Upcoming book events

We've had an avalanche of self-published and independent books in the last few years, and many of them -- most of them -- are far from being ready for the world to see. They are often poorly edited and come across as amateurish. That's too bad, because they obscure some quality works worthy of public attention. In the coming weeks I'll be posting about at least three of these, with stories that couldn't be more different from each other.

Bun Yom is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide of the late 1970s and the author of Tomorrow I'm Dead. I've read many accounts of that horror, such as The Killing Fields, the story of the late Haing Ngor that was later made into an Academy Award-winning movie. And there is To Destroy You Is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family by JoAn D. Criddle. But his book is in his own heartfelt words.

Guilie Castillo Oriard has just published The Miracle of Small Things, an engaging novella set in her adopted Curaçao. She's a Mexican native who writes beautiful English. I understand she has an e-version of her book coming out soon, and it deserves to be on a lot of Kindles and iPads. Soon we'll have much more about Guilie and her book.

Allen Woods has written The Sword and Scabbard, a historical novel set in colonial Boston, and it's about events leading up to the Boston Massacre. He's going to be my guest on October 27, and I expect we'll hear a lot about rowdies and Redcoats.