UM professor Katie Kane reviews Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love.
UM professor David Gates reviews Will Hermes’s Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.
Archive for the Books Category
Our local reviewers …
Posted in Books, Opinion with tags David Gates, Katie Kane on 5 December, 2011 by S&Co.Kids’ Book Group meets next on Dec. 15th
Posted in Books, Events, Reading on 4 December, 2011 by S&Co.
The Kids’ Book Group will meet Dec. 15th at 6 pm. to discuss Lois Lowry’s The Willoughbys. The group meets monthly and is open to 4th through 7th graders (no exceptions). Please contact us about joining now!
What I’m Reading Right Now
Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags Scott Raab, The Whore of Akron on 3 December, 2011 by S&Co.
The Whore of Akron, by Scott Raab (Harper; $25.99)
In the end, what truly matters is this: Cleveland fans love the city, cherish the teams more deeply, and pull for them with far more passion than fans anywhere else. Other Rust Belt cities have been stripped of a middle class over the past fifty years by the same socioeconomic Katrina, but only Cleveland became the armpit of a nation. Detroit is a sinkhole of permanent despair, Pittsburgh’s a human sewer, but fans in those cities know at least what victory looks, sounds, and feels like, and they limp a little taller and stink slightly less for that knowledge.
NEW — Non Fiction Book Club
Posted in Books, Events on 25 November, 2011 by S&Co.A new Non Fiction Book Club is forming; it will meet at Shakespeare & Co. bimonthly starting in January. The first meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, January 10th, at 6:30 pm. The first selection is “Founding Brothers” by Joseph Ellis. Attendance is open to all; registration is not required; books must be purchased at Shakespeare & Co. For more information about the club contact club organizers Paul (509) 981-1317 or Lindsay (509) 981-0048.
Big Unique Sofa
Posted in Books, Excerpts with tags Michelle Latiolais on 30 March, 2011 by S&Co.
California writer Michelle Latiolais‘s short story collection Widow has just been published by Bellevue Literary Press. William Kittredge calls it “a splendidly articulated masterpiece.” Here’s an excerpt from the title story:
[pp. 15-16] BIG UNIQUE SOFA!! Three words across the top of a flyer tacked up to a telephone pole on the corner near her house. This has made her laugh out loud. BIG UNIQUE SOFA and a few exclamation marks and a telephone number and maybe there was a price—she does not remember— really she remembers just the words BIG UNIQUE SOFA and the exclamation marks. Was there a band of little slips with the telephone number fluttering in the wind made by the traffic? She cannot remember that, either.
What could such an item promise? she asks herself. What could possibly be unique about a sofa? All the sofas I’ve known, she muses, all the gin joints … and you choose this. But then she is thinking about the sofa, the couch, in the therapist’s office in Brentwood, the chenille throw spread across its seat, to cover stains or to prevent stains, she cannot tell which, but the six or seven times she leaves the office, she straightens it, pulls it taut again, doesn’t like the throw there, doesn’t like that it retains an impression of her. The therapist tells her every time not to worry about it, that she’ll fix it, but she does not want a doctor straightening out a chenille throw after she leaves … something unnervingly domestic, assertively domestic. It bothers her enough that she has left the therapist with notes about her life, like hair or nail clippings left behind in a salon. It’s not rational; she doesn’t insist that it is, or even that it should be. She doesn’t trust this blur of the professional and personal, cannot appreciate this exchange of money for her unguarded thoughts and feelings, doesn’t trust professional ethics over codes of friendship or family—and she feels she has done her duty to her family by “seeing a therapist,” and when the suggestion comes from the doctor, as she knew it ultimately would, that she take antidepressants, she leaves the office and never returns. She is deeply confused by someone studying someone else’s mind and wanting to alter it chemically at the same time. BIG UNIQUE SOFA.
– Michelle Latiolais, “Widow”
$14.95 — IN STOCK
why does my blood thus muster to my heart
Posted in Books, Events, Excerpts on 10 February, 2011 by katherinepainter
From Stephen and Thomas Amidon’s The Sublime Engine (in stock):
No matter how hard he tries, he cannot ignore the realization that this thing he holds in his hand is not transcendent at all. It is small and negligible. Viscid and shriveled. Charred and oozing.
It is ugly. Ugly and dead.
