With the recent passing of Joe Weider, the creator of a bodybuilding empire, it sheds light on the fitness craze through American history. His iconic past is represented in Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women … Continue reading Making the American Body
Read the begining of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust by Ellen Cassedy:
"A soft summer rain was falling as a white-haired woman made her way to the microphone. “Tayere talmidim!” she began. “Dear students!” Through the pattering of drops on my umbrella, I leaned forward to catch her words. The old woman’s name was Bluma, a flowery name that matched her flowered dress. She was a member of the all-but-vanished Jewish community in Vilnius, Lithuania, the city once known as the Jerusalem of the North. “How fortunate I am,” she said in a quavering voice. “I have lived long enough to see people coming back to Vilnius to study Yiddish.”
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Earlier this week on the Dzanc Books blog, The Collagist, author Matthew Gavin Frank answered interview questions in the form of excerpts. Frank is the author of upcoming book, Pot Farm, which details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users looking to give back. Click here for insight into what Frank thinks about writing and why he does it in the interview titled “There is a Glossary of Terms for the Lives We are Leading Together.” Continue reading UNP author unplugged
Read the beginning of Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow: "In the middle of the night something pushes on my toes. Half asleep, I think a nocturnal squirrel is rooting around at the bott om of my tent. There is scuffling and the animal bumps hard against the hollows of my feet. That’s no squirrel. It’s larger, perhaps a raccoon. Th en I hear a low gutt ural snort and National Geographic images rush into my head -grizzlies mauling their helpless prey, wolves tearing elk apart with their long savage teeth. With my heart pounding, I lie as … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite by R. Mark Liebenow
On the blog, Pages of Julia's, “book beginning Fridays” the first pages of books are shared and discussed. Today, Julia called River in Ruin by Ray A. March a “great beginning" and praised March for bringing an important environmental issue to light. The full review is to come. In Necessary Fiction, reviewer Ashley Cowger said Greg Hrbek’s short story collection, Destroy All Monsters is “definitely worth the read.” Cowger also said, “Hrbek’s writing is crisp and often lyrical, and these stories complement each other nicely." Read the full review here. And Driving with Dvorak: Essays on Memory and Identity by Fleda … Continue reading Friday roundup
Read the beginning of the Prologue from Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher: "I watch my son as thunderclouds gather outside my Denver home. He stomps his wide little feet on the hardwood floor, clamoring for a tube of eucalyptus lotion he cannot reach and cannot have. He balls his dimpled fists into hammers, tugs at the reddish wisps of hair curling around his head like flames. He is twenty-three months old, the same age I was when my father died. I look at him now and try to imagine the impressions he is … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Descanso for My Father by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
James Crews’ poem, “The Bees Have Not Yet Left Us,” was recently featured on Verse Daily. This poem comes from his recent book of poetry, The Book of What Stays. Michael Simms from the Coal Hill Review said, "The Book of What Stays is one of the very best original books of poetry I've read in the past couple of years . . . . I feel that while this book may be the one that stays, there's a "part two" quickly on the way." To read Crews’ poem on Verse Daily, click here. Continue reading Featured poem
Read the beginning of "Colander" from Such a Life by Lee Martin: "One summer morning the telephone rang in my grandmother’s house, and, because she was busy washing dishes at the sink, I ran to answer it. She kept the new dial phone on a library table by her bedroom window, a bedroom off the kitchen in the modest frame house where I’d spent the night. It was 1962, and I was seven years old. Progress had come to our sleepy, backwoods part of southern Illinois in the form of telephones you dialed instead of cranked and seven-digit numbers instead … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Such a Life by Lee Martin
New in a paperback edition, read from Homer Hickam's foreword of Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story by David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin:
"The book that follows is a riveting, insightful account of the Skylab missions flown by the United States in 1973 and 1974. It is also simply a great yarn. Skylab began as an underdog, was nearly knocked out several times, staggered back to its feet, and fought on against overwhelming odds until it became a champion. In a lot of ways, it was the Rocky of space, and just like the story in that great film, it is an inspiration for all who know it. The difference is the remarkable saga of Skylab is all true.
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Read the beginning of "Going, Going, Gone" from The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life by Floyd Skloot:
"I was standing in the bedroom of our Brooklyn apartment with my ear pressed to the radio. It was dark outside, a spring evening in the mid-1950s, and through the open window I could hear people talking in the courtyard four stories below. I was eight or nine years old, and my brother Philip, a teenager, was sitting at his desk bent over homework. That explains why the radio’s volume was turned so low. Philip couldn’t hear it over the courtyard chatter or else he’d have told me to turn it down.
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