In high school, I was a University of Texas and Stanford fanatic. But women’s NCAA basketball has always been my favorite. KP: With a toddler son, my free time is seriously limited, so unfortunately I don’t really watch sports any more. LSLL: Are you still a basketball fan? Do you follow March Madness or the WNBA? If so, which teams? It has truly become home to me, even if I no longer live here. For a while, I didn’t know where to tell people I was “from,” but now it feels so natural and good to say I’m from Texas. I was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there until I was twelve, when my family then moved to Austin. The sun rising over the hills, the early morning mist in the live oaks, the mourning doves calling-these things are so familiar and comforting to me. I love waking up in my mother’s house, in the neighborhood where I grew up. KEJIA PARSSINEN: It’s always wonderful to be home. What’s it like to set foot on Lone Star soil again? LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Welcome back to Texas. We corresponded with her during her recent Texas book tour. In many ways, her new novel The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (Harper, 2015) is a tribute to all the girls she met on that journey: her coaches, the ones on her team, and the few Mercys she played against, the ferocious girls who left her awe-struck as they lit up the scoreboard, as they owned the court, the day, the season, the town. Kejia Parssinen played basketball competitively throughout middle and high school.
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He watches Gianna from a distance, never daring to act on his feelings. Plagued by his dark past and tormented by desires he deems unattainable. Despite his cold and calculating demeanor, Christian has a secret obsession with Gianna Castellano, a woman he believes he can never have. That’s because Corrupt was the first book in this Devil’s Night book series while Hideaway is 2nd.īelow is the detailed yet quick summary of the book:Ĭhristian Allister is a skilled and ruthless strategist, handling the most delicate matters for the Romano family. In case you haven’t read the summary or book The Sweetest Oblivion, it is advised to go through that. This book follows the story of Christian Allister, the cold and calculating consigliere to the Romano mafia family, and Gianna “Gigi” Castellano, the daughter of a powerful mob boss. It delves deeper into the world of organized crime and forbidden love. The Maddest Obsession by Danielle Lori is the second book in the Made series. Her body of work has “anticipated salient issues of our time – the struggle for racial equality and human rights – with unflinching visual and ethical force,” the Hasselblad Foundation said in its citation for Weems, adding that “Her artistic practice is inherently activist, poignant, and lyrical. She’s both the protagonist and perpetual observer, “a guide into circumstances seldom seen,” according to Weems. In each elegant black-and-white photo, Weems is the constant as the tableaux is rearranged with a cast of lovers, friends, and family who act upon each other. The Kitchen Table Series (1990), considered a seminal body of contemporary photography, stars Weems herself and is set at a kitchen table. She has a prolific oeuvre that spans multimedia installation, video, and performance, but she’s most celebrated for her photography, which has a sparse composition that belie complex ruminations on familial and romantic entanglements. Over nearly four decades, Weems has explored the subjectivity of personal and global history through a racial and feminist lens. Carrie Mae Weems Among Artists Added to SFMOMA's Board of Trustees ‘One of the best expressions of his unstoppable flow of comic invention’ The Times Who happens to be very attractive, in an ‘entire womanful of anger’ kind of way.īut there’s new technology to compete against and an evil chairman who will stop at nothing to delay Ankh-Morpork’s post for good. To save his skin, Moist will need to restore the postal service to its former glory, with the help of tough talking activist Adora Belle Dearheart. The Post Office is down on its luck: beset by mountains of undelivered mail, eccentric employees, and a dangerous secret order. It’s a tough decision, but he’s already survived one hanging and isn’t in the mood to try it again. Imprisoned in Ankh-Morpork, con artist Moist von Lipwig is offered a choice: to be executed or to accept a job as the city’s Postmaster General. ‘Always push your luck because no one else would push it for you.’ To comprehend the lives of black people, he had darkened his skin to become black. But Griffin, a novelist of extraordinary empathy rooted in his Catholic faith, had devised a daring experiment. A few white writers had argued for integration. Many black authors had written about the hardship of living in the Jim Crow South. John Howard Griffin had embarked on a journey unlike any other. “Yeah, I been shining some for a white man-” “Is there something familiar about these shoes?” Rag in hand, the shoeshine man said nothing until the hulking man spoke. He was certain he’d shined these shoes before, and for a man about as tall and broad-shouldered. Late in 1959, on a sidewalk in New Orleans, a shoe-shine man suffered a sense of déjà vu. He started collecting items for the museum in the 1990s, searching junk shops and friend’s homes for ideas. Pamuk developed the idea for the novel and the museum in parallel, effectively blurring the lines between the two. While it would be easy to assume that the museum is an offshoot of a successful novel, The Museum of Innocence is more complex than that. My intense feelings of déjà vu can be explained by