Authors

BAB author Catherine Gammon (Sorrow) has gotten some serious interest in her latest manuscript, Nightbirds in an Age of Light, a novel that explores the Salem witch trials. Below are links to the New England Review interview with Catherine and a sneak peek at an except from the book. Congratulations, Catherine.  
 
Read an excerpt here

Read an interview here

Catherine Gammon, author of Sorrow, has been quite busy writing a number of astute and discerning book reviews for several online literary journals. Her careful and honest critique provides insight and thought-provoking discourse.

Sharing her thoughts on Margo Berdeshevsky’s collection of short stories, Beautiful Soon Enough at Necessary Fiction, Gammon praises the author for her poetic yet sparse language and compressed narrative while giving us a glimpse of what readers might experience with Berdeshevksy’s work.

“There is an elegiac sadness in these stories, and for all their complexity and beauty and inevitability and truth, they take us into a world of restless unsatisfactoriness, made bearable for its inhabitants only by a serene sensibility that sees and hears the beauty—and the terror—in each moment.”

Catherine Gammon, the author of Sorrow, led a Writing As A Wisdom Project workshop with a wonderful group at Zen Center of Pittsburgh on July 19.

Sorrow was a finalist in fiction for the Northern California Book Award this year, which was awarded to Daniel Alarcon for At Night We Walk in Circles.

Text on Sorrow from Northern California Book Awards program:

"Sorrow focuses on the psychological descent of a character who suffers the scars of extreme sexual abuse, and the total landscape of grievous injury described within this novel includes incest, mental illness, murder and the struggling of immigrants from Colombia and Salvador. The novel’s dirge-like depictions of loss, longing, anger, insanity and pain are rendered with harrowing and graphic precision from start to tragic finish, but the despair that weighs down every page is leavened by the author’s exquisite poetry and her compassion for her characters.

The protagonist of Sorrow is Anita, a sensitive young woman who is in her twenties, works in an office, and lives with her TV-addicted, beer-guzzling mother in a small New York City apartment. Their building’s maintenance man and his nephew are both in love with Anita, but she’d rather have sex with strangers in alleys. Anita becomes enraged at her mother, and soon Anita is sharpening the family’s knives and experiencing delusions that drive her to kill. After Anita murders her mother, the real trouble begins. Anita’s memories of her horrific past—which have been repressed—return to torment her. She must also now deal with the predatory abusers her mother had warded off. A detective tries to figure out if a crime occurred, while Anita tries to adjust to being in prison.

The inner lives of these suffering souls and the evolutions of their turmoil make for an intense reading experience."