow soon, but given the amount of dessert and alcohol consumed and the many MC Hammer dance routines I witnessed, I think we’re safe in saying that it was a pretty awesome party.

I do have a whole bunch of bookish quote print-outs left over (see below for the sort of thing I’m talking about), so if you’d like one, just email your address details to readinasinglesitting@gmail.com and I’ll post one out to you.

Other bookish stuff:

Ebony McKenna talks strong characters: ”How can so many girls and women love books from a huge variety of genres where the main character floats along on the tide, rather than rowing her own boat?”

Fleur McDonald is interviewed over at Booktopia: ”I have no routine when it comes to writing. It all revolves around the kids, the farm and whatever is going on in my world at the time. I can go months and not put finger to keyboard. I wouldn’t recommend it and I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is.”

Sarwat Chadda on diversity in fiction: “when you write a kids’ book with an Asian hero, you’ll have a bookseller come up to you and say ‘I can’t see anyone in my area buying you book because we’ve not got any Indians living around us.’ By that logic you need to be a hobbit to buy Lord of the Rings.”

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Monologue: I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.

Hachette UK Acquires Worldwide Rights in Enid Blyton

On blogging-life-balance and authenticity: “‘More than words’ reminds me that I have a life outside writing. Although writing is important to me, it isn’t all that I am. Besides, there’s no point being a writer if you don’t make the time to create life experiences to write about, is there?”

Penguin is not happy with author David Thorne (check out these cease and desist emails!)

Three book cover trends: (my favourite is the “tiny men walking into the distance” category)

Cate Kennedy on Radio National here ow.ly/9TAl0 and here: ow.ly/9TAn0

Chuck Palahniuk survives a car accident with a semi-trailer

“Worst Vogue article ever” spurs book deal

9 things never to say in book club

The making of the modern picture book

Hachette Australia is now open to unsolicited submissions

Ten great short stories you can read online for free

Nominations closing on 10 April for the John Oxley Library Fellowship that comes with $20,000 to research a Qld story