Columns

How To Get Lucky With Your Next Read

March 18th, 2015

Photo Credit: Romano Carrattieri (Flickr) One of the most heart crushing truths of all time is that you will never be able to read every single book. There are so many titles, stories, characters, and options! Where do you begin? What happens if you spend your life reading all the wrong books? Disaster! But wait.

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Path to Publication 3.5: Galleys, Bookstores, Marketing, and Putting the Pedal to the Metal

March 17th, 2015

Polis Books will release my debut novel, New Yorked, in June, with the follow-up, City of Rose, slated to follow in 2016. This is a column about taking a book over the finish line. It's been two months since I checked in, and suddenly it feels like things are moving at warp speed. Screw the pleasantries. There's a lot to talk about, so let's dive in...

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Library Love: Go Forth and Wiki!

March 16th, 2015

Image by Matthew (WMF) Wikipedia used to be my nemesis. I spent so much time and effort explaining how to find peer-reviewed sources to students, and then they would turn around and use Wikipedia. Because it's easy. And often the first thing to show up in a Google search. The fact that anyone — like anyone off the street! — could write an entry was a real issue to me and my academic peers. Where was the quality control? Nowhere, I thought.

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Neil Gaiman Live in Tulsa: An Eyewitness Report

March 16th, 2015

Teresa Miller, the evening's MC and executive director of the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers (housed within Oklahoma State University-Tulsa) called author Neil Gaiman a "rock-star," a label that has been applied to him before.

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The Strange History of Cinderella

March 13th, 2015

This month, Disney will release a brand new, live action version of perhaps its most recognizable animated film, Cinderella. This retelling from writer Chris Weitz (Antz, About A Boy) and director Kenneth Branagh (a bit of an acting/directing powerhouse with too many credits to mention) seems faithful to the 1950 original, featuring an overall bright color palette and a light, fanciful tone.

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Culling the Poetry Classics: William Butler Yeats

March 12th, 2015

Cuirimid fáilte roimh chách! Google translate tells me that's an adequate way to welcome you to our special Irish edition of "Culling the Poetry Classics." If you recall, last year around this time we discussed this month's poet in "Poetry Fun-0-1: Greetings from the Emerald Isle," which you heartily enjoyed, right? Humor me.

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Taboo: Six New Adult Books About Student-Teacher Romance

March 12th, 2015

Nothing is more intriguing in a romance novel than when things get truly complicated, and exploring taboos can turn an otherwise run-of-the-mill story into something much more titillating. There’s many romances that delve into the taboo, but among my favorites are ones that feature the ultimate in forbidden relationships: the student-teacher romance.

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Bookshots: 'The Doll Collection' edited by Ellen Datlow

March 11th, 2015

Bookshots: Pumping new life into the corpse of the book review Title: The Doll Collection Who Wrote It?: It’s impossible to put together an anthology where every single story resonates with a reader, but if anybody can do it, it’s probably Ellen Datlow. Edited by Ellen Datlow, with fiction by Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Graham Jones, Tim Lebbon,  Gemma Files, John Langan, and many others.

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Controversy Be Damned: My High Hopes for Harper Lee's New Novel

March 11th, 2015

I couldn't have been older than twelve the first time I picked up Harper Lee's iconic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. I don't remember why I started reading it when I was still so young, years before it would have been assigned English Lit reading. Perhaps my mother, a lifelong Gregory Peck fan, had been watching the movie version, and perhaps I sat and watched it, drawn into the story despite the grainy black and white.

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Writing 'The Other'

March 10th, 2015

About a month or so back, I became fascinated with Boston. Not the city itself, so much, but a certain subset of people, perhaps equal parts stereotype and true-blue. The "Boston" character that I'm speaking of is fairly specific: he's working class, descended from a long line of Irish immigrants, and always seems to have at least one toe dipped into something illegal, or at least related to crime (which is at odds with his very pronounced yet flexible moral code).

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