Announcements

When science fiction author Paul Briggs started writing The Locksmith Trilogy ten years ago, he’d never even heard the word “Covid.” The notion of a global pandemic wiping out most of the people on earth was a plot device, and little more. World events caught up to the author’s imagination. On July 4, when the final volume of Briggs’s trilogy, Locksmith’s War, is released, his exploration of how some precocious teens battle the threatened extinction of humanity by a global pandemic will come to a satisfying but haunting conclusion. Instead of inventing mRNA vaccines in their basement to save humankind,...

Three Secant books have been named IPPY Award winners in this year’s international competition. The annual Independent Book Publishers Awards are open to presses and authors worldwide who are publishing for an English-speaking audience. Entrants include both large and small indies as well as university and foundation presses – which makes a very high hurdle indeed. Kudos to all of the following Secant books, published in 2021, for their awards: - Dragged into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult, by Tony Russo. Silver Medalist: True Crime. - The Henry Bagwell Story: English Adventurer, Virginia...

CHINCOTEAGUE, VA -- The future of humanity hinges on a young professor of environmental science, and her ability to outwit a mysterious Wallops Island institute funding her research, in a suspenseful new science fiction novel authored by a husband-and-wife writing team from Reston, Virginia. There’s an ever more head-spinning twist in the futuristic plot. There are two versions of the heroine who exist in parallel timelines. They will need to work together if an Ark-like spaceship carrying a few dozen refugees from Earth is able to escape the deadly gravity well of Jupiter and find safe harbor elsewhere. When Earth...

On Saturday, April 23, enjoy canapes "on the house" in Oxford, Maryland, as you hear a totally new take on Maryland's colonial history. Award-winning novelist B.B. Shamp will introduce readers to the world of a bustling and contentious eighteenth-century seaport in a reading and conversation based on her latest novel, A Wife in Watercolor, at the historic Robert Morris Inn. Shamp will discuss her book and sign copies in the Inn’s dining room at 4 pm, following annual town festivities known as Oxford Day. Books will be available for purchase on site from independent bookstore Mystery Loves Company. Appetizers will be provided by...

Brent Lewis, author of Stardust by the Bushel: Hollywood and the Chesapeake Bay's Eastern Shore, will chair a panel on Hollywood and Delmarva on Friday, March 4, at this year's Ocean City Film Festival. Featured along with Brent on the panel are: Jack Gerbes (Director of the Maryland Film Office) Matt & Monique Klosowski and their dog Sayuri (Brandy from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) Timothy Kearns (whose father, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, was portrayed by actor Greg Kinnear in the film Flash of Genius)  The roundtable session will be held in the Ocean City Center for the Arts, 502 94th Street,...