Blog Tour: Winter 2011

Welcome to the headquarters for the Quiet Americans Winter 2011 Blog Tour. Although I’ll have opportunities to meet some of you face-to-face this winter, the blog tour will help me—and Quiet Americans—connect with readers worldwide.

Here’s how the tour will work. Beginning Monday, January 17, and continuing for the following month, you’ll be able to find me/Quiet Americans on a number of excellent blogs for scheduled appearances. Sometimes, you’ll find an interview the blog’s host has conducted with me. Sometimes, the blog host will post a review of or commentary about Quiet Americans. Sometimes, I’ll have written a guest post tailored to the host blog/blogger’s interests. Every tour stop will be unique, with fresh content each time.

Reader comments will be warmly welcomed at each tour stop, and I’ll check in periodically at each blog on the day that it’s hosting to respond. And here’s a bonus: If you’re too busy on a given tour day to check an appearance, you can always come back here, where the links will provide a permanent archive.

I am immensely grateful to all of the talented and generous bloggers who are welcoming Quiet Americans and me to their virtual living-rooms. Please visit their wonderful blogs, and check back for direct links to the specific tour posts once each post has gone live.

• Monday, January 17: The tour begins with a guest post for the Jewish Book Council’s Author Blog series, which is shared with MyJewishLearning and The Forward‘s Arty Semite blog. Today’s topic: “Jewish-American Literature as Multicultural Literature.”
• Wednesday, January 19: It’s release day for Quiet Americans! And it’s time for a second guest post—“A Birthday and An Anniversary: A Book and Its Inspiration”—on the Jewish Book Council’s blog.
• Thursday, January 20: Our sojourn on the Jewish Book Council’s Author Blog series concludes with reflections on “Mark Twain, ‘Mishpocha,’ and Me”.
• Friday, January 21: Look for a contribution to the “Selling Shorts” short-story series on Ron Hogan’s Beatrice blog: “Erika Dreifus and Malamud’s ‘German Refugee’”.
• Monday, January 24: John Griswold interviews me for his InsideHigherEd.com blog, The Education of Oronte Churm.
• Wednesday, January 26: I’ll be showing up on B.J. Epstein’s Brave New Words blog with a guest post: “Four Ways to Manage ‘Foreign Words’ in Fiction.”
• Friday, January 28: Ellen Meeropol, herself immersed in the busy-ness that accompanies a book publication, takes the time to review Quiet Americans for her Between the Lines blog.
• Tuesday, February 1: Lisa Romeo, the writer behind the eponymous Lisa Romeo Writes, presents a Q&A focusing on individual stories in the collection—and offers a signed giveaway copy to one lucky commenter.
• Wednesday, February 2-Monday, February 7: The Blog Tour will take a week-long breather while I travel to Washington, D.C., where I’ll be attending the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and giving a reading at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History. For details, please visit my News & Events page. (And while I’m away, Quiet Americans will be the Fiction Writers Review “Book of the Week”. Please visit the FWR blog to see what this means—and find out how you might win one of the signed giveaway copies.)
• Tuesday, February 8: Veteran journalist Linda K. Wertheimer interviews me for her Jewish Muse blog.
• Thursday, February 10 and Friday, February 11: Thursday brings Part One of a two-day visit over on Lori Ann Bloomfield’s blog, The First Line. To start things off, Lori will post a review of Quiet Americans. The visit continues with a Q&A on Friday.
• Friday, February 11: Over on The Quivering Pen, David Abrams will host Quiet Americans for a “Friday Freebie.” (Click here to read Abrams’s remarkable review of the book.)
• Monday, February 14: Jessica Handler welcomes me–and a guest post connected to writing on Jewish themes–to Swimming in the Trees.
• Wednesday, February 16: I’ll be sharing some thoughts on the experience writing about the same subject in different genres on Sage Cohen’s Path of Possibility.
• Friday, February 18: Chloé Yelena Miller welcomes me to her blog for a Q&A.
• Saturday, February 19:  Technically, they’re not part of the blog tour, but our own two giveaways: one via Goodreads and the other via Facebook (the latter taking place via random selection of two people who “like” our page) will conclude on this day.
• Monday, February 21: Our tour nears its conclusion with an interview focused on historical fiction on John Vanderslice’s Creating Van Gogh.
• Thursday, February 24: One final stop, on the Guide to Literary Agents blog, where you can read about “7 Things I’ve Learned So Far” in my journey as a writer.