David Downie on PLACES I REMEMBER podcast: Stories of the Italian Riviera
The novelist and travel writer talks the Ligurian Coast, Italian travel ideas, and his new thriller set on the Italian Riviera, Red Riviera
ASP Author’s Gift Guide for Book Lovers (PART 2)
Gift guide part 2 features Mysteries, Travel Writing, and Books about Northern California.
ASP Authors’ Gift Guide for Book Lovers
Well, it’s that time of year again, when holiday gift lists are popping up all over. Here at ASP HQ, we’re particularly interested, of course, in gifts for book-lovers, and we’ve noticed a curious fact: No matter how diverse the sources of these lists, a few titles pop up again and again. Usually these are recently published, widely reviewed best-sellers. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, gift-givers might find themselves putting one more copy of the current hot mystery, or history, or memoir under a book-loving friend’s tree.
Featured Poetry: “Burial at Shanidar” by Elizabeth Hazen
This is no modern tradition, says Elizabeth Hazen. It is not only now that humans ornament their dead with flowers. “See,” she says in her rumination on tradition and humanity, Burial at Shanidar, “Even from a distance we dream of gardens where there should be stone.” And on Christmas especially, it is so wonderful to curl up with a book of poetry, even to read out-loud to one’s family, and bask in the ways we make words, just like the long winter days of dark, meaningful with light and tradition.