Dear Librarians, One of my fondest memories from my childhood in Accra—Ghana’s capital—is going across the street from the apartment building we lived in, to a makeshift library that was part of a row of stores. The library was about the size of a bodega. Against one wall were shelves of books and on the […]
Dear librarian, First let me say how grateful I am for your interest in my second novel, The Shadow of Perseus. As with my debut novel, Daughters of Sparta, one of the aims of my writing is to turn subjects which can feel lofty or esoteric into stories which are instead accessible and relatable on […]
Dear Librarians, You’re the heroes of Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, my first stand-alone novel. Without you, it simply wouldn’t exist. Let me explain. First, I wouldn’t and couldn’t have written a single book without librarians and without libraries. My hometown library—and one librarian in particular—nurtured my love of books and reading. I remember her putting a copy […]
Dear Librarians, Thank you. Sincerely, wholeheartedly, enormously, thank you. I’ve always been a librarian devotee, but about twenty-five years ago, I was invited to be on the Board of Trustees of Nantucket’s library, the Nantucket Atheneum. I was charged with starting a Friends of the Library group, because our new library director, Charlotte Maison, wanted […]
Dear Librarians, As the tenth Maggie Hope novel, The Hollywood Spy, goes out into the world, I think it’s more than fitting that a pivotal scene is set in a library. This particular scene takes place in Los Angeles’s magnificent downtown Central Library, and for guidance on how that library worked I must thank Jen […]
Continue reading "Susan Elia MacNeal’s Letter to Librarians"
The Girls in the Picture is a fascinating novel of the friendship and creative partnership between two of Hollywood’s earliest female legends—screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue and The Aviator’s Wife. Below, read Melanie Benjamin’s letter to librarians about writing and researching her new novel. It is 1914, and […]
Bewitching and playful, with its feet only slightly tethered to the world we know, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover explores hope, love, and loss across a series of surreal landscapes and wild metamorphoses. Here, Michael Andreasen, a UC Irvine MFA graduate and recent contributor to The New Yorker, writes a letter to librarians about the summer he lost […]
Julie Garwood, #1 New York Times bestselling author, shares how libraries and librarians are dear to her heart. In Garwood’s new novel Wired, a beautiful computer hacker and a bad-boy FBI agent must collaborate—in more ways than one. Allison Trent doesn’t look like a hacker. In fact, when she’s not in college working on her degree, she […]
