here are places in this country that go unnoticed. I grew up in one of them—eastern Washington. John Keeble has lived in eastern Washington for thirty years and has written movingly about the people there and the unremitting landscape, most recently in Nocturnal America, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and just released from University of Nebraska Press. Even when the stories (which are loosely linked across time and place) venture into Saskatchewan or onto a giant oil freighter headed north toward Valdez, the settings whistle the same tune. What is it about these places that won’t … Continue reading Reading Nocturnal America

ee Booksellers
Edgewood Center
5500 S. 56th Street, Suite 4
Lincoln, NE 68516

(We spoke with Linda Hillegass of Lee Booksellers, in November about bookselling and the holidays. Linda and her husband Jim McKee own the bookstore.)

1. What are
some of the traditions at Lee Booksellers for the holidays, such as sales or
events?

All year long we keep a pot of coffee for our customers
and in November and December, we put a plate of homemade Christmas cookies
alongside. Joni, a longtime staff
member loves to bake and for the two months before Christmas, not even the
Keebler elves are busier in the evenings. We’re pretty sure some of our customers come into the store in December
just to get one of her meltingly buttery Scotch shortbread cookies.

2.  Is there
anything Lee Booksellers is doing new this year?

We also do lots of store autographings and fall is our
busiest season. November usually sees
one or two events a week. In December
we’ll be hosting a favorite suspense writer, Omahan Sean Doolittle. This year we’ll also have a free children’s
concert featuring The String Beans, a local group that features its own
original children’s songs for ages 3 to 8. They have a new Christmas CD, Rocking Your Christmas Stocking,
and will intersperse songs from that album with outrageously goofy jokes. We’ve also started two store knitting clubs
that have drawn a very enthusiastic response.

Continue reading “November Featured Bookstore”

t turns out that Thanksgiving is more of a holiday than I thought.  The Pilgrims that migrated to America practiced many days of fasting and thanksgiving in response to “internal and external threats and blessings” according to Martha L. Finch’s essay in  Eating in Eden: Food & American Utopias, edited by Etta M. Madden & Martha L. Finch.  The chapter begins with a recounting of a two month long drought in 1623 Plymouth.  The colonists called a fast for God’s mercy and broke their fast with a day of Thanksgiving when it finally rained. A Pokanoket named
Hobomok, who lived with the colonists, said that the colonists’ god “‘is a good God, for he hath heard you, and sent rain.’” 

Included in this chapter is an account of the thanksgiving on which we base our Thanksgiving Holiday.  The Pilgrims were only in New England for about a year in 1621. 

Continue reading “Happy 385th Thanksgiving”

Since its inception in 1998, Whale and Star has been publishing meaningful books as well as commissioning graphic and sculpture editions and encouraging collaborations between artists and writers. Visit us online at http://www.whaleandstar.com Enrique Martínez Celaya’s work revives and reinterprets the classic Western metaphysical tradition that relates aesthetics to ethics, the Beautiful to the Good and the True. His aesthetic project embodies his belief that being a certain kind of artist means being a certain kind of person and that it is in and through art that he gains clarity about himself and his relationship to the world. Curator Daniel … Continue reading Announcing Martinez Celaya: Early Work