YOUR FIRST NOVEL, by a certain Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb, was recently reviewed on writersservices.com:

Your First Novel is an excellent tutorial and reference source for anyone who wants to become more than a weekend scribbler. Working through the chapters, carrying out the exercises, following up on the references provided, will give the budding author a very thorough understanding of what’s involved in writing a novel and getting it into the bookshops. The advice is clear and unambiguous, the tone supportive, but as both authors make clear, in the end it’s up to you. However, with a book like this on your desk, you stand a much better chance of succeeding.

If you enjoy reading nice things about us as much as we do (which you must, if you’ve made it to the bottom of the post), the entire review can be found here.

New York Magazine named Mark Caldwell’s NEW YORK NIGHT the best New York book of 2005, saying:

Other books gave us incisive looks at New York this year, like Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of a City, a wonk’s ultimate reference guide to our municipal infrastructure. But Caldwell’s study of New York after dark — from New Amsterdam pub brawls to Studio 54 — taps directly into the city’s collective unconscious. Nighttime, after all, is when the Stonewall was raided, when a 1776 fire engulfed the city, and when Hannah Man-o-War Nance Bradshaw suffered a famous case of spontaneous human combustion. It takes a deft storyteller to pull together such disparate fragments in a grand historical context, and Caldwell manages it well.

We at ARLA think it would make a perfect Christmas present for your favorite New Yorker!

Joseph Berger, a senior reporter for The Times, calls Mark Caldwell’s NEW YORK NIGHT “deeply researched” and “lyrical.” He goes on to say,

Caldwell’s analysis is quite canny at times, as is his understanding that nighttime draws us out of our safe homes precisely because of its “frisson of terror,” and because it provides a veil through which we can encounter worlds happily avoided during daylight.

Berger especially appreciates the book’s “telling symmetry,” the way in which center of night life has shifted from Times Square to lower Manhattan, where the New York night began.

In his recent New York Times review, William Grimes calls Mark Caldwell’s NEW YORK NIGHT “brilliant” and a “descriptive tour de force,” likening it to “a mad after-hours party that guests later pronounce a smashing success, based on the number of empty Champagne bottles left on the floor.”

ARTNews has very nice things to say about Avis Berman’s new book in its Summer 2005 issue:

Surprisingly, this slim volume is the first devoted exclusively to Hopper’s depictions of New York City. Combining more than 50 paintings, watercolors, and etchings with an elegant essay by historian and critic Avis Berman, it sums up both the life of the man and the uniqueness of his work.

One of the mysteries of Hopper’s paintings is why they still seem so contemporary seven decades after he created them. Berman distills the vast number of writings on the artist and clarifies the hallmarks of his vision.

Hopper ignored the city’s soaring skyscrapers, bustling crowds, and architectural icons (he never painted the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State, Chrysler, or Flatiron buildings). Instead, his signature New York images, such as Early Sunday Morning (1930) and Nighthawks (1942), are unrelentingly horizontal, intimate, and anonymous. His images deal in spatial and psychological ambiguities–windows that both separate and unite, intrusive angles, unexpected vantage points, glaring sunlight and deep shadow. Hopper, Berman comments, “portrays architectural exteriors and human interiors at the same time.”

Carefully chosen quotes from the artist and earlier writers add to our appreciation of the images. Like her subject, Berman extracts with deceptive simplicity the essence of Hopper’s progression from his early days in Paris to his stark masterpieces of the 1930s and 1940s.