January 2006
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But over the next three hours, something startling happened, something foreshadowed onscreen when Jimmy, an adolescent boy, clutches a worn copy of Heart of Darkness. “It’s not an adventure story, is it?” he asks. As it slowly dawns on Jimmy that Conrad meant to explore human nature and human cruelty as much as he did the Belgian Congo, it slowly dawned on me that Jackson meant to give us not just a blockbuster film but also a profound tale about the human will to exploit those who are different.
by
Barbara J. King
Though I frequently jest that the advent of the cosmetic lobotomy is well overdue, my reverence for the brain and all of its afflictions is really quite boundless. In appreciation of both the pleasures and displeasures this three-pound ball of nerves affords, January’s Judging gives a satchel of brainy titles the full bookslut treatment.
by
Melissa Fischer
Of course it helps a lot when the books are illustrated as beautifully as Bone Sharps. The drawing was done by a group of artists known as “Big Time Attic.” Ottaviani presented the idea to the group in 2004 and subsequently they agreed to collaborate with him immediately. What they brought to the project was an impressive commitment to period design -- the books looks and reads like a 19th century novel.
by
Colleen Mondor
"This figure of the poet is still very attractive to outsiders. This blowing of smoke is intended to willfully irritate you and to create a miasma and murkiness. So many of these poets were so revolted by the bourgeois society from which they came and its stultifying behaviors and conventional thinking. Look at the heaviness of the clothes, the paintings. It’s enough to make you choke."
by
Nick Cannariato
"The reader is sort of forgiving of a novel. You know, in
Moby Dick, you're going to get a million pages on harpoons, and the reader says, "Okay, I can learn about harpoons for a little while." But it in a short story, the reader doesn't have that patience. And you do feel like, also, that since it's born out of a more discrete impulse, that you want to get it done in a quicker period of time. Or, I do."
by
John Detrixhe
Author Seth Kantner has spent his entire life immersed in what is truly a uniquely Alaskan lifestyle. After years spent reading books that did not portray the Alaska he knew, he decided it was time to write his own. The decision to make his story fiction was easy – as he explained to me when we met recently, “it freed me from a lot of research and allowed me to write what I know.” What Kantner knows, better than most, is what it is like to live in a very remote place on the Earth, and not only survive there, but thrive.
by
Colleen Mondor
