The Book Is Out!

After months of waiting anxiously by my mailbox, my editor's copies of The Sincerest Form of Flattery arrived last week--and, yes, the book was worth the wait!  

At the root of the anthology is a conversation Jacqueline Kolosov and I had in 2005.  Both writers and avid readers, we began comparing notes on our literary heroines. "Willa Cather," I said.  "Elizabeth Bishop and Alice Munro."  These three are my trinity, the women whose books I read and re-read, each time swooning again, falling a little deeper.  Jacqueline's literary luminaries: Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and--like me--Alice Munro.  

Although, of course, we could both also list a long roll of male writers whose work we admire, our feelings for these women and their work were something more than admiration.  We recognized these women as our literary mothers--women whose work and lives have shaped our own.  As we continued to discuss the the role of influence on our own work, the idea for this anthology was born.  We'd organize a book, we decided, in which contemporary women writers honor their debts to their literary heroines.  And so The Sincerest Form of Flattery was born.

The contributors to this book (a full list of contributors will be included in a future post) have entered this dialogue with their stories--fictions which engage and respond to the work of other women writers.  And we invite you to both check out the book (available here) and to join in the conversation yourselves now--in the space this blog offers.  

We want to know: Who are you reading? Which books have shaken you, defined you, shaped your writing?  Who are your literary mothers?