REVIEW: SPEAKERS OF THE DEAD by J. Aaron Sanders

In the muddy, soot-blackened days of early Manhattan, a tiny cabal of scientists pushes for the advancement of medicine and anatomical understanding. A smaller group runs a dangerous underground business in procuring dead bodies. And the general public is disgusted by them all. Walt Whitman, cub reporter for the Aurora newspaper is both friend to the…

ACCENT: MISSING REELS by Farran Smith Nehme

Nehme, author of the acclaimed classic film blog Self-Styled Siren, has written a novel. Drawing on her extensive and joyful knowledge of old Hollywood, and her actual time living in NYC in the 1980s, she created a naive but likeable protagonist in Ceinwen Reilly. Somewhat predictably, Ceinwen works at a vintage clothing shop and shares a…

Books for Bathtub Gin Drinkers

Two books devoted to that volatile and endlessly fascinating era… Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers & Swells Edited by Graydon Carter Drawing from the best of the Vanity Fair archive, this selection of essays, poems, stories and columns from the early days are a looking glass into the era. Beginning with the days of WWI and into the…

REVIEW: EMPTY MANSIONS by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

Bill Dedman has uncovered one of the strangest true stories in the history of American royalty.  There were the Vanderbilts, the Stuyvesants, the Rockefellers and then the Clarks.  That they are not a household name today is part of the mystery that Dedman seeks to unravel. William A Clark’s story is a quintessential boot-strap tale.…

REVIEW: THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN by Hallie Ephron

  Perhaps what makes this novel so frightening is that it could happen to anyone.  The devious plan is so deceptively simple that it barely registers as out of place. The narrative alternates between two feisty heroines — Mina, an elderly resident of the quiet Higgs Point neighborhood in the Bronx and Evie, a young,…