The Book of Madness and Cures Regina O’Melveny Little, Brown and Company, April 2012 $25.99 336 pages In Renaissance Venice, Gabriella Mondini is a much sought-after healer of women, apprenticed in the “art of physick” by her father—a doctor who abruptly left his family on a mysterious expedition ten years earlier. When the Council of…
Last fall, when I sold my debut story collection to Grove/Atlantic, a smart friend whose book had just come out (and was doing extraordinarily well) wrote to encourage me to get on Twitter, stat. He said it was far and away the best place to meet book people and readers. He said: “Make sure you…
I met Tracy K. Smith a couple of weeks before she won the Pulitzer Prize for her terrific and completely ravishing new book, Life on Mars. We were at a book party for Stephen Motika and his lovely new book, Western Practice – a loft somewhere downtown, in the rain, owned by people I didn’t…
I first heard Wendy Mnookin read her work during AWP, and later I discovered our odd, unfortunate commonality: Both of our fathers were killed in car accidents. The circumstances differ greatly, but the impulse to write about death, to look at it from every direction, is the same, so this week I asked Mnookin to…
Two winters ago, brand-new to the creative writing community of Madison, Wisconsin, I was at ground zero of the national debate on union rights, caught in a throng of 70,000 protestors marching around the State Capitol, screaming “Whose Streets? Our Streets!,” “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!,” and “It’s Not About The Money, It’s About…
Darkroom Jazzy Danziger University of Wisconsin Press, March 2012 72 pages $16.95 Dear Dr. Poetry, I’m a mime currently looking to transition into set design, but I keep losing jobs because my sketches are just blank pages. I have no idea how to translate emotion into visual effects or create a scene that supports a…
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. The series will run on our blog from May 2012 until AWP13 in Boston. Please enjoy the third post on Omaha, Nebraska by Katie…
A Conversation With Traci Brimhall, Amy Gerstler, Andrew Hudgins, and Timothy Liu 1. How do your poems come to you? Traci Brimhall: They rarely come to me. Usually I have to go find them. They’re a bit wily like that and generally prefer midnight over noon and my office floor rather than my desk. Amy…
This is old news, but in 2005, the Poetry Foundation gave the poet Billy Collins something called the Mark Twain Poetry Award of $25,000, “recognizing a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry.” The press release included these two sentences: “Billy Collins has brought laughter back to a melancholy art. He shows us that good…
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