New edition of The House of the Seven Gables

The recent Signet Classics edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables features a new introduction by Marblehead's Katherine Howe, friend of the NSLT and author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Not bad double-billing, Kate!

As she points out, one of Hawthorne's more notable, irascible comments is something he wrote to his publisher in 1855, "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash..." Sorry Nate, there's no stopping the scribblers.

Brenda Wineapple, author of Hawthorne: A Life, contributes a new afterward as well. (Her more recent book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, has been on my impossibly long to-read list for the last year.)

Physick Book out today!

The much hyped, eagerly awaited debut novel by Marblehead's Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, came out today and shot directly to the top of Barnes & Noble's best-seller list. (Seriously, reviews aplenty. One calls it a cross between Harry Potter and The DaVinci Code, which sounds like a recipe for summer book list domination.)

It's known as The Lost Book of Salem overseas... Anyone want to put bets on what the movie will be called, because if the rights aren't sold already they will be by next week.

Recent mentions in the Boston Globe, cover of Indie Bound's Next List for this month, and Kate will be on Good Morning America tomorrow morning.

Catch her first local reading tomorrow at Marblehead's Abbott Library at 6:30 pm.

Goooooo Kate! Congratulations!

book talk at the Spirit of '76 in Marblehead tomorrow

My first book talk! I'll be speaking briefly and signing copies of the book at 6:30 tomorrow evening at the Spirit of '76 in Marblehead. Please come by and ask me some questions.

(Scroll down on their events page—my friend Kate is speaking in June about her soon-to-be published debut novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. I'm pretty excited about the NSLT, but she's hitting the stores with an audiobook already recorded. Very cool.)

Katherine Howe on BBC World Service

Marblehead's Katherine Howe, author of the forthcoming The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (as well as frequent dinner companion and excellent party hostess), discussed Salem witchcraft on BBC's The Strand yesterday.

From an advance reviewer's appraisal of the book, which will be published by Hyperion imprint Voice in June 2009:

Connie Goodwin, a PhD candidate at Harvard, has her dissertation research derailed by an odd request from her eccentric mother. At her mother’s behest she spends the summer in Marblehead, Mass., attempting to resuscitate her grandmother’s vacant home into salable condition. In doing so she uncovers a new line of inquiry into a dark chapter of the colony’s history, the hysteria which produced the Salem witch trials. An antique key leads her on a path of discovery, unlocking the secrets of the true nature of witchcraft, which may not have been eradicated by the trials after all. In the first chapter Connie survives her own trial by fire: her oral exam for admittance to the PhD program. By the book’s end she faces another sort of trial, and her acceptance into an even more exclusive apprenticeship depends upon her survival. As Howe’s proxy discovers more about the mysterious practice of witchcraft it becomes apparent that Howe knows a thing or two about the practice of wordcraft.