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Posts Tagged ‘Hidden Falls’

Beaufort Titles I Will Read in 2023

Tuesday, January 31st, 2023

Hello, readers! My name is Beau Henry, and I am one of Beafort’s newest interns. As a new intern, I’m very excited to dig a bit deeper into Beaufort’s incredible list. Aside from the bestsellers like If I Did it and I Shall Live, I’m hoping to explore some frontlist titles in genres I’m not as familiar with. As someone who has mostly been interested in literary fiction, I’m hoping to get a better grasp on genres such as romance, mystery, and science fiction and to expand my reading habits. The following books are a few that I’m very excited to explore.

On top of an excellent title, the plot’s labyrinthine twists and turns look fascinating, and the sardonic humor in the narrative voice is endearing. The layers to the relationships within the novel and the warped Americana at the center of the novel are very much in line with my interests.

The tragedy of the plot is deeply layered, and the criminal conspiracy that pushes the narrative forward is appealing. I love when books have the capability to draw you in with carefully crafted narrative turns, and Hidden Falls certainly does that. The austerity of the main character’s voice adds additional weight to the themes in the novel.

As a huge grammar nerd, I am always on the lookout for new books about grammar and language. Grammar is fascinating because it allows you to view language as equations where there are right answers and wrong answers. While art is subjective, grammar is not, and I find that to be very reassuring.

As someone who finds expansive, maximalist novels to be very exciting, this historical fiction novel is intriguing. The parallels between family connections and lives marred by tragedy across decades is incredible, and I’m hoping to find out how Probert pulls off a narrative with such a vast scope.

While these four are at the top of my list, I’m looking forward to seeing the new titles that Beaufort has in store for this year!

Until next time,

Beau Henry

Virtual Talk with Author Kevin Myers and Jenna Russell from The Boston Globe

Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

You are invited to join a lively, virtual conversation with author-comedian Kevin Myers and Boston Globe reporter Jenna Russell, on his novel, Hidden Falls, set in Massachusetts.

Advance registration by 4 PM on Oct. 21 is required to receive the Zoom invite. One lucky registered attendee will win a free copy!

HIDDEN FALLS News!

Friday, August 14th, 2020

Hidden Falls Featured in Juneau Empire: ‘Goodfellas’ Meets ‘Good Will Hunting’

He’s written movie reviews, news releases, jokes, screenplays — and even helped shape the Capital City Weekly. And now, Kevin Myers has written a published novel.

“Hidden Falls” was released July 15, and Myers said in a video interview that he had initially hoped to travel back to Juneau to promote his new book.

“The initial plan was I’d be up in Juneau about now for a book tour,” Myers said. But COVID-19 altered those plans.

Myers said in some ways it’s strange how much has changed since he completed “Hidden Falls” a couple of years ago, and some of those changes color certain passages now.

“You do go back because everything has changed,” Myers said. “You read passages where they’re going to bars and hanging out. You feel, like, a sense of angst. I think the other surreal part is I finished writing this sometime in 2018 and signed the deal in 2019, and then it came out two weeks ago. So really, you’re two years removed from having written it. You have to get back into it. I’ve written another novel since putting that one to bed.”

However, Myers said there is at least one advantage to releasing a book amid a pandemic —people tend to have a lot more time on their hands to read.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Click here to learn more about Hidden Falls.

Click here to learn more about Kevin T. Myers.

HIDDEN FALLS News!

Wednesday, July 29th, 2020

Hidden Falls Book Review on Rose City Reader

Kevin Myers’ new novel, Hidden Falls, follows protagonist Michael Quinn back to Massachusetts following the unexpected death of his father. Middle-aged, single, in a strained relationship with his own kid, and at the peak of a dead-end job in print journalism, Michael is on the brink of a classic mid-life crisis. What he gets instead is a real-life crisis when he discovers his father was involved with organized crime and Michael lands in the middle of a criminal conspiracy.

Although it starts with a bang, literally, the first chapter is just a teaser, before the story starts for real “a few weeks before.” Then the first quarter of the book is about Michael’s workaday life in Portland. He’s a columnist for the Portland Daily newspaper, waiting to be downsized out of a job in the next round of layoffs. He’s divorced, with a son just starting college, and is trying to navigate the stormy waters of middle-aged dating. One amusing subplot has Michael following the “Missed Connections” listings on Craigslist, convinced a younger co-worker is flirting with him.

Michael carries his everyday concerns with him to New Bedford when he returns for his father’s funeral. These concerns don’t go away – especially when his ex-wife, son, and potential girlfriend show up for the funeral – but Michael’s perception changes as he falls deeper into the realities of his family’s life in New Bedford. Those realities are exciting enough, with gamblers, gangsters, and crooked cops to spare. Tensions are high, tempers run hot, and Michael is right in the middle of it. It’s a good yarn.

To read the rest of the review, click here.

To learn more about Hidden Falls, click here.

To learn more about Kevin Myers, click here.

HIDDEN FALLS News!

