Happy Holidays from Open Road Media!

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“At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are sexual—and brought all those things together. Women are bodies and brains both—I wanted to show that in Fear of Flying.”

—Erica Jong on Fear of Flying

“Moral perplexity. Failure. Trying again. The feel of putting one’s soul on the line. That’s the music that Jones uses to tell his stories, the music of everyday America.”

—Tim O’Brien on James Jones

“I’ll always have a story to tell. Some of my books feature heroines who are down and out, struggling against tremendous odds. That’s what I love to do—take elements from my life, throw them into a pot, and stir the pot and see what happens.”

—Eileen Goudge

“I wrote without guile or craft, but from a simple consuming urgency to tell a story and to right a wrong. I wanted to get The Boo’s job back. I wanted The Citadel to understand the egregious nature of its mistake . . . It was my tribute, my heartfelt valentine to the one man who demonstrated a shining, innate sense of mercy and laughter in the dark land of the barracks.”

—Pat Conroy on The Boo

“This is the first time in history that so many women want men but no longer need them. That’s huge. It means that we can have rich lives, careers, self-expansion, and relationships—as men have always had.”

—Dalma Heyn on Drama King

“The book sort of hit me like a thunderbolt.”

—Jeremy Irons on Damage

“Ira Levin makes the fact that we’re going to die okay. That’s one of the things that horror novels in general do. They kind of inoculate us to the horror that life ultimately becomes.”

—Chuck Palahniuk on Ira Levin

“Go the F**k to Sleep is the secret anthem of tired parents everywhere.”

—Bliss Broyard on Go the F**k to Sleep

“Celebrities don’t do anything for free… They get paid to tweet, take photographs of their children, to go shopping at the mall. They are nothing like the average American.”

—Jo Piazza on Celebrity, Inc.

“Stanley was one of a kind. When you were reading a Stanley sentence that it wasn’t anybody else. It was always a complete surprise.”

—George Pepe on Stanley Elkin

“I am often asked my feelings about Murdoch today. My concerns are professional rather than personal. I have been happily engaged in the United States as an editor, publisher and historian, and when I come across Murdoch socially in New York I find I am without any residual emotional hostility.”

—Harold Evans on Good Times, Bad Times

“Everybody who met Leigh Bowery would be influenced by him in some way—a way of thinking, a way of doing things, a way of not being afraid… I think his whole life was a piece of art.”

—Sue Tilley on Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon

“I consider myself a traveler who writes rather than a writer who travels.”

—Alan Dean Foster

“Writing is enormously satisfying. It gives you a sharpened sense of power of words—of the beauty of life altogether.”

—Anne Perry

“It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about. Whether we are ‘minority’ writers or ‘majority.’ It is simply in our power to do this.”

—Alice Walker on In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

“Kinflicks is a novel about a young woman who finally grows up. To achieve this, she must first review her past romantic entanglements in an effort to understand the true nature of love and lust.  She must witness her mother’s slow death in a hospital bed before at last gaining the self-reliance that can result from the painful loss of loved ones.”

—Lisa Alther of Kinflicks

“My father was an agricultural farm vet visiting countless small family farms. With me, it was an adventure… one adventure after another. He was the old style clinician who would look at the dog, feel it, use his fingers, use his eyes, use his brain. He was a very modest, self-effacing man.”

—Jim White on James Herriot

“This may well be the craziest—but best—thing I've ever been part of. The camaraderie of the authors, the excitement of the audience (live and online), even the long hours it took to bring it all together, were joyous and moving. Words flowing from an author’s mind through fingers to keyboard to projection screen? Absolutely incredible.”

—Jennie Shortridge of Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices

“I lived a space dream. I spent three months in mission control with 130 top NASA scientists and engineers as they explored, photographed and dug up Mars. I was the first outsider ever granted unfettered access to the physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists and rocket scientists in the control room of a planetary mission to Mars. I did such a great job skirting NASA rules and making the Jet Propulsion Lab nervous, I’ll most certainly be the last…”

—Andrew Kessler on Martian Summer

“Well, what if there was magic? What if there were aliens? Well, what if you could buy a computer generated personality and screw it into your head and acquire a different personality?”

