Alan Squire Publishing

A Small Press With Big Ideas

Joanna Revisits Greece in her New Blog Entry In her personal blog, "Thoughts on Books and Such," Joanna Biggar describes the differences between visiting and revisiting. "Visiting a foreign place for the first time offers the traveler the chance for fresh wonder and the jolt of surprise—like new love. But revisiting that place, perhaps multiple times, offers the traveler another opportunity:  to add connections through time and season rendering what was already known to layers of what is still to be revealed and the chance to find something new altogether" It's safe to say … [Read more...]

Joanna Biggar talks “Melanie’s Song” and Thanksgiving Recipes with Leslie Pietrzyk The most challenging character to write and more in this short and sweet interview conducted by local luminary, Leslie Pietrzyk. Leslie Pietrzyk's brief interview with Melanie's Song author, Joanna Biggar, is now live on her personal blog. When author of critical darling Silver Girl (and favorite of many here at ASP) and local literary hero, Leslie Pietrzyk, asks Joanna Biggar to share something about her book she wants readers to know Joanna answers: "The narrator, J.J., in the first book … [Read more...]

MELANIE'S SONG is "Riveting", "Unputdownable" In a new "Literary Review" article, Professor of English, Nandini Bhattacharya, discusses the storytelling virtues of Joanna Biggar's newest novel. In Nandini Bhattacharya's review of Melanie's Song for "The Literary Review" posted earlier this week, she focuses on the novel's non-traditional story-focus: "...What distinguishes Biggar’s novel from the traditional hero’s journey narrative and in fact makes it more satisfying and significant is that [the main character] undertakes a hero’s journey not for her own … [Read more...]

The Existential Experience of Mystery: Joanna Biggar on Her new Novel "Melanie's Song" "I was attracted to the mystery genre not just because I love mysteries but because I think mysteries are at the heart of everything" Joanna Biggar A missing girl, a cultural revolution, a friend tangled in the mysteries of both. How did Melanie, the most reserved of the group of young women Joanna Biggar first introduced us to in That Paris Year, become a folkloric figure of so many stories: all at once a revolutionary, a young mother, a bank robber, a mystic and a spiritual healer? Joanna … [Read more...]

David Downie on "Melanie's Song" David Downie a fellow francophile travel-writer and novelist in his own right, gives his thoughts on the new novel by Joanna Biggar. “Joanna Biggar explored Paris as a post-adolescent during the distant Age of Kennedy in That Paris Year. Now she explores the backwaters of American revolutionary culture during the so-called Summer of Love in Melanie’s Song. With wit and aplomb, Biggar reminds readers that love may be free but has its consequences. A poet and journalist, when she turns her talents to storytelling, the result is a page-turning novel where … [Read more...]

Joanna Biggar Presents a Chapter from her Upcoming Novel In the fifth chapter of "Melanie's Song" we "encounter a gathering of personalities and links that will weave into the fabric of the novel." At the beginning of the fifth chapter of Melanie's Song, we find J.J. leaving Mendocino after her first visit, as both friend and journalist, to investigate the burnt-out commune in the forest where her missing friend, Melanie, was rumored to have lived. Soon we also encounter a gathering of personalities and links that will weave into the fabric of the novel. We meet some of those tied … [Read more...]

What does Patricia Bracewell have to say about "Melanie's Song"? The author of "Shadow on the Crown" and "The Price of Blood" weighs in on Joanna Biggar's new novel. "Joanna Biggar’s novel Melanie’s Song is like a sweetly familiar refrain from the not-so-distant past. Nostalgic, redolent with the sights and sounds of the sixties and seventies, it is a tale of broken hearts, healing friendships, and the tender yet powerful bonds that friendships forge. It is a bittersweet delight." —Patricia Bracewell, author of "Shadow on the Crown" Pre-Order Melanie's Song Patricia … [Read more...]

Diane LeBow Shares her Thoughts on "Melanie's Song" The President Emerita of Bay Area Travel Writers, Diane LeBow, gives her thoughts on Joanna Biggar's new novel,"Melanie's Song." "In Melanie's Song, Joanna Biggar takes you along on an amazing ride of mystery and intriguing details, combining personal turbulence masterfully set against the reality of the politics of the '60s and '70s in the USA. Her writing, both crisp and lyrical, draws you into each scene with suspense and tempting detail. Of course, there are those earlier memories of Paris. It's quite a trip." —Diane … [Read more...]

Bastille Day By Joanna Biggar When J.J., the narrator of That Paris Year, departed after finishing her exams, she left in June, too early to catch the extravaganza that is le quatorze juillet in Paris. But she knew about the legendary festivities she had missed in her adopted city: fireworks, parades, the laying of wreaths for the heroic dead—, with “le grand Charles” de Gaulle himself saluting from a grandstand. J.J. already had her own, American-flavored July 4th sensibility, as she remembered lighting sparklers and pinwheels while eating home-made peach ice cream in … [Read more...]

Joanna Biggar's Picks for NPM Week 3 Week three of National Poetry Month is here and we are still celebrating! So as the champagne continues relentlessly foaming for party-goers catching their tipsy mid-air, we asked author, Joanna Biggar, to select three poems she thinks are worthy of applause between wassails. Her first, featured above, is Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are You?" For her second an excellent poem by Carolyn Forche called "The Testimony Of Light" And last but not least an absolute banger from Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora entitled "Let Me Try Again" Joanna Biggar … [Read more...]

Inside the Industry: The Wonderful World of Galleys Joanna Biggar's new book has just gone to galley, but what does that mean? "Melanie's Song", the latest from Joanna Biggar, is out on October 1st, 2019 A galley, put simply, is a proofing copy. Doggy-eared, coffee-stained, and scribbled  on with bright red pen, the galley is the penultimate stage before publication where all the smallest details of a manuscript, disregarded during the writing and organizing process, are scrutinized by fastidious copy-editors and a team of eager-to-help friends of the author. Because it is … [Read more...]

Fact or Fiction By Joanna Biggar As a fiction writer, it is not uncommon to be asked: “Is that real, or did you make it up?”  This was certainly true for my first novel, That Paris Year, based on my own experiences as a young woman attending the Sorbonne in the 1960s. It was assumed that the narrator, whose name, J.J., includes the same initials as my name, are one and the same person. And if that is true, the thinking goes, everything else in the book must be “real,” too. One French reader even wanted to know how my French grandmother was getting along and was shocked to learn that I … [Read more...]

Joanna Biggar's "Thoughts on Books and Such" "It’s a given nowadays that at some point in our distant ancestral past, bipedal and no doubt hirsute forebears marched out of Africa. Thousands of years later, mine showed up in Northern Europe, from whence they sailed to North America only hundreds of years ago—hardly a blink in the continuum of time. But in the millennia between the African exodus and their establishment in the British Isles and Northern France, where were they? What were they doing? I have no idea in specific terms. But in general terms, the limestone rocks and caves of … [Read more...]