About Me
FREE on Amazon.com Aug. 29th to Sept. 2nd: My award-winning short story collection, THE MEANING OF CHILDREN
You are cordially invited to download a copy at http://amzn.to/AiGGsm !
Reader and Reviewer Response to Beverly Akerman’s The Meaning Of Children:
A keen, incisive vision into the hidden world of children as well as intimate knowledge of the secret spaces that exist between the everyday events of life. A work with a brilliant sense of story…Magical, and so refreshing for me to read. I absolutely loved it and I hope it goes on to do marvellous things. Yours is a luminous talent.
~JoAnne Soper-Cook, Author and Judge, 2010 David Adams Richards Prize
“Profound...a writer of such substance that she is obviously headed to the top echelon of writers of our time...a book of rare sensitivity and masterful creative writing [that] must surely be shared with as many friends and fellow readers as possible.”
"Loved your book; read it in one sitting."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyOp2wQlxvk )
"...this lovely little book, short stories about life in a family that might just resemble yours. I wanted to congratulate you on the publication of this book and I hope it goes far far afield for you. A wonderful gift for mother’s day, perhaps more long lived than the usual cut flowers."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djOXwJasZes )
"This isn’t the invented childhood of imagination and wonderment…[here] children both corrupt and redeem: each other, family relationships and the female body."
“I can't stop thinking about this book...I can't remember a book, let alone a collection of short stories, where I could identify so heavily with the emotions and feelings of the characters.”
“Remarkable in its intensity and craft, The Meaning of Children is a book that bears discovering, and Akerman a writer to watch.”
"Akerman engages with dichotomies. Childhood is that safe, magical, carefree time and place — but it’s also risky, threatening, ominous and dangerous — full of impenetrable mystery around things seen and experienced, but beyond understanding. And if it’s not too much of a simplification or stating the obvious, life and the world are not gentle on children simply for being children…If, as Dostoevsky once remarked, and as is quoted on the collection’s frontispiece, “The soul is healed by being with children,” it is the tragedy of adulthood that we become so isolated from childhood — and what children offer us. Artfully, evocatively, Beverly Akerman’s The Meaning of Children reminds us of that."
"Beverly’s background as a scientist, MSc and twenty years as a molecular researcher, inevitably spills into the stories…characters, the settings and her style. Intelligent, objective, open-minded but not clinical, her prose is refreshing and unprejudiced. Her characters are frank and genuine ...With The Meaning of Children, we get a beautifully written exposé on the meaning of life."
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After over two decades in molecular genetics research, Beverly Akerman realized she'd been learning more and more about less and less. Skittish at the prospect of knowing everything about nothing, she turned, for solace, to writing. Her book The Meaning Of Children made the Top 10 for the CBC – Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers’ Choice Contest. Winner of the David Adams Richards Prize, the Professional Writers Association of Canada’s Short Article Award; multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and National Magazine Awards (submissions). Credits include The Hill Times, The Jewish Magazine, Maclean’s, The Montreal Gazette, The National Post, The National Review of Medicine, The Toronto Star, CBC Radio One, and the numerous literary journals and anthologies: Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2012, The Antigonish Review, Best New Writing 2011, The Binnacle, BluePrintReview, carte blanche, cellstories.net, Cliterature, The Dalhousie Review, Descant, EarLit Shorts, Fictionaut, Fog City Review, Grain, Joyland.ca, The Nashwaak Review, The New Quarterly, On the Premises, Rampike, Red Wheelbarrow, Rio Grande Review, r.kv.r.y quarterly, The Rover, The Vocabula Review, Windsor Review and The Winnipeg Review. Beverly is strangely pleased to believe herself the only Canadian fiction writer to have sequenced her own DNA. http://beverlyakerman.blogspot.com/ .
TV & Radio Interviews: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0i9teebBxk ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyOp2wQlxvk ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djOXwJasZes
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Thank you, Beverly, for your lovely comment on "My Mother Loved To Dance." It's one of my favorite pieces, and I'm thrilled, too, that my mother's story will be part of a play put on in North Vancouver in October of this year. With a tiny reference to the subject matter of "My Mother Loved to Dance" in it.
Beverly, thank you for reading and commenting on After he failed to wake up. And SO super to see you here again. Hope all is well in your world. Peace...
Hi Beverly, congrats to have made it into the 13 Top Contenders for the Glass Woman Prize. I feel honored to be on there with you (with my story The Black Horse). I loved 'Pie' - I was one of the ones who favored it on fictionaut.
Bjorkman, See: Always up for giving a giggle
Thanks for reading!
Welcome, Bev! You arrive with a splash--loved the echoes in "Pie"! Amazing piece.
Hi Beverly! Welcome to f-naut :)