Sure, it’s hot and sticky around here in July — but Voltaire Books is rewarding those of us who stick around with Tax-Free Tuesdays. For the entire month, locals — who already get a 5 percent discount — can take an extra 7.5 percent off purchases at the island’s best independent bookstore. Let’s go! (The [...]
My review of Tony Horwitz’s latest historical travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange, is in this week’s edition of Solares Hill, and on the Citizen’s website. I liked the book, better than Blue Latitudes but not as much as Confederates in the Attic. Still, a fun and informative read. It will be interesting to see [...]
I haven’t read the Da Vinci Code (can you hear my tone of satisfied superiority via text?) — though I think it made a fine movie. I did read Angels & Demons and thought the writing SUCKED but eventually found myself turning the pages for plot. But I have been looking for several years for a [...]
When I was 10 or 11, visiting my grandparents, I came across a copy of “Elizabeth the Great” by Elizabeth Jenkins. Since then I have, to varying degrees, been obsessed with the various versions of the Tudor story — mostly nonfiction, though more recently supplemented by fiction (I like to call this genre Tudor Trash) [...]
A recommended read from Maggie Nelson, one of the New Voices at this year’s Key West Literary Seminar, was John Wray and over the weekend I finished his second and most recent novel, Canaan’s Tongue. Thank you, Maggie! Wow. The book is one of those written in multiple voices, set during the Civil War, about [...]
From the National Book Critics Circle Blog, Critical Mass, a very interesting guest post from Molly Giles on judging the PEN Faulkner Awards. I can’t imagine.
Her comments at the end of the post are especially interesting, given the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar topic, historical fiction.
From Kris Neihouse at the Key West library: “Sorry for the late notice (again!) but at least this time nothing has changed.
This is just a reminder about Book Bites tomorrow night March 12th at the Key West Library at 5:30. We will be discussing Pulitzer AND Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison. So come on [...]
When not gulping down episodes of “The Wire” and “Rome” (on DVD, courtesy of the Monroe County Library). I recently read a couple books from the collection of my employer, the FKCC Library: “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan – which I reviewed for Solares Hill, probably appearing in Friday’s edition. And I read [...]
Why, oh why, in the post James Frey world, does anyone think they can write a flagrantly fake memoir and get away with it? