Category: Publishing News

More of my microfiction was published in 50 Give or Take. “Wrinkles of Disappointment” was prompted by a remark my daughter made about the “disappointed” face of a woman in a theater lobby where we were attending a performance. Sign up to receive and submit your own ultra-short stories, free, at 50 Give or Take.

Faces carry our life histories

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Thanks to all the locals who came to Ann Arbor’s Schuler Books to hear me read from my novel One Person’s Loss on July 19th. There was an animated exchange with audience members and between me and my co-presenter Beth Kirschner, who read from her book Copper Divide. Thanks to Schuler Books for hosting the event. Wherever you live, please support your independent book store.

Ann S. Epstein and Beth Kirschner read and discuss their historical novels at Ann Arbor’s Schuler Books

More of my microfiction was published in 50 Give or Take on July 20, 2023. Read “The Last Time” for a mini-dose of philosophy. It’s not the first time, or the last time, I’ve been included in this unique online daily magazine. (Why writers write: “A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood)

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On July 19, 2023 at 6:30 PM Eastern, please join me and author Beth Kirschner as we each read from our historical novels at Schuler Books, 2513 Jackson Avenue, Ann Arbor, Michigan (in the Westgate Shopping Center). I will read from One Person’s Loss, about Jewish newlyweds who escape Berlin for Brooklyn in 1937, admonished by their families to “have children to save our people” on the eve of the Holocaust. Beth will read from Copper Divide, about a friendship tested by the massive and violent copper miners’ strike in 1913 that split the once-peaceful community around Calumet, Michigan. Read more about the novels and their authors at the bookstore’s event website. The event is FREE and open to all, but please register here so Schuler’s knows you plan to join us. Hope to see you there!

My creative nonfiction essay “Riley and Lucille” appears in the May 2023 issue of The Blue Mountain Review (pp. 155-158), published by The Southern Collective Experience. Written on the eve of surgery to save my right eye, “Riley and Lucille” ponders how my habit of naming ailing body parts is a tool to confront, communicate, laugh about, and adapt to the physical challenges of aging. Read more in MEMOIR.

The Southern Collective Experience publishes The Blue Mountain Review

Why writers write: “Fiction is like listening to someone’s heartbeat through a stethoscope. Memoir is like open-heart surgery and holding someone’s heart in your hands.” – Maya Shanbhag Lang

Historical Novel Review praised One Person’s Loss, saying in part, “Epstein paints a skillful picture of the tragedy of the Holocaust mirrored in miniature with each person. The use of a present-tense narrative voice in close third-person gives an immediate sense of the looming and unstoppable horror of the war as each suspected loss is confirmed.” Read the full Historical Novel Review of One Person’s Loss and learn more about the book One Person’s Loss in NOVELS. If you’re a fan of historical fiction, join the Historical Novel Society and receive a print copy of their quarterly magazine.

You’re invited to an Ann Arbor District Library event: “Imagination Meets Experience: Alternative Paths to the Writing Life.” Authors Ann S. Epstein and Janet Gilsdorf discuss their journeys to becoming writers and blending real and imagined events in their writing with interviewer Danielle LaVaque-Manty. Tuesday, January 24, 2023, 6-7 PM, AADL Downtown Branch, 4th Floor Meeting Room. Books will be available for purchase and signing. More at the AADL event page.

50 Give or Take published another piece of my microfiction, Vintage Varmints, a story guaranteed to elicit a chuckle whether you prefer the newfangled or the old-fashioned. (FYI: The Hungarian Mudi, an all-purpose farm dog, has been around since the 1800s, but only recently did the breed become the hottest new member of the American Kennel Club.) Sign up to receive and submit your own ultra-short stories, free, at 50 Give or Take.

I’m tickled that “Snappily Ever After” will be in the Improbable Press anthology, Anna Karenina Isn’t Dead, which imagines better endings for women who have been ignored, vilified, or otherwise mistreated in literary works. My piece, “Snappily Ever After,” is a series of limericks about maligned females in fairy tales and classic children’s books. While the submission calls for prose, and these rewrites are technically poems, they can be read as micro-fiction, or very short stories. The anthology will be published in 2023. Learn more at Improbable Press, a London publisher featuring books about “everyone and anyone from whom we don’t hear enough.” Read about my other short fiction in SHORT STORIES.

I’ve been named a finalist in the Black Lawrence Press 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award contest for my story collection Women, Working. See the list of finalists and semi-finalists. About the book: The fourteen stories collected in Women, Working dramatize women’s ongoing fight to balance work and family, intimacy and independence, tradition and progress. Spanning two centuries, the narratives highlight a forward march impeded by social upheaval, physical and psychological assault, and patriarchal resistance. The women — including an 1820 mill worker, a 1911 Triangle fire survivor, a Depression packhorse librarian, a chicken catcher in feminism’s early days, a contemporary trucker — are notably different, yet they share an unsinkable spirit, unflagging determination, and unwavering peer support. Read more about each piece in SHORT STORIES. The winner will be announced in the coming weeks. Wish me luck!