PS: If you don't mind giving me a postal address I'll send you a hard copy.

Lähettänyt: dcozy 7:59 am (EST) May 26, 2008

Hi Terese:

My review of Black Glasses Like Clark Kent appeared Sunday, May 25 in The Japan Times (Tokyo). You can read it on-line here:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/f...

Thank you very much for the review copy, and for having written such a good book.

Best,

David

Lähettänyt: dcozy 7:58 am (EST) May 26, 2008

Thanks!

Best,

Lähettänyt: dcozy 6:09 pm (EST) Mar 1, 2008

Ms. Svoboda,

Your book, Trailer Girl: And Other Stories is an excellent collection of short fiction. Your characters are poignant, gritty and tremendously human. It's wonderful to find you here.

Lisa Haynes

Lähettänyt: anoisblue 11:39 pm (EST) Sep 28, 2007

I won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for the memoir. It's called Black Glasses Like Clark Kent and will appear in February. I'd be glad to send you a galley. Maybe email you a copy! He was an MP in postwar Japan who guarded an American stockade in which a gallows was built--and used on American soldiers, by Americans. It's the untold story of violence between Americans and Japanese during that Occupation.

These are my blurbs so far:

Delving into the past, in this wonderful, singularly wry memoir, turns up enough guilt to go around for everyone. And yet, such is the honesty, humor and literary skill of Terese Svoboda that she manages to turn this sad story into a triumph of compassion and insight.
- Phillip Lopate, author of "The Art of the Personal Essay"

"Few books over the past decade have surprised and moved me as much as Terese Svoboda’s Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. A family romance in the guise of a biography and memoir, this is also a mystery in the spirit of writers as various as Dashiell Hammett and Sigmund Freud, Patricia Highsmith and D. W. Winnicott. Black Glasses is, as Svoboda intimates, a 'triptych,' a three-story house that spans World War II Japan and contemporary America, creating imaginative space for the intricate lives of her uncle and cousin as well as her own. Resourceful, elegantly phrased, angry, stubborn, fierce, beautiful, and ultimately devastating— I’m honored and pleased to award the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize to Terese Svoboda's Black Glasses Like Clark Kent." Robert Polito, author of "Crime Novels."

"When Teresa Svoboda agrees to write the war story of her uncle, who served
in the American military police in Japan in the aftermath of World War II,
she enters a nightmarish world of secrets and irretrievable truths.
Lucid, self-knowing and artful, her memoir about getting the story will
resonate for readers of every generation."
Alice Kaplan, author of "The Interpreter"

Lähettänyt: svoboda 9:11 am (EST) Sep 10, 2007

Thanks for your note. Who's publishing the memoir? And who was your uncle? Was he well-known? What was he doing in Japan? (I review books about Japan for a couple of nationally distributed newspapers here, and am always looking for interesting things to write about.)

Best,

Lähettänyt: dcozy 9:41 pm (EST) Jul 16, 2007