By the time he arrives in Pisa, he has manged to banish these troubling thoughts from his mind. He goes immediately to see Mary. This is his mission now, to give Shelley’s immortal beloved her husband’s miraculously intact heart. He is greeted by her friend Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri, a professor of anatomy at the local university, who explains that the widow is resting in her bedroom. As they wait for her to be summoned, Trelawny shows the doctor the poet’s heart and describes how it survived the intense heat of the pyre. Berlinghieri is less impressed than Trelawny had hoped. He responds, almost casually, that the heart is a particularly durable muscle. And in cases of suffocation, it becomes engorged with blood before death, which would have allowed it to resist the conflagration. Trelawny dismisses his remarks as a characteristic of a man of science, a fact lover who has never experienced sublimity. The doctor seems more interested in the skull, remarking that he has never seen one so extraordinarily thin. Mary Shelley overhears this last remark as she enters. In deference to the widow, Berlinghieri adds that this is no doubt due to the unique sensitivity of the brain it contained.
After describing the extraordinary events at the beach ceremony, Trelawny then presents Mrs. Shelley with the poet’s heart. Her reaction is not what he expects. The author of Frankenstein looks at it with terror and disgust. She gestures for him to remove it from her sight, looking for a moment as if she might even swoon. Then, in a weak voice, she asks that it immediately be taken with her husband’s remains to Rome to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery, according to his wishes. Trelawny, remembering the recent miscarriage that had sent Shelley to sea and his doom, understands that giving her the heart might not have been the flamboyantly gracious gesture that he had intended. He readily agrees to her request, though he will disobey her in one regard: he will keep possession of the heart. He does not have it buried. Later, when the storm of emotions has passed, he sends it to her. This time she does not reject it. And in fact, she keeps it in her desk until the day of her death, though it is doubtful that she ever takes it from the box.
A captivating, polyvalent look at the human heart, The Sublime Engine thumps and pulses just like its star.
On Saturday, Feb 19th: Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon read from The Sublime Engine. Here. 7 pm.
I love this.
Posted in Books, Excerpts, Opinion on 4 January, 2011 by S&Co.Dwight Garner reviews Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud:
Some of Ms. Proulx’s tangled sentences made me put her book down and pace around for a while, vigorously rubbing my forehead. Here is one, and its little coda. Together they distill and parody this memoir’s tone and content: “I like a colorful, handily cluttered kitchen and Bird Cloud’s cabinets and drawers in red, violet, aquamarine, burnt orange, cobalt, lime, brick, John Deere green and skipjack blue inspires stir-fries, osso buco, grilled prawns, Argentinean salads of butterhead lettuce, tomato, sweet onion, roast lamb with Greek cucumber and dill sauce, frittatas, rhubarb sauce with glasses of dry Riesling for the cook. You bet.”
So tight they scream, they so tight.
Posted in Books, Excerpts, Opinion on 20 December, 2010 by S&Co.Ladies and gentlemen!
The 2010 MorCrack FerGarthy Award for Dubious Achievement in Popular Literature [past winners include Toni Morrison and Per Petterson] goes, without a doubt, to the 2010 National Book Award-winning novel, Lord of Misrule:
[p. 16] Medicine Ed would be seventy-three on Labor Day. Since he give up drinking he never even had a cold no more. Breathing that pine tar and horse manure all the day was a kind of devil tonic. On account of his froze-up left leg, the result of being run over by a mare named High Soprano at Agua Caliente in 1958, he had to lie down in the straw on one hip, like a ho posing for a nasty picture, when he worked on a horse’s feet. He had to lie on his good side and stick his bad leg straight out. But there wasn’t anything a groom or either a trainer did, that Medicine Ed could not still do. And Zeno, for all he was chubbyfat and getting fatter, was a horseman of the old school, a gentleman who never forgot to dip down and stake you when he win. He was more ashamed to be stingy than to be broke, so as long has he had two dollars you had one, whereas a lot of them anymore they so tight they scream, they so tight.
The Insurmountable Hurdle
Posted in Books, Excerpts on 26 November, 2010 by S&Co.
[p. 31] The insurmountable hurdle for so-called populist movements is having the nerve to attack the rich instead of the poor. Even after the rich almost destroyed the entire global economy through their sheer unrestrained greed and stupidity, we can’t shake the peasant mentality that says we should go easy on them, because the best hope for our collective prosperity is in them creating wealth for us all. That’s the idea at the core of trickle-down economics and the basis for American economic policy for a generation. The entire premise — that the way society works is for the productive rich to feed the needy poor and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for their excesses might inspire Atlas to shrug his way out of town and leave the rest of us on our own to starve — should be insulting to people so proud to call themselves the “water carriers.” But in a country where every Joe the Plumber has been hoodwinked into thinking he’s one clogged toilet away from being rich himself, we’re all invested in rigging the system for the rich.
– Matt Taibbi, Griftopia
IN STOCK
