Monday, July 6 - Lynn Freed, The Servants' Quarters

My guest Monday at noon is Lynn Freed, author of the novels Friends of the Family, Home Ground, The Bungalow, The Mirror, House of Women and a short story collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man as well as a collection of essays, Reading, Writing & Leaving Home: Life on the Page. Her fiction has appeared in every important fiction, travel and news magazine there is, her writing widely translated and included in numerous anthologies. All of which is to say that arrival of her new novel, The Servants’ Quarters, is a big deal for readers who admire empathetic characterization, history, and novels which elegantly, sometimes mercilessly, expose the provincial, reveal what is hidden and celebrate the unlikelihood of heroines who cannot abide the restraints of place or love or class or war. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, reviewer Margot Kaminski gets it just right about The Servants’ Quarters: “…in the end it is the strength and strangeness of the love story… Or perhaps it is the unsettling ease with which Freed points out the hypocrisy of all of those around them. The lovers…come to grips with the past and embrace its scars as an inescapable and even attractive feature of the present.” Reading from and talking about her new novel, The Servants’ Quarters is Lynn Freed. Listen up! And check out her website, http://lynnfreed.com/

And, at 12:30, keep listening for a rebroadcast of my recent interview with American super-man of letters Phillip Lopate on his two-novella collection, Two Marriages. For more on Lopate, go to his nifty site, http://www.philliplopate.com/