Columns

Get The Most Out Of A Small Book Promo Budget

February 8th, 2023

Original image via Pixabay Let’s say you’ve got a book coming out, and let’s say you’ve set aside a modest promo budget of $250 dollars. Yes, I know, calling $250 bucks “modest” makes me sound like The Monopoly Man. But when it comes to book promo, you’ll eat through $250 pretty fast. If you’re looking at a budget like that, let me give you some hard-won advice on some good and bad ways to spend it.

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Book vs. Film: "The Cabin at the End of the World" Vs. "Knock at the Cabin"

February 7th, 2023

What happens when a novel of unabashed and beautiful ambiguity gets in the hands of a decidedly unsubtle — at times even blunt — filmmaker? Knock at the Cabin happens, an adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s 2018 novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, written and directed by the one and only M. Night Shyamalan.

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6 Books with Warped Timelines to Celebrate Groundhog Day, Bill-Murray-style

February 2nd, 2023

Not being American, I have to admit that Groundhog Day registers as Time Travel Day for me, purely out of association with the Bill Murray film. What better opportunity, then, to look for books that play with non-linear narratives, re-organized chronology or jumping through time? Bonus points if you begin the search grumpy as hell, then unexpectedly become an increasingly wholesome and honest person, to mirror the movie's arc. 

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Smash or Pass: Monster Porn Edition

February 1st, 2023

It's love month. And monsters need love, too. Let's take a quick tour of some monster porn titles and play a game of Smash or Pass.

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On "The Fabelmans" and "Armageddon Time" or Should You Prefer, the Birth of the Artist

January 31st, 2023

When I was a kid my father told me a story about the father of one of my friends who he was friends with. This other kid’s father had wanted to be an artist when he was a child and one day as he and his father were out for a walk in the Bronx or Brooklyn or wherever in New York City they lived, this friend’s father told his father that he wanted to be an artist. The father’s father, a poor immigrant Jew from Russia replied: “You want to be an artist?” He then did a pirouette and said, “and maybe I’ll become a dancer.”

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Grad School Residency Part III: I Learn That I Matter

January 30th, 2023

Header image via Fauxels When my train trundled into the station in Montpelier, Vermont, on Jan. 10, 2023, I felt a deep and abiding sense of relief: I had made it to residency. For nearly a week before the third residency of my grad school career, I refused to leave my house or interact with anyone but my roommate for fear of getting sick and having to miss this thing I’d looked forward to for six months.

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Storyville: Dissecting Body, Mind, and Soul

January 27th, 2023

I wrote a previous column about body, mind, and soul in 2020, and I’d like to expand on that, dissect a few things, to show you what I mean. So let’s dig in.

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Dialog Journals and Writing Good Dialog

January 25th, 2023

Here’s a quick quote from an interview with Jason Isbell. Isbell is talking about seeing Garth Brooks live right before Garth got huge: I remember in 90, 91, I saw Garth at the state fair for a dollar right before the potbellied pig races, and I think “Friends in Low Places” came out like a week later. So it was–He probably never played in daylight again after that.

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A Walk Down Salinger Lane: The Legacy of an Author in a Small Town

January 24th, 2023

Images by Leah Dearborn Driving into Cornish, N.H. on a sleepy Sunday in January, it was clear that for my purpose, I’d either picked the worst time of year to visit or the best. Possibly the worst because there wasn’t another living soul to be found; just fields, barns, old chapels with peeling paint, and a fire station with strings of Christmas lights still hung along the front. My car wound down roads with pine trees and farmer’s cemeteries dusted in a soft coat of newly fallen snow.

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Book vs. Film: "We Have Always Lived in the Castle"

January 23rd, 2023

Reading a Shirley Jackson novel, one has the sense of being spellbound or beguiled. It isn’t so much that her writing is surreal, though there is a dreamlike quality to Jackson’s narratives — a quality that dips its toes into the realms of nightmares but never quite fully submerges itself, leaving readers unnervingly aware of horrors at the periphery of consciousness. Violence, too, often stays outside the margins, visible and vibrating, though never quite actualizing.

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