—Barbara Hambly

“I knew I would always write. Not because I wanted to write stories or because I wanted to write books. I liked the purpose it served: it helped me understand what I was thinking.”

—Susan Minot on Lust and Other Stories

“Sports give us many happy doorways into the greater lives we harbor. I want people to understand that a greater life is pressing to be born from each of us. Life stretches far beyond our ordinary concepts of human nature’s limits.”

—Michael Murphy on In the Zone

“Instead of doing laundry or polishing my nails, I went to my books.”

—Susan Isaacs

“Thinking of a world without birds would almost be like stripping out a color from the spectrum... What an amazing crisis to have to write about.”

—Bradford Morrow

“Iris Murdoch has a following because she writes utterly brilliantly about the life of the mind. The nearest historical equivalent is Henry James. She writes about how people love, how people deceive, how people react to events, about human consciousness. There’s no one better at displaying it in a dramatic way.”

—Literary Agent Ed Victor on Iris Murdoch

“One of the things I always try to do is take my readers with me. You can’t go to the homicide scene. I’ll take you there.”

Jonathon King

“I thought it’d be great to do a combination of personal anecdotes married with business lessons… I think the subtitle of the book—My Journey from Adboy to Adman—is less a memoir than the maturation of someone’s experience starting out as a boy and ending up an ad man.”

—Richard Kirshenbaum on MadBoy: My Journey from Adboy to Adman

“My goal wasn’t just to find interesting things and explain them, but to find news, to find stuff that was happening, and report on what was going on right now on the front lines of science.”

—James Gleick

“Good art poses new questions about the nature of humanity. Great art insists that we return to the older, deeper ones. I ask you to make up your own mind as to the proper category for this gem of a novel.”

—Helen Atkinson on Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier

“I see Julie as the girl I would like to be—with no fear and loving the outdoors.”

—Jean Craighead George on Julie of the Wolves

“We love to read in my family. My father taught me to read when I was four years old. They fed me books. I always wanted to write. But I didn’t write because I had never met a writer. I didn’t think it was possible to write.”

—Patricia Reilly Giff

“It’s a tough world out there, and we all need heroes. We all need something to believe in.”

—Jon Land

“I think a good sociologist is the kind of person who looks through keyholes and reads other people’s mail.”

—Peter Berger

“Over the past three years, I’ve traveled around the world interviewing prime ministers, generals, intelligence officers, and former terrorists. My goal has been to explore why and when governments have decided to talk to terrorist groups, understand the mistakes they’ve made, and reveal the victories they’ve achieved.”

—Mitchell B. Reiss on Negotiating with Evil

“I want to tell a human story about a person’s journey through a forbidding or threatening world.”

Robert McCammon

“We make beautiful, substantive books. We’re proud to share them with ebook readers everywhere.”

—Melanie Falick

“Nobody wants to read about a perfect character. You can’t relate to a perfect character. You want to read about someone like you, someone making mistakes. Because you read about someone making mistakes, you get to find out how they’re going to solve them.”

—Suzanne Forster

“Imitation teaches you things, but finding your own material shows you what to write. Each writer has her own song.”

—Susan Minot on Monkeys

“For years I wrote a magazine column called “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex.” Young, newly married women wrote me about the confusion they felt over having extramarital affairs. Their experiences dovetailed with national statistics showing that all around the country, wives were having affairs. How could this be, when women wanted so much to be married—and believed so in fidelity?”

—Dalma Heyn in The Erotic Silence of the American Wife

Stocking Stuffers

For the Bookworm

For the Chef

For the Thrill-Seeker

For the Historian

For the Mystery Lover

For the Inspiration Seeker

For the Athlete

For the College Student