Welcome!

Welcome to the Joseph Benjamin family blog. The look, feel, and purpose of this blog is quite fluid. My hope is that as additional family members join me in authoring and perhaps administering it, the blog will fulfill multiple needs.

My name is Laurie Gold. If I've not yet friended you on Facebook or didn't meet you at the family get-together last month in Rhode Island, I am married to Harold Gold, who is one of Emily Gold's four sons with Sammy Gold. Emily's father was Jacob Gold, the eldest son of Joseph Benjamin and his second wife Emma.

I am a writer and critic, and for more than a dozen years I've reviewed fiction and genre fiction for Publishers Weekly magazine. In addition, I've blogged for years and until the end of 2008, published an influential book website that now continues on without me. Until recently I also worked as a part-time bookseller at a local Barnes & Noble, where I discovered my "savant-like" skill in matching books to readers. If any of you would like for me to recommend specific books just for you, . I've already successfully recommended a few books to my brother-in-law Lewis; I hope to convince him to write up one he particularly liked for this blog.

In addition to my PW gig, earlier this year I began to write for a blog hosted by Macmillan publishers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt, St Martin's Press, Tor, Forge). It's a genre-driven blog with a pop culture sensibility. Unless you read romance or urban fantasy (that's vampires and werewolves and whatnot to the uninitiated) and have a tolerance for "smexy," you probably wouldn't enjoy Heroes & Heartbreakers.

I hope to put my skill set to good use in administering this blog. Please feel free to participate in whatever way may work for you. Check out the lay-out and see if there are any widgets you'd like added. To kick things off, I've started a blogroll with a link to my personal blog (it's called Toe in the Water); please help me grow the blogroll by sending me links to your own blogs and websites.

Tomorrow I'll be writing about a brand new book that I cannot recommend strongly enough. See you then.

~Laurie