Previews, Reviews, and Collection Development
So I accidentally destroyed my hat the other day. Remember when I lost the hat? Well this time I flat-out annihilated it. I felt bad, so after my plucky farm friends tried to cheer me up, I wrote a roman à clef about the whole affair using the pseudonym David Melling (how I’ve always loved [...]
Street lit often deals with crime in the streets. Those streets can be in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem, D.C., Baltimore, or almost any urban setting. Where there is crime, there’s also jail, aka the big house, the slammer, or the joint. Treasure Blue has written some of the most powerful jail scenes in recent street [...]
By Melanie C. Duncan With its focus on biblical values and traditionally low emphasis on profanity, sex, or violence, Christian fiction (CF) has long been popular with a certain readership, mostly white, female, and coming from an evangelical Protestant background. “I’m not sure I’d describe all of our readers as white women of child-bearing years [...]
by Julie Kane The likelihood of a small group of memoirs including two titles by the hearing children of deaf parents is brain-scrambling, but that’s what we have here! Also in this bunch: an aneurysm arrives mid-divorce; a Bombay bar dancer takes a journalist through her tumultuous life; a couple finds their way through the gutting [...]
As I write this, snow is falling in the Puget Sound area. After the December holidays, February is a great time of year to tuck in with a “chilling” story—for its cold-weather setting—or one that will get your heart beating—featuring unforgettable characters, a knife-edge plot, or the throes of first love. Emond, Stephen. Winter Town. [...]
Okay, kids, let’s start 2012 off with a bang! Along with some vintage and modern classics, fiction offers four golden age action/adventure pulp stories from one of the greats (hint: he also founded a religion). In nonfiction, we’ve got Audubon’s Birds journal, the queen of soul, drama gods, and a top Titanic centennial title. And [...]
By Bonnie Brzozowski Over the past several years, the graphic format for nonfiction has gained steady acceptance within the mainstream. Titles such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have received acclaim from national and international publications and have been adopted by public libraries as annual book club selections or as “one book, one [...]
As we assess how much we care that Albert Pujols is now an Angel and José Reyes is a Marlin managed by Ozzie Guillen, as we remind ourselves that we love baseball for the game itself, maybe a new glance backward is in order! This year’s roster of spring books on our national pastime is [...]
Charles Dickens’s bicentenary—he was born on February 7, 1812—is the occasion for the release of a feast of books relating to the writer whom so many consider the emblem of Victorian England. Indeed, each work of new historical fiction blurbed as “Dickensian” simply reminds Dickens purists that he was truly the Inimitable—a nickname that Dickens [...]
February 7, 2012, marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. His fiction career began with a serialization of a story that eventually developed into The Pickwick Papers. Soon, he became the first literary superstar (apologies to Shakespeare), going on successful reading tours in England and the United States that were the equivalent of Beatles [...]
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