Recent and First Books

by writers who have worked with Tom Jenks



Longtime Ploughshares editor Don Lee’s first novel Country of Origin (Norton) is a compelling follow-up to his acclaimed collection Yellow: Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Members’ Choice Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Country of Origin, a tightly woven story involving the Tokyo sex industry, Tokyo cops, and the American Foreign Service, has been hailed as a grittier counterpoint to Memoirs of a Geisha. An excerpt of the novel can be found online at Narrative magazine.
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Bridgett Davis, who wrote, produced, and directed a well received, independent film, "Naked Acts," has adroitly tuned her hand to fiction in a first novel, Shifting Through Neutral (HarperCollins/Amistad). Publisher’s Weekly praised the book as a strong debut that deconstructs the daddy's girl myth by viewing it from an original African-American perspective. An excerpt of the novel can be found online at Narrative magazine, in the viewable archive. Davis’s journalism has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Detroit Free Press, New York, Newsday, and the Chicago Tribune. She teaches creative writing and literature at New York’s Baruch College.

After workshopping part of her novel with Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks, Davis wrote: "It happened. I sold my novel!! ... HarperCollins bought it, and has slated it for summer 2004 release. I'm thrilled... Of course I am here, at this moment, due to a wise decision I made three years ago — choosing to take part in your workshop. Believe me, it's comforting to know you and Carol are there, offering your unique gift of insight, demystifying the process even as you reveal its power and magic."


A finalist for the National Book Award, Jennifer Egan's Look at Me (Doubleday) is a novel whose power lies in its hard-edged mirroring of a franchised, online, decadent America. Look at Me, which was lauded by Janet Maslin in the New York Times, expands the literary promise Egan showed in her first novel The Invisible Circus and a fine story collection Emerald City.  Egan is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday magazine.  Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Zoetrope, and many other periodicals. 
 


Brian Ascalon Roley's first novel, American Son (Norton), is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California.  The book is a coming-of-age story and a heartful depiction of immigrant, multicultural life in Los Angeles, the first such portrait since Danny Santiago's award-winning Famous All Over Town came out in the early 1980s.  With his interest in the ever-shifting nature of American identity, Roley joins Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, and other writers effectively staking claims to literary ground.

On working with Tom Jenks Brain Roley commented:  "Last year you edited my novel, American Son ... I thought you might like to know that I revised it with many of your suggestions in mind and got an agent who sold it to W.W. Norton.  It'll be coming out next April or May.  It is a much better book than when I first sent it to you.  Your line edits helped condense the prose, but your suggestions on pacing and structure and narrative flow helped, too.  I learned a lot from the experience.  Thanks."



Debra Spark's second novel, The Ghost of Bridgetown, has been hailed by author David Shields as "wise and enormously moving" and by Andrea Barrett as "bitingly funny" and Robert Boswell praised Spark as "one of the very finest writers of her generation."  Spark, who made her national fiction debut in Esquire magazine's first summer reading issue in the mid-1980s and who edited the acclaimed, best-selling short story anthology Twenty Under Thirty, is also the author of Coconuts for the Saints.  She teaches at Colby College and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
 

David Corbett 's first novel The Devil's Redhead (Ballantine) has been selected as a featured title of the Doubleday Book Club, the Literary Guild, the Mystery Book Club, and the Book-of-the-Month Club.  Corbett's novel has been favorably compared to such classics as Farewell, My Lovely and The Last Good Kiss.  But don't be mislead by Corbett's pot-boiling title — the novel is a literary work, a page turner with an ironic edge.  Corbett, who was a private investigator in San Francisco for nearly fifteen years, worked on a number of high-profile criminal and civil litigations, including the Cotton Club Murder Case and the People's Temple Trial.  The Devil's Redhead is a crime story of betrayal and retribution, passion and redemption,
 

Kirkus Reviews gave Masha Hamilton's Staircase of a Thousand Steps (Putnam) a  starred review, calling the novel "a luminous debut" and noting the author's talented weaving of Arab voices into a "haunting tale of loyalty, longing, and accidental betrayal."  In creating this story, Hamilton drew on her experience as a journalist.  For nearly ten years, she worked as an Associated Press Middle East correspondent and, later, as the Los Angeles Times Moscow correspondent.  She has also reported for NBC/Mutual Radio.

