A Look at Indie Authors and Their Publishers By Lanie Tankard, Indie Book Reviews Editor A GIFT FROM ABUELA by Cecilia Ruiz (Candlewick Press, August 7, 2018). 38 pp, hardback $15.99. “Sweet are the uses of adversity….” —William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act II, Scene I) Indie publishers bring all types of books to life. Some…
Tag: book review
Two Cosmopolitan Collections
Essay Collections in a Global Time By DeWitt Henry, Literary Bookmarks Editor In the American Sixties, a writer’s “sense of place” usually referred to regionalism and immediately brought to mind Faulkner, Cather, and Frost. For English writers, the phrase suggested colonial displacements, such as E.M. Forster’s India or Joseph Conrad’s Congo. Since then, however, with…
Eye on the Indies
A Look at Indie Authors and Their Publishers By Lanie Tankard, Indie Book Reviews Editor MEM: A NOVEL by Bethany C. Morrow (Unnamed Press, May 22, 2018). 192 pp, hardcover, $25.00. Also available as e-book and audiobook. “Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.” Christina Rossetti “Remember”…
Eye on the Indies
A Look at Indie Authors and Their Publishers By Lanie Tankard, Indie Book Reviews Editor THE LIBRARY: A CATALOGUE OF WONDERS by Stuart Kells (Counterpoint Press, 2018). 224pp, hardcover, $26.00. li · brar · y “What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.” —Neil Gaiman, 2013 Lecture for The…
Eye on the Indies
A Look at Indie Authors and Their Publishers By Lanie Tankard, Indie Book Reviews Editor A GOOD DAY FOR SEPPUKU: SHORT STORIES by Kate Braverman (City Lights, 2018). 248pp, trade paperback original, $15.95. “—tell me, how does it feel with my teeth in your heart!” —Medea to Jason, Medea by Euripides Who knew metaphorical seppuku could…
Eye on the Indies
A Look at Indie Authors and Their Publishers By Lanie Tankard, Indie Book Reviews Editor AMBIGUITY MACHINES AND OTHER STORIES by Vandana Singh (Small Beer Press, 2018). 320pp, paper, $16.00. “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society…
Review: Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction
Traditional vs. Modernist approaches, Fine vs. Plain prose styles By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor LIVING BY FICTION by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial. 192 pages. The cultural assumption is that the novel is the proper home of significance and that nonfiction is mere journalism. This is interesting because it means that in two centuries our assumptions have…
Book Review: Know Thyself
“A poet writes to continue asking questions” By Ruth Lepson, poet-in-residence at New England Conservatory of Music It takes nerve to write homophonic renderings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, yet that’s exactly what Joyce Peseroff has done in one section of her well-crafted, complex recent book of poems: Like a granite island quarried to oblivion, her husband’s memory…
Dusting Off. Moving Forward.
Chris Offutt’s writing advice resonates as America regroups By Richard Gilbert, Contributing Editor Cast a cold Eye On life, on death Horseman, pass by. —tombstone of W.B. Yeats When Chris Offutt was ten, growing up in an Appalachian backwater, he asked a librarian for a book on baseball. She gave him J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in…