The Open Road Blog

"I feel I belong to a tribe of writers . . . it's a tribe I love." —Rafael Yglesias

Today marks the release of Helen Yglesias's The Girls, a poignant and very funny story about the last American taboos: old age and dying.

Open Road is honored to be publishing The Girls with Delphinium Books. This release represents our first parent-child author pair—Helen Yglesias and Rafael Yglesias—as Mother's Day approaches. Watch Rafael Yglesias speak about his mother in the video below, and then read on to learn more about Helen Yglesias's final, semi-autobiographical novel.

These days the ...

To continue our celebration of National Short Story Month, we are excited to share this powerful story—"How Can You Tell Me"—from Eileen Pollack's collection, The Rabbi in the Attic, released as an ebook today from Delphinium Books and Open Road Integrated Media.

In an age of minimalists, Eileen Pollack is a writer of rare generosity. The women and men in The Rabbi in the Attic are complex, vivid people to whom something happens. Like most of us, these characters are struggling to understand what they have gained and lost by abandoning the passions and moral certainties ...

Editor's Note: This week's excerpt comes from Michael Parker's gripping novel Virginia Lovers, which tells the story of Thomas Edgecombe, a North Carolina newspaperman investigating the local murder of a gay teenager. Thomas's two sons, Daniel and Pete, know something about the crime, but they're not telling. Instead they skip town, drawing the suspicion of the authorities—and their father. Written in a lush, descriptive style that brilliantly captures each character's emotional state, Virginia Lovers reminds us how incredibly real great fiction can be. As Gay Pride Month comes to a close, we hope you'll take the time to read ...

Editor's Note: Open Road is proud to share this special essay from Alex Mindt for Father's Day. Visit our Alex Mindt author page for more information about Male of the Species.

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I spent my twenties traveling around America, moving from place to place every couple of years.  My grand idea at the time was to get to know the country I called home.  Along the way I wrote stories inspired by the people I had met along the way, their voices somehow guiding me.

Yesterday, June 12, was Susan Engberg’s birthday and to celebrate that occasion we’ve decided to feature her in our archival photo of the week. Engberg is the author of four short story collections, including Pastorale, A Stay by the River, Sarah’s Laughter, and Above the Houses. Her work has attracted substantial praise. Writing in The New York Times, critically-acclaimed novelist Russell Banks called the stories in Engberg’s first collection, Pastorale, “so good that they could change your life.”  The collection went on to win the 1983 Banta Book Award. In 1991 Michiko Kakutani, ...

Editor's Note: May is National Short Story Month and what better way to celebrate than to read one of the masters of the genre? New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has praised the short story writer Susan Engberg for her "uncanny understanding of the darting, itchy paths taken by the introspective mind," and her "lyrical, meticulous prose." The novelist Russell Banks once wrote that Engberg's stories "are so good that they could change your life." In her fourth collection, Above the Houses, excerpted below, Engberg continues to demonstrate why she deserves such accolades.

Mother of Chartres

By Susan ...

Editor's note: To celebrate Tell-a-Story Day we've excerpted a piece of Freshwater Boys, a moving collection of short stories by Michigan-based author Adam Schuitema. The book's eleven short stories are set in and around the Great Lakes of Michigan, sometimes known as America's Third Coast, and depict male characters of various ages confronting the difficulties of manhood. Author Stuart Dybek called Freshwater Boys "a deeply engaging first collection" and Publishers Weekly praised Schuitema's "crisp, effective prose." Today Open Road readers can get a special glimpse of a talented new voice in contemporary American fiction. 

Last Thursday, while idling ...

What are you doing to celebrate St. Patrick's Day?

Get in the Irish spirit with this special video featuring author Malachy McCourt speaking about Joseph Caldwell and his connection to Ireland. In his famous Pig Trilogy—The Pig Did It, The Pig Comes to Dinner, and The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven—Caldwell trains his ear on the musical dialects of Western Ireland, an area McCourt knows well. 

Clinton Stark attended the Churchill Club event with William Davidow and Geoffrey Moore on Tuesday, January 11, in Silicon Valley. The article he produced, the introduction of which is excerpted below, is a great primer on Davidow's Overconnected:

"No large, tightly connected system can be made safe. 930,000 derivative contracts remained outstanding when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. In 2009 Susan Boyle’s rendition of a Les Mis song circled the globe twice… before she even finished singing it.

These are just some of the ideas and examples that arose last night at a lively event hosted by Churchill Club in ...