Monday, June 29th, 2020

Kevin T. Myers Interview on Rose City Reader

Kevin T. Myers has worked as a stand-up comic, comedy writer, journalist, editor, speechwriter, and media liaison, among other jobs. He grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Portland, Oregon where he works at a spokesperson for Reed College. 

Myers’s new novel Hidden Falls launches July 15 from Beaufort Books. It is available for pre-order now.

Kevin talked with Rose City Reader about his new book, Hidden Falls, its New Bedford setting, and what books he likes to read:
How did you come to write Hidden Falls?

When I began Hidden Falls, I was emerging from a dark time when I was processing a lot of old trauma through my writing. I set out to write the book I wanted to read to help lift me out of that place. At the time, my guilty pleasure (read: obsession) was reading the missed connections classifieds. It was a carnival midway of ideas, emotions, magical thinking, hope, optimism, denial, and sometimes depravity. Mostly it was filled with romantic souls exposing their secret desires to the world in hope of finding a connection. So, I started to write a comedic love story whose protagonist was pursuing a relationship through an ad he found.

I don’t write following an outline, and somewhere along the way my protagonist, Michael Quinn, went lookin’ for trouble. The original story almost necessitated that Michael be an unreliable narrator. As I dug deeper into why he was so lacking in self-awareness, his backstory became more interesting to me than what I was writing. Had I not had that false start, I don’t think Michael would have been as interesting, and I don’t think the book would be as fun.

The setting of New Bedford, Massachusetts, is key to the story because the location shaped the personalities of many of the characters. Why did you choose New Bedford?

Well, nobody had ever written a decent book connected with New Bedford. I was going to begin with the line, “Call me Michael.” Kidding. The story of Hidden Falls was invented whole cloth. It is also deeply rooted in the milieu of New England’s lower middle class, where I was raised. As I get older, I find myself becoming more appreciative of what I think was a pretty unique upbringing. In the first draft, Michael was from my hometown of Peabody, Massachusetts, but when the story started taking on elements of crime, I decided to change it to New Bedford. Not because of how it would reflect on the city, but because illegal gambling was so prevalent in Peabody that I didn’t want people to mistake the book for a memoir.

I chose New Bedford because I think it is the archetype of the kind of New England town I wanted to write about. The once great centers of now dead American industries. At one time, Peabody was to leather tanning what New Bedford was to whaling. The towns’ high school teams are named the Tanners and Whalers. We took great pride in an era and trade we never knew. It’s part of our heritage. The people from my hometown have a special bond that’s not easily explained. There’s also a connection to sports, professional and otherwise, that a lot of people who have never been exposed to that environment don’t understand. I wanted to explore those themes and I thought New Bedford was a great place to do that.

To read the rest of the interview, click here.

To learn more about author Kevin T. Myers, click here.

To learn more about Hidden Falls, click here.

A Father’s Day Q&A with Author Kevin Myers

Tuesday, June 16th, 2020

Need a last-minute gift for Father’s Day? Consider gifting a copy of Hidden Falls, the new, debut novel from author Kevin Myers. While Hidden Falls is a literary fiction novel, Peter Rock (author of My Abandonment and The Night Swimmers) described it perfectly: “Hidden Falls is many books in one—replete with humor, it’s also a thriller, a love story (or two!), a series of mysteries, a deep reflection on the relationship between fathers and sons, and a demonstration of how the past haunts the present.”

In honor of Father’s Day, we spoke with Myers to discuss the book, his writing process, and how his own relationship with his father inspired the novel.

BB: Hidden Falls is your first book (though certainly not your last). What was the process like of writing the first book? 

KM: Hidden Falls was actually my second novel manuscript. My first manuscript was never published; I read it recently and understand why. It felt like an imitation of an old British man’s writing. It was stiff and formal. I made all the obvious choices. With Hidden Falls, I just listened to my own voice, stayed true to the characters, and gave them room to explore. I don’t follow an outline when I write, I chart a course for the characters’ development. Not to get deep into the weeds, but that process brought the book to places I didn’t predict. It makes writing an act of discovery and I think it made the book far more interesting and fun to read.  

Publishing, however, was a fascinating trip! When I was a standup comic, I’d write a joke and tell it to an audience within a period of days. If it didn’t work, I’d change it or toss it out. It takes so long to write a novel and very few people provide feedback while it’s in process, but then it’s just done. You send the publisher all these words that you’ve been rearranging for years, and they send you back something that looks like a book. It’s a surreal moment when time stops, or at least time stops for your manuscript. It’s no longer a living idea; it’s a tangible thing that’s become set in time. There’s no more rearranging the words. It’s very exciting but a little bit scary.    

BB: Among other themes, Hidden Falls is about the complexities of father-son relationships. How do you think both fathers and sons will be able to relate to the main character, Michael Quinn, and the relationship he has with his father?

