When Megan Crane(like me, she’s a Southerner now living in California) stepped into the literary light last year with her debut novel, English as a Second Language, Kirkus called it “an engrossing, intelligent read never lacking in drama or humor.†Now she’s back with a second novel, Everyone Else’s Girl, just released on the [...]
It seems that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, and their ilk have gotten out of an important habit. What habit is that? Take this cue from Aristotle: The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their [...]
Lauren Baratz-Logsted stops by with this week’s offering:
It’s been a crap week for reading. Of the eight books I’ve read since last I was here, there’s only one worth mentioning, As Hot as It Was, You Ought to Thank Me, by Nanci Kincaid, a coming-of-age story.
In my own debut novel, The Thin Pink Line, crazy [...]
Rosa Parks died today in Detroit, at the age of 92. Read more about the seamstress and NAACP secretary from Montgomery, Alabama, who challenged municipal bus laws in 1955, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott–here in Wikipedia. While the mythology holds that Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, in fact she was [...]
Tonight I’ll be doing a panel at Black Oak Books in Berekeley, the topic of which will be “writing, blogging, and publishing in an age of electronic media,” with:
Laila Lalami, author of Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits and the popular blog Moorish Girl
Kevin Smoker, editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Readerly Times and the blog [...]
I currently have a piece in The Writer’s Chronicle called “In Search of the Beautiful Lie.” Pamela Schoenewaldt, whom I met a few months ago when she submitted a lovely story called Threads on the Mountain to Fiction Attic, just emailed me in response to the WC piece…thought I’d pass her well-said missive along:
The issue [...]
More from Lauren Baratz-Logsted:
I started out the week with one lousy book after another, but then, just when I was at the end of my reading rope, the book gods of the universe shined down on me with a string of hits.
The Cadaver’s Ball, by Charles Atkins. I reviewed Dr. Atkins’ first two novels for [...]
What inspiration have buxom blondes lent to the literary landscape? James Bernard Frost lets you in on the details, as told to him by Lewis Buzbee (Fliegelman’s Desire). Who knew?
I’ll be reading at the Makeout Room tonight with Stephen Elliott, Michelle Tea, Will Christopher Baer, and Craig Clevenger. I’m excited about hearing from Clevenger’s new novel, Dermaphoria, the follow-up to his cultishly beloved The Contortionist’s Handbook. The reading will be emceed by MacAdam/Cage publisher David Poindexter–yes, you’ve seen him, that tall fellow with the [...]
Ben Marcus has an interesting piece in Harpers this month with the rather long but accurately descriptive title, “Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it.” Marcus argues that the Franzens of the world, and a preponderance of stick-in-the-mud critics, hold that realism can be achieved only [...]
