![]() ![]() Atmosphere is built at the expense of momentum, and the collection as a whole, while still superior to most YA writing, doesn't achieve the heights of the author's best fiction. The roses, camellias and jacarandas of Block's lush prose style scent these works with a heady perfume the disadvantage here has to do with her manipulation of the short story genre. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets. You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. I could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you. Throughout, eros and love receive modulated but frank tribute. When you were a baby I sat very still to hold you. In one of the most ambitious entries, ""Dragons in Manhattan,"" a girl with two mothers decides to find her father and, after traveling from New York to California, learns that one of the ""mothers"" is in fact her father, a transsexual. Here, as in her previous work, the author sets about deflating the oppositions that most people either reinforce or invent in order to distance themselves from others: carefree child/knowing adult straight/gay black/white male/female. Writing with the same sense of wonder that gives such magic to Weetzie Bat and her other novels, Block turns out nine short stories that share a similar theme. ![]()
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7/6/2023 0 Comments How i discovered poetry![]() ![]() Over time, they become less about vocabulary issues and more about the deeper questioning she is doing concerning the world and her place in it. She has many such misunderstandings as she grows up. ![]() She is truly puzzled about that flea as she sits there in church. “Why did Lot have to take his wife and flea What I loved was the voice that truly seemed to mature. Each sonnet is a snapshot of family life, but many also give glimpses of the cultural changes that were occurring in the wider world. ![]() Marilyn Nelson has crafted fifty sonnets that begin with the simplicity of a pre-schooler and progress to the complexity of the early teen years. Here a laugh, there a tear, sometimes even an admission of mischievousness. Review: Reading How I Discovered Poetry is like looking through a photo album with a loved one while they share memories. Readers are given an intimate portrait of her growing self-awareness and artistic inspiration along with a larger view of the world around her: racial tensions, the Cold War era, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement.Ī first-person account of African-American history, this is a book to study, discuss, and treasure. Looking back on her childhood in the 1950s, Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson tells the story of her development as an artist and young woman through fifty eye-opening poems. Summary: A powerful and thought-provoking Civil Rights era memoir from one of America’s most celebrated poets. ![]() 7/6/2023 0 Comments The keep paul wilson![]() ![]() Preorder: The Willows Weep (Pirates of the Witheri.Celia’s Comic Review: The Me You Love in the Dark.Book Review: The Keep: A Novel of the Adversary Cy.Cover Reveal: Leather & Lace (The Fool's Adventure.I highly recommend this classic for its original spin on the ‘haunted’ castle story, its unbelievable tension on very human levels, and for reminding us, vampires are supposed to be monsters from your darkest nightmares. I recently saw the movie was back on cable. But if this monster gets out of the keep, it kills everyone. You 100% want the vampire to destroy the Nazis. ![]() Wilson does this so you are actually torn with who is the worst evil. He doesn’t shy away from actual history, from the Nazis claiming they’re the ‘superior race’ to addressing the concentration camps. I was immediately captivated by all the conflicts and subplots running underneath author F Paul Wilson’s absolutely frightening vampire creature. He’s there because the monster in the keep has awakened. And then a mystery man arrives from nowhere. The Nazis have to bring in a scholar who happens to be Jewish. Soon, one of their soldiers is slaughtered every night. They take over an abandoned keep, even after the locals warn them it’s cursed. THE KEEP takes place back in WWII when the Nazis swept Europe. So when I saw there was a novel, I gave it a chance. The movie is pretty bad, but it had some cool ideas and an interesting enough plot. I read THE KEEP years ago, after making the mistake of seeing the film version. ![]() ![]() ![]() The sisters are separated, and Chiyo - now renamed Sayuri - must learn to adjust to a new, often cruel, way of life as a young slave in a geisha house. But as her mother lies dying, her aged father sells nine-year-old Chiyo and her older sister to a man with connections to the top geisha houses in the Gion district of Tokyo. Written as a fictional memoir (including a fictional “translator’s note” at the beginning), the book tells the extraordinary story of one woman’s life as a geisha.Ĭhiyo, a pretty grey-eyed child, is born into an impoverished fishing family living in a village on the coast of the Sea of Japan. For some inexplicable reason, both have passed me by. It has even been turned into a Hollywood film. ![]() Remember that project I set myself at the start of the year, the one in which I read at least a dozen books from my TBR that are listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die? Well, this is book four (I’m woefully behind) - and what a mixed bag it turned out to be.Īrthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha seems to be one of those novels that everyone has read. Fiction – paperback Vintage 497 pages 2005. ![]() 7/6/2023 0 Comments Luster a novel![]() ![]() We are introduced to twenty-three-year-old artist Edie as she remembers her first sexual encounter with Eric, an older businessman working in uptown New York, after he and his wife, Rebecca, had agreed to an open marriage. ![]() The book, which has caught the eye of writers like Justin Torres, Brit Bennett, and Zadie Smith, speaks to Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In it, Lorde states, “Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.” In gut-wrenching and masterful prose, Leilani’s novel demonstrates the validity of Lorde’s quotation through the character of Edie. Raven Leilani’s Luster paints a portrait of a Black woman attempting to make space for herself and her art in white America. ![]() ![]() ![]() And as she gathers stories and catches whispers of his former wives-all with hair as red as her own-in the forgotten corners of the abbey, Sophie knows she’s trapped in the passion and danger of de Cressac’s intoxicating world. But as she begins to piece together the mystery of his past, it’s as if, thread by thread, a silken net is tightening around her. Sophie has always longed for a comfortable life, and she finds herself both attracted to and shocked by the charm and easy manners of her overgenerous guardian. With no money and fewer options, Sophie accepts, leaving her humble childhood home for the astonishingly lavish Wyndriven Abbey, in the heart of Mississippi. ![]() An invitation-on fine ivory paper, in bold black handwriting-from the mysterious Monsieur Bernard de Cressac, her godfather. When seventeen-year-old Sophia Petheram’s beloved father dies, she receives an unexpected letter. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Then, of course, the sun sets and we see above us the dark dome of glittering stars. And when the world of every cell has been limned and painted and sung, we lie back on the grass, satisfied that our work is done. Beyond that, the city, then the rolling hills, then the sea. We may crawl around the cathedral floor for ages before we grow up enough to reach the doorknob and walk outside into a garden of delights. That means there’s no end to the discovery. When we manage to make something pretty, it’s only so because we are ourselves a flourish on a greater canvas. We aren’t writers, but gleeful rearrangers of words whose meanings we can’t begin to know. We can hardly make anything beautiful that wasn’t beautiful in the first place. “I am convinced that poets are toddlers in a cathedral, slobbering on wooden blocks and piling them up in the light of the stained glass. ![]() 7/5/2023 0 Comments Mamo 2 sas milledge![]() ![]() Can the two girls work together to save the town? Now, Orla and Jo will both be pulled into worlds they never wanted to be part of. Without Mamo managing magical relationships between the townsfolk and the fae, the seas are impossible to fish, the crops have soured… and Jo Manalo's attic has been taken over by a poltergeist! Orla, the youngest in a long line of hedge witches, finds herself pulled back to her hometown after the death of her grandmother – Mamo. ![]() Check out a preview of Mamo #1 below.īOOM! Studios is proud to showcase the incredible artistic vision of Sas Milledge!Ĭan Orla O'Reilly embrace her destiny in order to bridge the divide between humanity and the faerie world? ![]() The five-issue series will be published by BOOM!'s BOOM! Box imprint. Mamo debuts on Wednesday from explosive publisher BOOM! Studios, the first original series by Australian artist Sas Milledge, who may be best known for her work on the DC Young Adult graphic novel, The Lost Carnival: A Dick Grayson Graphic Novel. ![]() ![]() Instead, we’ll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. By the time the book is done, we’ll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. ![]() ![]() Such as: Can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? How much money should I give to charity? Why bother being good at all when there are no consequences for being bad? And much more. Schur starts off with easy ethical questions like “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?” (No.) and works his way up to the most complex moral issues we all face. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. Most people think of themselves as “good,” but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “good” or “bad”-especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. ![]() From the creator of The Good Place and the cocreator of Parks and Recreation, a hilarious, thought-provoking guide to living an ethical life, drawing on 2,500 years of deep thinking from around the world. ![]() ![]() ![]() When the character of Manolin is introduced, the already growing empathy and commitment I felt towards Santiago’s character were expanded. I felt that this, as have critics since it was written, is Hemingway at his best, his most articulate and most engaging. He cares about simple things, fishing first and foremost, but also his young friend Manolin, and baseball, specifically Joe DiMaggio. ![]() I felt, almost instantly, an attachment to Santiago and a stake in his day-to-day hardship.Īs The Old Man and the Sea progresses, the reader is treated to a clear look into Santiago’s mind and the purity of his drives. These are features of Hemingway’s main character that endeared him to me. While Santiago’s luck might be down, his ability to look towards the next day and find a reason to keep going is persistent. His character drives the novella, without the incredible character-building Hemingway engaged in, the story would be a shell of itself. ![]() In his hope and perseverance: something of the human spirit. In his failure, I felt every impossibility of my own life. Read The Old Man and the Sea summary here. It is both his passion and the way he makes a living. This hardship, and its reverberating impact, consume Santiago’s life. He’s making his way back to shore after what is his eighty-fourth day without catching a fish. ![]() |