Jane Austen: the self-help guru… Ten life lessons from the pen the world’s wisest author
For generations people have turned to the works of Jane Austen for comfort and wisdom. In Cocktails with Miss Austen, authors from around...
Jane Austen in South Africa
In the first of a series of posts featuring the authors of Cocktails with Miss Austen, we visit Jaime Lilleen Uranovsky to see what she...
The unseen faces of Jane Austen
Jane Austen is many things to many people, but have you thought of her as any of the following before? Perhaps you'll see her in a whole...
Bewitched in Santa Marta
Santa Marta isn’t widely known as the second oldest colonial city in the Americas, and it certainly doesn’t look or feel like it. It’s...
A fine beast of a woman
From the small towns gripped in a tight squeeze of inescapable heat to the Andean cities trapped in a time-lapse of endless drizzle,...
Let him rest
On a cold evening in April 2014, I arrived early for a meeting. I didn’t know the neighborhood well, so I meandered through the streets...
The first chapter
Love in the Time of Cholera. When I chose that book off the bookshelf as a teenager in Philadelphia in the late 1980s, I’d never before...
Giving Jane Austen some feedback
I do love writers groups. I’ve been a member of a few for some years now, and I’ve learned so much from my fellow writers. But as I’m...
Love, Cholera and Madness
Love in the Time of Cholera begins with Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s death and proceeds to recount the other characters’ histories. Before...
Echoes of solitude
A girl is scrunched up around a book underneath her duvet. Her bed sits in a sea of clutter—clothes both clean and dirty are strewn...