About working with Tom Jenks she commented: "When I got home in front of my computer and reviewed your copious notations on my manuscript and thought about the issues your raised, I felt very enlightened and was able to make revisions throughout ... thanks for your time and attention."

 

Laura Glen Louis won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in 1990 for her first short story.  Her second story, "Fur," was selected by Tobias Wolff for Best American Short Stories 1994, and "Her Slow and Steady," was a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 1997.  In her first collection, Talking in the Dark (Harcourt Brace), Louis examines the underside of love — endurance and betrayal, sacrifice, obsession, and abandonment.  The language is spare and precise, filled with the subterfuges of desire and need and, also, with vibrant hope.  Louis, who emigrated with her parents from Hong Kong at the age of six, lives in California.
 

Dennis Must's first collection of short stories is no ordinary debut but the mature work of an accomplished literary artist. Moreover, his originality, his deep irreverence, and his compassion for working-class men and women ... strivers and seekers of dreams, signal him as an inspired author in a new American grain — a visionary, poet, and realist.  The stories collected in Banjo Grease (Creative Arts) previously appeared in literary magazines and in the Short Fiction for the New Millennium anthology.  Mr. Must lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their two children.


Gina Ochsner's story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press.  Afterward, Ochsner wrote to Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian to say, "Many thanks for your superb editing of 'Signs: Markings.'  It found a happy home with Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion.  Thanks to you, Carol, for your encouragement and excellent teaching.


In The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity, American historian Wyn Wachhorst writes lyrically of the drive to explore space and sees in it a mirror of humanity's profoundest aspirations and noblest urges.  He surveys major figures from Johannes Kepler to Werher von Braun, recalls the romantic decades before Sputnik, looks at the moon landing as a signature event, suggests that evolution and exploration are inseparable, and finds spaceflight to be a cure for the withered postmodern capacity for wonder. He appends a chronology of space exploration. Two of the five essays have appeared in Best American Essays.   Sir Arthur C. Clarke called The Dream of Spaceflight a "beautifully written book."  Astronaut Buzz Aldrin contributed an introduction to the book.


Combining the page-turning momentum of a psychological thriller with the finely observed, nuanced portrayal of a domestic drama, playwright and filmmaker Cai Emmons has written an extraordinarily assured first novel, His Mother's Son (Harcourt Brace), that readers have compared to works by Sue Miller and Jane Hamilton.  Emmons, a summa cum laude graduate of Yale, began her career as a playwright.  Her plays were read and produced at the American Place Theater, Playwrights' Horizons and Theatre Genesis.  She worked in New York film in a variety of capacities and in Los Angelas as a writer of screenplays and teleplays.  She currently is on the faculty at the University of Oregon. This is her first novel.

About working with Tom Jenks, she said: "I can't thank you enough for your responses. You have not only been an impressively careful reader, but I also appreciate your psychological acumen, something critics of writing do not always bring to their reading.... I found myself with remarkably little resistance to making the changes you suggested. After reading your comments I feel as if I've been through at least a year of graduate school."


Linda Watanabe McFerrin's first novel, Namako (Coffee House Press), paints a portrait of a diversely multicultural family — a Scottish father and a half-British and half-Japanese mother and their four children.  McFerrin's thoughtful, smooth writing vividly captures the constantly-changing world around the family and the novel's ten year-old protagonist, Ellen.   Reviewers have hailed Ellen as a winning young heroine in a complex family surrounded by secrets, ancestors, spirits, and ghosts.