January 2007
« Previous Month
Next Month »
"Which is why I’ve decided to analyze the most dreadful covers of 2006 by genre. Otherwise, we’d basically be looking at a solid line-up of diet books, self-help books, memoirs of childhood sexual abuse, and books with babies on the cover in which the baby is supposed to be cute, but actually looks like a flesh-eating zombie."
by
Heather Smith
"Mid-way through writing the book, my dad was diagnosed with dementia. The last 100 pages were mostly written in a nursing home, here in Jackson Hole. That’s when the book became real. The workers, the residents, even the cafeteria workers, everyone had a story. And because I’m a writer, I could ask the most embarrassing questions you can think of, stuff that would normally get you whacked with a crutch."
by
Clayton Moore
"When I started doing comics, I would go to the comic book stores and look at all the mini-comics and the zines. They would be my influence because they made it seem easier. I was reading stuff like Dan Clowes and Julie Doucet and Peter Bagge, but the things that really started me on it were mini-comics and zines by people my own age or people as professional as me, like Fly [Peops]. It seemed very spirited and beautifully written. So I thought to myself, if I work at it, maybe I could do something like this."
by
John Zuarino
"I seek out something else too: nonfiction by young white women who go to Africa to chase a dream. Maybe this is because I dream of Kenya still, Kenya where I turned 30 in the midst of yearlong baboon’ing, where I fell in love in so many ways. As a visiting researcher I inhabited a little room in a house within Amboseli National Park, with an open-to-the-air half-mesh wall that brought in nightsounds: the great bulk of an elephant munching through my back yard, the rushing roar of lions and hyenas."
by
Barbara J. King
"Under My Roof is a young adult book in that there is no cursing or sex... well, YA books are full of those things anyway. Well, there is this kid, Herbie, and he's the hero and is wise beyond his years... no, wait, that's in all sort of adult literature too now. Mmm, it's short? YA books are still short, right? I mean, except for the War and Peace-sized brick of the last Harry Potter novel. But I do think kids should read this book. I mean, better they find out that the nation-state is a lie now, right?"
by
Geoffrey H. Goodwin
"For most of my life, I did not discuss my childhood in any detail beyond that I had grown up in India. I was afraid that if I told the truth, people would think I was irreparably damaged or at best, weird. I didn’t personally feel ashamed of what happened; but I was afraid that if I told the truth, strangers would think badly of me, friends would think I’d been holding out on them, the entire Baba community would become even more annoyingly passive-aggressive to me, and I would break my mother’s heart."
by
Shannon McDonnell