my own literary travel through the streets of Istanbul courtesy of Pamuk’s sweeping descriptions of his home town. I am on my way to The Museum of Innocence, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk’s monument to a love affair and the subject of his 2008 novel of the same name. As I walk along the streets of Istanbul’s antiques district, where chic cafés and cocktail bars draw a fashionable clientele, I imagine a love sick soul weaving his way between the backgammon players, with their heads bent intently over their boards, as he searches madly for the woman he loves. I get a strange feeling as I climb the hill toward Çukurcuma, the kind you get when you visit someone you haven’t seen in years or a distant relative that you know all about but have never met. On a visit to the Turkish city of Istanbul, Susanna Smith visits a compelling museum that blurs the lines between fact and fiction to exquisite effect. 100 tips, tricks and hacks from travel insiders. It is about a gender-creative white boy who wants to wear a dress to school and who ends up making a dress with his mom. My student told me about Julián is a Mermaid the day we read Jacob’s New Dress by Sarah and Ian Hoffman, which is one of my favorite children’s books about children’s gender nonconformity. This weekend I also had the opportunity to attend a panel at NWSA about children’s literature, which included a presentation on Julián is a Mermaid and I will end this post with some of the main points from the talk and the Q and A afterwards.īut first, my class and our discussion of queer children’s books. I am eager to share this book with others, and today I want to write about some of the some of the key themes of this book as I understand them, as well as my thoughts on the books Jacob’s New Dress and My Princess Boy. In my class The Queer and Trans Child we always start or end class by reading children’s books that focus on topics of gender and sexuality and this semester my students’ introduced me to one I had not heard of before, Julián is a Mermaid by Jessica Love. One of my favorite things about teaching is that I learn so much from my students. Since it was first published in 1995, Notes from a Small Island has never been far from the top of the bestsellers lists, and has sold over one and a half million copies.īill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. The resulting book was a eulogy to the country that produced Marmite, George Formby, by-elections, milky tea, place names like Farleigh Wallop, Titsey and Shellow Bowells, Gardeners' Question Time and people who say 'Mustn't grumble.' Britain would never seem the same again. But before leaving his much-loved Yorkshire, Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around old Blighty, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had for so long been his home. After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson took the decision to move Mrs Bryson, little Jimmy et al. The painful business of picking up the threads of family life in a time of grief, facing the unfinished business that led her to leave in the first place, is made even more gruelling by the discovery that her family home is about to be destroyed by a mining company. In this case a thirty-year-old Wiradjuri woman, August Gondiwindi, comes home after years London to the fictional New South Wales town of Massacre Plains on learning of the death of her grandfather, Poppy Albert. Like Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip it begins with a woman returning to her childhood home on the occasion of a death and re-engaging with her family’s internal politics and its history of dealing with colonisation. To echo Tara June Winch in an interview with Stephanie Convery in the Guardian (at this link), ‘It’s just about bloody time, you know?’Įllen van Neerven, in a review in the Australian Book Review, describes The Yield as a ‘returning novel’. It’s not that ‘phases’ of Australian life that include First Nations people have been comprehensively ignored by other winners, but it’s heartening that Kim Scott (twice), Alexis Wright, Melissa Lucashenko and now Tara June Winch have received this recognition. The Miles Franklin is awarded each year to a novel ‘which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases’. The Yield won the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, making Tara June Winch the fourth First Nations writer to win it, all of them this century. " A fresh riff on the Grimm Brothers' Rumpelstiltskin, told with wit from the impish point of view of the troublemaker himself." - People And don't miss Liesl Shurtliff's other fairy tale retellings: Jack: The True Story of Jack and the Beanstalk and Red: The True Story of Red Riding Hood. The odds are against him, but with courage and friendship-and a cheeky sense of humor-he just might triumph in the end.Ī Texas Bluebonnet finalist and winner of the ILA award for middle grade fiction, Rump is perfect for fans of Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted or Adam Gidwitz's A Tale Dark and Grimm. To break the spell, Rump must go on a perilous quest, fighting off pixies, trolls, poison apples, and a wickedly foolish queen. With each thread he spins, he weaves himself deeper into a curse. His best friend, Red Riding Hood, warns him that magic is dangerous, and she’s right. Rump discovers he has a gift for spinning straw into gold. In a magic kingdom where your name is your destiny, 12-year-old Rump is the butt of everyone's joke. But when he finds an old spinning wheel, his luck seems to change. New York Times Bestselling author Liesl Shurtliff "spins words into gold. This funny fractured fairy tale goes behind the scenes of Rumpelstiltskin. |