KM: The father-son relationships are really at the heart of the book. Michael struggles to be closer to his teenage son while lamenting the distance in his relationship with his father. There are three generations of Quinn men who all grew-up with different societal expectations and pressures, who are trying to understand where they fit in the world but also where they fit into each other’s lives. There are universal themes of identity and family dynamics, but where Michael’s exploration takes him is anything but universal. I think ultimately, Hidden Falls is a funny, very relatable book about relationships that is wrapped inside a thriller. I think it’s a book everyone will have a lot of fun reading.

BB: How much of your own relationship with your father/son inspired the book?

KM: I have a closer relationship with my children than Michael has with his son, but a much more distant relationship with my father. For most of my life, I was much closer to my stepfather. He was a great role model for me growing-up, very caring and generous, and engaged in a way my birth father was not. After my parents divorced, my father’s interest in his kids waxed and waned quite a bit, mostly waned. Michael has a pretty steady relationship with his dad, but their emotional connection is limited to their feelings about Boston sports teams. That was certainly inspired by my relationship with my father. I can’t think of more than five conversations I’ve had with him in my lifetime that didn’t involve some connection to sports. I’m glad we had that because it gave us something.

The relationships in the book certainly draw from my own experience, but Michael’s relationship with his father is inspired more by the one I wish I had with my father.       

BB: Taking place in Boston, the Red Sox play an important role in the lives of the characters in Hidden Falls, which is apparent from the iconic Citgo sign featured on the front cover. What did the Red Sox (and coincidentally, the Citgo sign) symbolize to you growing up in Boston?

KM: Fenway Park is one of the great cathedrals of baseball. Its defining feature is the Green Monster, a giant wall behind left field and beyond the wall is the Citgo sign. Every time a home run sails over the Monst’ah, you see the Citgo sign. It’s so strongly associated with the Red Sox that it’s like a second logo. When we’d go to the games, we’d usually take the T to Kenmore Square station. As soon as we got to the street level—there it was illuminating the skyline. The only thing I can compare it to is seeing the Hollywood sign. It’s iconic, kitschy, and magical. Maybe it’s because I watched most of the games on a 12” black & white TV as a kid, but I was always struck by its enormity and the brilliant red triangle. The sign is animated so the background lights come on and off, and then the red triangle collapses into the middle and expands back out, and then the whole thing blinks. When you see it, there’s no mistaking you’re in Boston. It conjures so many great, but also heartbreaking, moments.     

In the book, the story hinges on the Red Sox 2004 World Series victory. That was the year that the Sox reversed the Curse of the Bambino. They hadn’t won a championship in 86 years, since they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees. For decades, they were perennially stealing defeat from the jaws of victory in ways that made it easy to think the team was truly cursed. The fact that they were always so close to the ring without ever getting one, made them even more endearing. Honestly, to let the world in on a little secret, Sox fans reveled in those collapses. It gave us epic stories of defeat. Being a Sox fan felt like something you’d earned from years of hardship. There are a lot of Irish Catholics in Boston and we love our misery. 

As a kid, to say sports were important to me is like saying water is important to a fish. Without a strong male role model in my early life, I can’t overstate the pivotal role Boston sports figures played in my childhood development. Players like Luis Tiant, Carlton Fisk, Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, and Bill Lee, in my mind, existed somewhere between mythological figures and superheroes. That they could have been born of human parents and have lives outside of the ballfield seemed entirely improbable. The Celtics and Red Sox were my whole world.

BB: If you could be asked any question about the book, what would it be, and what is your answer?

KM: Q: Where shall we park the dump truck filled with your royalties? 

A: The backyard is fine.

Kidding. I don’t want to give away too much, but it has to do with the significance of Hidden Falls—the place(s) in the book. Hidden Falls is introduced as a tourist trap that catches ten-year-old Michael’s attention. It starts off as a place described in a brochure; then a place in Michael’s imagination; and then a destination for Michael and his father. Then it becomes a place he passes when he’s lost in the woods; then the actual place from the brochure; then it becomes the setting for a story that he and his father both repeat often; then it becomes a destination for Michael and his son, and then a place where he and his father eventually meet near the climax of the book. But it’s never the same place. It is only after it is stripped of the weight of expectations and desire that it becomes the thing Michael had been seeking.    

BB: From your perspective, what makes Hidden Falls a great gift for dads this Father’s Day?

KM: First off, books are always a thoughtful gift. Secondly, dads are impossible to shop for. I’m a dad and I know this to be true. I have no idea what I want for Father’s Day. Pro Tip: if you’re thinking of getting your dad a gadget for his hobby, I promise you that if he doesn’t have it — it’s because he doesn’t want it. So, by process of elimination, Hidden Falls is the only gift to get your dad this year, or maybe every year… But seriously, when you strip away the thriller, and the humor, it’s about a man looking for a deeper connection to his father and son. Hidden Falls is about love, and what better gift to give your dad than a book that’s going to guilt him into wanting to show you how much he loves you. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!  

While the hardcover version of Hidden Falls doesn’t come out until July 15th, the e-book is available now from Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Apple Books. Choose the gift option to have the e-book sent directly to your dad’s device, just in time for Father’s Day.