Round-Down: Amazon Opens Amazon Books in Seattle
Amazon Books, Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar bookstore, opened last week in Seattle’s University Village. The store is similar in appearance to many book retailers, though Amazon Books interestingly (and necessarily) does not note hard prices on its items in-store–the store has a commitment to its Amazon prices, which frequently change.
A Family Tree of Books You Need a Family Tree to Read
Let’s start with One Hundred Years of Solitude, to prove after last time that I do, in fact, love Gabriel García Márquez, and because where else would I start? By me, there is no better family novel than One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel is nominally the story
The Words Beneath the Sound: Music Inspired by Literature
As Virginia Woolf famously observed, the best writing often begins with a rhythmical “wave in the mind,” an inner tempo around which syntax and diction are arranged, a guiding beat of artistic intuition that, when struck upon, makes it nearly impossible to set down the wrong word. Other writers
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “Raised by Humans” by Christopher Knapp
Anyone who has owned a cat has at some point looked on it with envy as it slumbered peacefully through the day. How are they so comfortable in their own skin? So clear in purpose, while we humans struggle so mightily to know who we are and what we
Review: EXCERPTS FROM A SECRET PROPHECY by Joanna Klink
Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy Joanna Klink Penguin, 2015 Poetry | $20 80 pages, 6×9 in Buy: Paperback As a stopped clock is right twice a day, so book blurbs are right a few times a year. On the back cover of Joanna Klink’s fourth book, Terrance Hayes declares,
“Slipperiness of Signification”: An Interview with Lee Ann Roripaugh
In her most recent book, Dandarians (Milkweed, 2014), Lee Ann Roripaugh writes in the borderland between poetry and prose, blurring boundaries and finding the unfamiliar music in everyday language. She is also the author of three previous books of poetry, including Year of the Snake, which won the Association
Six Books to Light the Way Through the Darkest Night(s) of Your Soul
John Gardner once wrote, “If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.” While
Round-Down: First Ever American Writers Museum Slated for 2017
The United States is getting a new addition. In early 2017, the first museum dedicated to writers from the USA, the American Writers Museum, will open. Its mission will be to celebrate American writers and literature. The idea came from Malcolm O’Hagan, an Irish immigrant and retired engineer who is raising the funds for
How We Represent: A Review of FOUR FROM JAPAN: CONTEMPORARY POETRY & ESSAYS BY WOMEN
Four From Japan: Contemporary Poetry & Essays by Women is an anthology rooted in a specific time and place. No, that place is not Japan, nor is it the respective eras from which the four poets emerged. The time and place of which I’m thinking is New York City,
Review: JUVENTUD by Vanessa Blakeslee
Juventud Vanessa Blakeslee Curbside Splendor Publishing, October 2015 340 pp, $15.95 Buy paperback | eBook Blame radiates outward from the center of Vanessa Blakeslee’s new novel, Juventud, which begins in Santiago de Cali, Colombia, during the conflict between FARC and ELN in 1999. First-person narrator fifteen-year-old Mercedes Martinez blames