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LAST CIRCLE OF LOVE

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Here it is, Number (Lucky) 13!
Are you looking to read a novel that will increase your IQ by thirty points, double your income and tighten your abs?
Hmm, there might be one out there like that, but until we find it, please check out LAST CIRCLE LOVE!
It’s about a group of wily church circle members who, wanting to save their crumbling old church, decide to
create a different sort of fundraiser — a cross between a recipe book/confessional they jokingly refer to as
the ABCs of Erotica. Reading it, you may have your own ideas as to what F or U or N stands for!

CHRONICLES OF A RADICAL HAG (WITH RECIPES)

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When Haze Evans’s column first appeared in the pages of the Granite Creek Gazette, she earned fans by writing a story about her bachelor uncle
who brought a Queen of the Rodeo to Thanksgiving dinner. Now, fifty years later, when the beloved columnist suffers a massive stroke and falls into a coma,
publisher Susan McGrath fills the void (temporarily, she hopes) with Haze’s pasts columns, along with the occasional reprinted responses from readers.

With her customary warmth and wit, Lorna Landvik summons a lifetime at once lost and recovered, a complicated past that speaks with knowing eloquence
to a confused present. Her topical but timeless CHRONICLES OF A RADICAL HAG (WITH RECIPES) reminds us — sometimes with a subtle touch,
sometimes with gobsmacking humor — of the power of words and of silence, as well as the wonder of finding in each other what we never even knew
we were missing.

Once in a Blue Moon Lodge

Available now in Paperback!

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Set adrift when her mother sells the salon that has been a neighborhood institution for decades, Nora Rolvaag takes a camping trip, intending to do nothing more than roast marshmallows over an open fire and under a starry sky. Two chance encounters, however, will have enormous consequences, and her getaway turns out to be more of a retreat from her daily life than she ever imagined. But Nora is the do-or-die-trying daughter of Patty Jane, who now must embrace the House of Curl’s slogan: “Expect the Unexpected.”

With her trademark wit and warmth, Lorna Landvik follows Nora and an ever-growing cast of characters between city and wooded retreat, Minnesota and Norway, a past that’s secret and a future that’s promising, but uncertain. Responding to a mysterious letter with a Norwegian postmark, Nora’s grandmother Ione travels to her native land to tend to a dying cousin and her husband—two people who played a painful, pivotal role in her past. Nora accompanies her and is surprised by her grandmother’s long-ago love story—but even more surprised by the beginning of her own.

A book about making new beginnings out of old endings, Once in a Blue Moon Lodge invites readers to check in, set down their baggage, and spend time with the kind of people who understand that while they can’t control all that life throws at them, they can at least control how they catch it. And as anyone who has stopped in at Patty Jane’s House of Curl will tell you: you’re in for a rollicking good time with characters whose strengths, foibles, and choices will have you laughing and crying. Hankerings for coffee and gingerbread cookies may also be experienced.

Best to Laugh 

Available now!

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Can’t Argue with the Title

In my twenties, I had the great good fortune to be in Hollywood, California seeking what  zillions search for in that smoggy, jasmine-scented, magical basin: a career in show biz. I lived in Petyon Hall, a Hollywood Boulevard apartment complex with an Olympic-sized pool designed by Douglas Fairbanks and tenants who’d been around when orange groves outnumbered Mercedes and BMWs.

I’d headed westward with the goal of making people laugh, via a career in stand-up comedy, which of course would lead to starring roles in movies, headlining in
Vegas and one-woman Broadway shows.  It was a fun dream.

Dreams shift though, go on diets or bulk up, and mine led me to what ultimately was most important to me:  writing.

In BEST TO LAUGH I pay homage to my time in Hollywood; to having as my neighborhood the boulevards Hollywood, Sunset and Santa Monica; to understanding that while most tinsel was tinsel, rare and shining gold did exist.

Mayor of the Universe

Reissue – September 15, 2014 from University of Minnesota Press

Lorna Landvik launches science fiction into comic territory in this tale of a Walter Mittyish dreamer exploring universal truths

Thanks for Second Chances

Writers often feel parental with their books, and when I first sent Fletcher Weschel into the world via a self-published book, I felt I sent my beloved boy out with a runny nose, scabby knees and head lice.  I had good help and advice but failed to use it.  But – as Zen Masters/S.E. Hinton have wisely said, ‘that was then and this is now!’

Fletcher, a mild-manned actuary with a wild yearning heart is so dear to me, as are the Lodge of aliens who believe in him and their shared deep and profound pursuit of fun.

Like awesome, thrilled is an overused word, but I’m thrilled and I think it’s awesome that the University of Minnesota Press has reissued MAYOR OF THE UNIVERSE in the manner in which it deserves and I hope the millions who missed this tale of fun and wonder and will discover it this time.

P.S.  Movie producers:  I am near my phone.