Bootlegger’s Daughter, by Margaret Maron

Blogging for a Good Book

Readers who enjoy police procedurals and are looking for stories of justice in the New South will find a lot to enjoy in Margaret Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott series. Maron sets her books in contemporary North Carolina (like fellow writer Michael Malone). Over the course of the series, Judge Knott has to address the same problems and concerns—racial and social divides, economic inequality, etc.—that face Malone’s Police Chief Cuddy Mangum. Maron does not shy away from addressing challenging issues in contemporary society.

The problems that Judge Knott faces are often rooted in the evils of the past. Family and community play important roles in both the life of Judge Knott and in the stories. Maron’s novels are straight ahead mysteries, with engaging characters and interesting plots. This is an excellent series for readers interested in contemporary crime writing, issues in the New South, or police procedurals. Start with Bootlegger’s…

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Library Lust

oh yeah!

The Captive Reader

Source: Lonny

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chaotic stillness

∙ tenderheartmusings ∙

Life goes.. forward
or does it trace its way back
one encounter at a time
to where it all began

like a jigsaw
that you try to piece
your whole life
only to realize
it was already complete

in the name of ‘experience’
you stumble
diving face first
into your destiny
resisting, accepting, becoming
what you were meant to be

faces, forgotten faces
surfacing from abyss
at the time of need
others with time
sink to the bottom
in the deep

faces, traces, erase it
a hand once held
an embrace once felt
that left a taste of divinity

this fading world
sweeps past
so quickly
where is the affinity?

cradling fragments
embedded in the core
of true Reality
I persist
hearing the memory
of a quiet surrender
long before
I can remember.

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the bottomless memory hole

weekend reading

BookPeople

Chris Kraus’s Torpor, originally published in 2006, was recently republished by semiotext(e). In Null and Void, Becca Rothfeld insists that Torpor  “is not the festival of negativity we deserved but the festival of negativity we needed in those—and these—artificially untroubled times.” Though she deems the novel “depressing to a fault,” she argues for the importance of negativity and negative emotion in a culture that frequently requires a false outward display of positivity. In Slate. 

Also, be sure to check out Negative Emotions, by Lydia Davis (author of Can’t and Won’t, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Break it Down, and many more.) It’s referenced in Null and Void and follows a similar trajectory of arguing for negative emotional spaces and reactions, though Davis does a good job of making that sentiment quite funny. From Tweed’s. 

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the process…

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Five Fascinating Facts about Aldous Huxley

Interesting Literature

Interesting trivia about the life of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World

1. Aldous Huxley was the great-nephew of Matthew Arnold. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the author best known for the dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), could boast the nineteenth-century poet and educational reformer Arnold (1822-88) as his great-uncle. This literary ancestry is worth mentioning at the outset of this list of interesting Aldous Huxley facts, not least because it is often eclipsed in accounts of Huxley’s life by his more famous family connection – namely, his grandfather, the great Victorian biologist T. H. Huxley, who coined the word ‘agnostic’. And while we’re discussing the coining of words… 

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Just Read It: Or How I Learned To Love The Poem

There is definitely poetry out there for everyone! 😉

BookPeople

April is National Poetry Month. I am not a poetry reader. So in honor of NPM, I decided to branch outside of my comfort zone a little and see if there really is poetry out there for everyone (I heard a rumor that there is)! Before I dove in, however, I decided to talk to my good friend, Louisa Spaventa, who also has an MA in Creative Writing/English from UT and teaches composition and an honors class, Queer Writings, at Austin Community College, to get her perspective on poetry and find out where her love of it comes from.

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What made you want to major in poetry in college?

It really was because of my love of words. I like to repeat words, look up new words, I like the way they sound. And I like the way the words can connect you to something. I had several experiences in college…

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Book Club Corner Picks: April Recommendations

BookPeople

Welcome to our Book Club Corner, where each month we highlight books new to paperback we think would make perfect picks for your next book club discussion. If you’re looking to join a book club, we host a wide variety of free, bookseller-run book clubs right here at BookPeople. Join us! We love to talk books.

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Featured Books of the Month:

No Book but the World: A Novel  by Leah Hager Cohen

A story about a brother and sister, Ava and Fred, who as children has what seemed to be an idyllic childhood with parents that believed in curiosity and the natural environment. But as adults they’ve fallen out of touch. When her brother is accused of a shocking crime she must convince the world of his innocence and come to terms with her guilt for not being there for him. It’s dark literary fiction about an unconventional family, the…

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The Antagonist, by Lynn Coady

Blogging for a Good Book

Gordon “Rank” Rankin, Jr., is incensed when he starts to read a novel by a college friend, Adam Grix, whom he hasn’t seen in twenty years, and finds himself unmistakably but very imperfectly portrayed in the novel. He sits down at his computer and fires off email after angry email to his old friend, over a three month period, trying to set the record straight, trying to put into words the events of his life that led to the fateful night in their second year of college when Rank left their circle of friends and never went back.

Rank is particularly incensed that Adam mentions, in the early part of his novel, that the character’s mother had died. “It did nothing,” Rank writes to Adam. “[i]t was just a thing that had happened to this guy – his mom died, by the way. Background information. It’s mentioned once and never…

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ShoeBox PR Presents Echo Lew

Be Inspired! ...and Get ArtQuenched!

Artist Echo Lew

Drawing In Space

Solo Show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art

Artist Echo Lew has a fascinating story being the son of a Taiwanese farmer. A self taught inventor, Echo has made a successful career in the contemporary art world and is still going strong with a solo show opening at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art.

Echo Lew is a very unique artist who manipulates light, to create ‘light drawings’ with his own ingenious style. Echo talks about his work, “I have been drawing with traditional mediums for twenty-eight years. I used oil painting to explore the effects of light in a 2006 solo exhibition, “See the Light,” at the Little Tokyo Cultural Center, partnered with Helen Keller International. I became curious about the effects of lights in motion. Could this become the basis of a new kind of drawing? I experimented with cameras…

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