I’m loving the new design book by Christian Lemieux, Undecorate: The No-Rules Approach to Interior Design. I’ve always sort of hated the term “decorate,” which brings to mind stuffy lamps and knick-knacks chosen by someone who’s being paid by home decor stores to talk clients into overstuffing their space with impersonal items. Having passed out of my Room and Board phase into my Anything Goes phase, I’m thrilled to find a book devoted to the art of decorating for one’s personality and lifestyle, as opposed to decorating one’s house like a showroom.
About the author: CHRISTIANE LEMIEUX is the founder and creative director of DwellStudio, a fast-growing home décor and children’s furnishings company. Known for her colorful, modern patterns, Lemieux launched a full-scale fabric line in 2010. She is also a featured design partner with Target and a frequent contributor to leading design blogs, such as Apartment Therapy and Design*Sponge. She lives in New York City with her husband, children, and her Labrador, the design studio’s mascot.
About the book: Undecorate profiles twenty homes from all over the country, revealing their owners’ love of imperfection and penchant for surprise and unusual juxtapositions while inspiring readers to follow their own whimsy and practicalities in their personal spaces. An anglophile creates an English manor in Hollywood, mixing British flea-market finds with midcentury furniture. A car fanatic turns a vintage Airstream trailer into a master bedroom and situates it in the middle of a vast industrial loft in downtown Chicago. A couple transforms a log house in Nashville, Tennessee, by blending their modern and eclectic styles with the home’s rustic charm. Though the designs differ widely, the spaces all express an open-minded attitude. Some homes embrace their contexts, while others transcend them. All are shaped by instinct and imagination and share innovative ideas that readers can use to organically and elegantly create their home to match their lifestyle and tastes.
What if you spent 20 years writing your magnum opus, only to pass away the day before its publication? That’s what happened to Columbia professor Manning Marable, remembered here in the New York Times.
“For two decades, the Columbia University professor Manning Marable focused on the task he considered his life’s work: redefining the legacy of Malcolm X. Last fall he completed “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” a 594-page biography described by the few scholars who have seen it as full of new and startling information and insights.”
It is tragic that Marable will never get the chance to go out into the world and talk about the book that was so close to his heart for so long. But there is something to be said for the fact that he spent his life pursuing work about which he was passionate. Now that work is out there in the world, and, judging by the response in the New York Times and elsewhere, the book will surely find a wide audience.
Cupertino Library’s Year of Fog essay & photo contest
Today in the San Jose Mercury news, an article about the essay contest and photo contest the Cupertino Library Foundation is running in conjunction with Silicon Valley Reads 2011. Two grand prizes of $500 each and two prizes of $300 each will be given to the winners of the essay contest, and four prizes of $100 each will be given to the winners of the Holga photo contest (Holgas can be checked out at the Cupertino Library).
Essay contest: Applicants are asked to describe in 500 words or less how the themes of The Year of Fog deal with discouragement, human frailties and the power of perseverance, hope, faith and love. Essay writers are being asked to think about what role fog plays in the story. The essay contest is open to all adults living or working in the city of Cupertino or students attending Monta Vista, Homestead, Cupertino or Lynbrook high schools.
The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, originally published in 2001 by the University of Massachusetts Press and winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction, is now available for Nook, Kindle, and other ereaders.
“The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character…smart and adept…” The New York Times
“This collection of brief sketches alternating with longer fictions has a novel’s heft, as characters who are just names in one story emerge to take center stage in another. These women’s lives are shaped by fate and by place, forces hauntingly evoked by this talented young writer.” ~The Boston Globe
“Richmond’s writing is perceptive and heartfelt, her subjects at once edgy and familiar. This is a winning debut.” Publishers Weekly
The New York Times Book Review: The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character. Gracie is nearly 30 when we first meet her, sitting in a rented car on the way to the Jersey Shore and just about to break up with her Bruce Springsteen-obsessed boyfriend. Most of the stories circle similar small, critical moments. In the crushingly sweet and brief ”Curvature,” for example, Gracie stands in the doorway of her sister Celia’s bedroom and watches her mother dress the wound on Celia’s back, made by surgery to correct curvature of the spine. A child at the time, Gracie envies the intimacy between her mother and sister and, in those few minutes, recognizes her mother’s capacity for sacrifice and tenderness. In ”Mathematics and Acrobatics,” set years later, Celia and her young daughter, Roberta, witness a bus accident on an icy Georgia road. Celia doesn’t stop to help the victims, and Roberta’s insensitive reaction to the scene makes Celia question both her mothering abilities and her own response to the crash. The settings here — from the Alabama coast to Iceland — frequently shift, as does the perspective; there are stories from the point of view of each of Gracie’s three sisters and a few of her childhood friends…smart and adept.”
About THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS
A series of locations both familiar and exotic delineate the nineteen linked stories in this award-winning debut collection. Whether leaving, returning, or staying put, the women who narrate these stories are bound to Alabama by history and habit, their voices informed by the landscape and lore of the New South.
Michelle Richmond introduces us to a memorable extended family, in which lies come more easily than forgiveness, and parents and siblings conceal the truth as often as they reveal it. In many cases, the women are forced to choose—between family and lovers, safety and self-sufficiency, the religion they grew up with and the reality of the world they have found for themselves.
In “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right,” twenty-eight-year-old Grace abandons wide Southern beaches for New York sidewalks, only to discover that the Gulf Coast still has a hold on her. In “Intermittent Waves of Unusual Size and Force,” a wayward father is called home from California by a massive hurricane that threatens the lives of his family. In “The World’s Greatest Pants,” three younger sisters watch in awe as Darlene, the eldest and bravest, defies her parents and heads for Texas in a battered El Camino.
An undercurrent of eroticism runs through the collection. “Propaganda” finds the youngest sister alone in an old house in Knoxville, where she forms a symbiotic relationship with a mysterious upstairs neighbor during her husband’s lengthy absence. In “Fifth Grade: A Criminal History,” adolescence and sexuality merge with explosive consequences. A woman dancing naked on a bridge in San Francisco is the central figure of the title story.
The divine and the absurd are uneasy but frequent bedfellows in this volume. “O-lama-lama” portrays the scene of a religious free-for-all at a beachside church in Fairhope, Alabama, while “Slacabamorinico” celebrates the holy commotion of Mardi Gras at a Mobile cemetery. In “The Last Bad Thing,” a love-struck young woman in the Bible Belt is haunted by visions of Ramadan.
