Dear Reader:

It’s sad times and glad times here. The sad times having to do with the failing health of Barbara Holland and the unexpected death of Jean Warmbold who wrote three Sarah Calloway mysteries that we published in the 1980’s (June Mail, The Third Way, and the White Hand). Her thrillers representing both Jean’s deeply held feminist and political perspectives, were critically well received, and had several translation sales abroad.

 As for Barbara, a curmudgeon with a heart of gold, we’ll never forget her sly, funny, Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals, & Malarkey from George W to George W which proved to be wildly successful through several reprintings and licensing agreements with updated paperback editions. One of the joys of our keeping good books in print is that these works are still available and will go on as long as we remain in business.

On a happier note, last month saw some excellent reviews for Chris Knopf’s Elysiana (May), Mike Zitz's Giving it All Away: The Doris Buffett Story (May), and Tom Rayfiel’s Time Among The Dead (June) in the San Francisco Book Review, and for Georgeann Packard’s Fall Asleep Forgetting (July) in the New York Journal of Books. There was also additional coverage of Anastasia Hobbett’s Small Kingdoms in the Washington Times, and in the San Francisco Chronicle (on June 20, in a “Summer Reading Recommendations” column where Zoë Ferraris, author of Finding Nouf wrote “Take a trip to Kuwait! Small Kingdoms interweaves the stories of five people as they discover the plight of a housemaid held captive in a villa. Hobbet spent five years in Kuwait, and her writing about it so richly evokes the presence of the kingdom that you'll feel you've spent your summer holidays there.”

In our June newsletter I described Leonard Rosen’s masterful, All Cry Chaos, which we scheduled for publication in September 2011…the delay resulting from our belief that this would give us ample time to find publishers around the world willing to publish simultaneously with us for this international thriller. The good news on this front is that rights have now been sold to Flamma Editorial in Spain, and there is interest in several other countries. Stay tuned for more developments in our next newsletter.

Also, check out Marty's new blog posting, Summer Reading, at The Cockeyed Pessimist.               

The Staff: Judith and Martin Shepard, co-publishers and senior editors; Rania Haditirto Graetz, managing editor; Susan Ahlquist, typesetting, design and production editor; Joslyn Pine, copy editor;  Lon Kirschner, our extraordinary cover artist; Caleb Kercheval, web designer and web master; Jennifer Hartig, acquisitions editorial assistant.