William Blake possessed an erratic imagination that serves as a fascinating example of how a literary artist can forges new modes of expression in order to stand before the shifting reality in which they live.
In the space of a second spent looking at a book’s cover, we reach certain conclusions about its content. An internalized pool of knowledge built on years of reading experience gives us a clue as to how serious/funny/strange the book is likely to be.
Derrick Austin’s Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016) turns flooded ruins into relics devoted to floods, both physical and emotional. His debut collection of formally-driven, hermetic verse shapes physical and emotional overflows into precise devastation.
Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You is a beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on how we learn to fill the emotional space between ourselves and others.
Among the homegrown events regularly packing the literary-minded into bars in Washington’s hippest neighborhoods is The Inner Loop, a reading series created by local residents Rachel Coonce and Courtney Sexton.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer re-situates history. 3 million Vietnamese died, and 58,000 American soldiers. A generation later, Nguyen has given this history an authentic voice—a voice that has been brushed aside, hidden from discourse, from textbooks, from individuals whose identities contain it.
Thanks mostly to the incredible work of the local bookstore chain Politics and Prose, I’ve seen some of my favorite authors and chatted, oh so briefly, with them after collecting their signatures. For someone who loves listening to authors talk, my cup runneth over.
The Book Hive is a much-beloved independent bookshop that sits on the slope of a hill in Norwich’s town center. By purchasing from independent presses and maintaining a tailor-made monthly subscription service, the shop pushes the readers of Norwich down unexpected avenues.
Set in the fictional, working-class town of Victory, North Carolina in the armpit of the 1970s, Maureen Brady’s 1982 novel, Folly, is an expansive love story that begins when a diverse group of women decide to walk off their garment factory jobs.
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