Results tagged “bookreview”

Luckily Karr has succeeded in making Lit just as readable for a secular audience as her previous volumes. In an interview with Terry Gross, Karr herself compares her earliest drafts as a recent convert to the rhetoric of late-night televangelists—an interesting comparison considering how readily she admits to doing it all for the money. But through great care and diligent editing, the final product is thankfully more Anne Lamott than Joel Osteen.

James Hannaham’s God Says No is narrated by the book’s primary character: Gary Gray, a sweet overweight black Christian who loves God, Disney Land, and sweets. He has one big problem, though: a nagging sexual attraction to men. Convinced that his deeply buried homosexuality will condemn him to eternal hellfire, Gary embarks on a quest to convince himself and everyone around him that he is indeed a normal guy, 100% straight.

The title is intriguing. A quick read, however, reveals that while Baltimore’s Fell’s Point is definitely urban, working two jobs, traveling to Bosnia and taking a cross-country trip with friends to Montana, hardly qualifies as a hermit. Instead, it is good marketing. Sam Macdonald, a first-book author with a blurb from his MFA program director on the back cover and a tuna can on the front, delivers a conflicted narrative told with self-deprecating humor.

Short-story master William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) is remembered for his twist endings. Each year, twenty stories published in the US or Canada receive the prestigious award that bears his name. Editor Laura Furman, a professor at UT’s Michener center and founder of Austin-based lit mag American Short Fiction, had the onerous task of sorting through heaps of submissions for inclusion in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009.

Author Laura Dave will be in town this week to promote her second novel, The Divorce Party, now in paperback. Whereas her first novel, London Is the Best City in America, focuses on the events surrounding a wedding, the action in The Divorce Party takes place within a 24-hour period in which Gwyn, a sixty-something Montauk housewife, throws a fete for her divorce. The novel is divided in four parts, with each part split among the characters of Gwyn and her soon-to-be daughter-in-law Maggie. While Gwyn is facing the end of a thirty-five year marriage, Maggie is coming to grips with her own commitment issues.

In her latest book, Finding Beauty in Broken World, Terry Tempest Williams applies a poet’s sensibility and an unadorned syntax to juxtapose a pair of unlikely subjects: genocide in Rwanda and prairie dogs. Admittedly, that’s an unconventional combination. So is the style - a series of broken narrative and impressionistic paragraphs, braided with reflective comments, a trip to Italy for a class on mosaic construction and stories from her family’s pipeline business. This episodic structure, often found in lyric essays, eliminates the traditional narrative arc; the art arises from the arrangement. No wonder this book took eight years. Although Williams periodically supplies her take, she mostly observes and invites the reader to witness. What keeps the reader engaged is the tender and honest tone.

There are coffee table books, and there are glittering behemoths, good behemoths, that happen to be book-shaped. Comic Book Tattoo, an anthology of standalone comics inspired by Tori Amos lyrics, comes alive in almost 500 pages of startlingly unique tales from over 80 different writers and illustrators. They provide a staggering artistic range – one moment you’re immersed in an oil painting, the next a photo realistic poem, then suddenly you’re smack in the middle of a stark black-white-red cityscape before emerging out of a bright cartoon.

M O N D A Y [ 1 7 ] music · Elizabeth McQueen (of Asleep At the Wheel) and Jason Roberts begin their new Monday night residency at Threadgills - they're sharing a band and splitting the night. (8pm-10pm) music · Ethan Azarian at Waterloo Records (5pm) music · The Sad Accordions with Just Guns at Emo's music · The Drafthouse Downtown screens "Rock & Roll Invaders: The AM Radio DJs" - a documentary...