Brenda Webster's Blog
RSS
Mar.15.2012
My independent publisher WINGS Press just lost 40% of its profits. Just like that--from one day to the next. Just because they wouldn't accept Amazon's terms for a new contract. Terms which would have forced them to lose money on every book. 5,000 e-books dropped just like that inluding my book...
Continue Reading »
Mar.05.2012
Last week my book Vienna Triangle was ranked number two on Amazon it stayed there moving form the Daily Deal to best in Historical Fiction. It was on the top ten for over a week. And then just as suddenly as it came it vanished. "No longer available."
Up until last week I was like many others...
Continue Reading »
Feb.20.2012
The day before Valentine's Day I got a call that my book was ranking second on Amazon. That seemed impossible but when I looked, there it was. Then I noticed that Amazon had chosen it for their Daily Deal to sell at .99. I wondered what that meant in terms of sales. Amazon is difficult to untangle...
Continue Reading »
Nov.17.2011
Interview by Brenda Webster
BW: What made you decide to write about love?
LA: It is something of a bizarre or perhaps grandiose subject to explore, given how many books have been there before. It’s the principle subject of the novel, of course. It certainly was of my novels. But it’s also the...
Continue Reading »
Sep.26.2010
I was rejected twice by the SF Psychoanalytic Institute when I applied as a candidate. Now, their name changed to SF Psychoanalytic Center, they have asked me to be on their Board of Directors. What is going on? Psychoanalysis is embattled, "pushed to the margins" as one recent author...
Continue Reading »
Sep.21.2010
The central square in Oaxaca is bright with Christmas lights strung in the trees. Flocks of multicolored balloons strain against the light strings that hold them back from the fading sky. It is the Night of the Radishes and even at this early hour-it is barely dusk-the line curls snake-like...
Continue Reading »
Jul.28.2010
My earliest memories are filtered through my mother's psychoanalytic lens. She liked to recall her favorite incidents from my childhood and delightedly repeat them to me over the years.
My own first memory, when I am five years old, is of her standing by the window in a pale peach silk kimono,...
Continue Reading »
Feb.03.2010
Psychoanalysis is in many ways like a religion. People trace their lineage as it were from the Prophet Freud and from his early disciples. Sitting on stage in front of an audience of 130 people at the Austrian Cultural Forum, I wondered what the analystsin the audience would say about what could be...
Continue Reading »
3 comments
Jan.07.2010
I just got asked to be on the Leonard Lopate show and wanted to share. Jan. 14th at 1:00 Eastern time
I've long been a fan of his. Love his brisk intelligent questioning.
And after feeling grim about the world and the fate of books, am cheered.
So off to New York on Saturday and after the Lopate...
Continue Reading »
1 comment
Dec.16.2009
In just a few short weeks I'll be talking about Freud as a fictional character to a group of people who either belong to the Austrian Cultural Forum or the American Psychoanalytic Association. Will they bombard me with tomatoes? Or have they--the analysts in particular--gotten more mellow, perhaps...
Continue Reading »
3 comments
Sep.07.2009
Huang Xiang condemned to death in China, has found asylum here. He is a slender man, always in motion, singing to himself, moving, full of kinetic energy which explodes as he reads his extraordinary poems. You would not imagine, seeing him that he had spent twelve years in prisons and labor camps...
Continue Reading »
1 comment
Aug.12.2009
Muriel Gardiner: Hero
Muriel Gardiner was a close family friend. We shared a large house and farm outside of Princeton with her, her daughter Connie and her husband Joe who had gotten out of a French interment camp after heading the Austrian resistance. Her own...
Continue Reading »
2 comments
May.26.2009
I heard a funny war story last night from my cousin George Oppen's best friend JZ who just had his 90th birthday. Apparently during the war, JZ was in Astoria, Queens making films for the army. John Cheever and William Saroyan and Kucor were in his group. Saroyan was generally disliked by the...
Continue Reading »
May.25.2009
We know that Freud insisted on sex as the key to neurosis. This led him to some grotesque results such as telling a psychotic patient to divorce his wife, leave his children and re-marry because sexual satisfaction would cure him.
Guess what. It didn't. The first wife died in poverty and the second...
Continue Reading »
2 comments
May.12.2009
Freud was just plain wrong about the sexual underpinnings of neurosis. I don't know why it took me so long to realize exactly how wrong. Today, sitting on my terrace in Rome reading Lou Breger's biography of Freud, I finally got it.
What is strange is that I wrote a memoir ten years ago writing...
Continue Reading »
3 comments
About Brenda
Brenda Webster was born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore College, Columbia University, and University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. She is a freelance writer, critic, and translater who splits her time between Berkeley and Rome,...
Connections
Causes Brenda Webster Supports
Doctors Without Borders
The Nature Conservancy
Women Support Women
International PEN
Poetry Flash