Dropping in on Jersey’s Literary Scene

By Neal 

montclairtrio.jpgMrs. Beatrice and I drove out to Montclair, New Jersey, yesterday afternoon to the hillside manor of novelist Dorothea Benton Frank (left), who was hosting a party for her friends Pamela Redmond Satran and Debra Galant. You might recognize Galant’s name from the recent reviews for her debut novel, Rattled, in both the daily NYT arts section and Sunday Book Review—and Satran, whose Suburbanistas is her fourth novel, is certainly no stranger to these pages. It turns out Montclair is also home to many other writers; we chatted briefly with Alice Elliott Dark and her husband, Story Prize curator Larry Dark, and were reliably informed of a few other novelists scattered across the spacious ground floor.