After 15 years of staging annual literary festivals — and just weeks before its 2024 event was to open — Bookstock announced on Monday that it is closing down. The Woodstock festival scheduled for June 21 to 23 is canceled. Cofounder and board chair Peter Rousmaniere told Seven Days that disparate visions for the festival prompted some participating organizations to pull out. He declined to name them. "It was a decision on their own, which I respect," he said. More than two dozen local...
Out in West Texas, a pair of aspiring novelists and enterprising small-town newspaper owners, Barbara Brannon and Kay Ellington, were dismayed by the number of publications that were dropping book sections, cutting critics, and otherwise decimating literary coverage, especially in the Lone Star State. By the 2010s, “93 percent of the state’s newspapers offer no […]
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Russell Banks' latest book, American Spirits, was published posthumously a few months ago, and reviewers have been mostly positive about it. I recently got around to reading it and found the insights regarding rural folks, incluidng their attachment to place, quite compelling. This excerpt is from the first of the three stories, "Nowhere Man," which involves a man, Doug Lafleur, who, with his siblings, sold their interest in the land they inherited from their father (Guy Lafleur) in the rural...
The periodical cicadas that are about to infest two parts of the US aren't
I'm glad we're all finally on the same page about our thoughts on Derek Shepherd.View Entire Post ›
Before the publication of her debut novel "A Good Happy Girl," author Marissa Higgins told us why the book's protagonist isn't an easy sell.
What is the real Kerala story? Perhaps it's a film which offers a slice of life from Malappuram, where a local Muslim family ends up nursing — and eventually caring for — a Nigerian football player with a broken leg who had been recruited for the wildly-popular sport of “sevens football”. Or maybe it’s the one about an impetuous young man and his “team” in a Christian community in Angamaly, which offers a glimpse into their life of petty crime and violence, with unforgettable depictions of the...
With an event as big as the moon passing in front of the sun, there are
Authors and translators say PEN America has ‘had no criticism of American complicity in the bombardment of Gaza’, in stark contrast to other national centres of the organisation Thirty-one authors and translators have withdrawn their work from consideration for or declined PEN America’s 2024 literary awards over the organisation’s “failure to protect” Palestinian writers in Gaza.Nine out of 10 longlistees for the PEN/Jean Stein book award, worth $75,000 (£60,143), have withdrawn their books....
On its last day, the Mission Creek Festival set up shop at the SpareMe bowling alley for an afternoon book fair filled with local press, editors, and more on April 6. At the entrance, there was a vendor with Mission Creek-themed tote bags, one with images of each Iowa City venue and one with a
If you care about literature, good novels, and poems, Virginia's new English Language Arts standards will depress you.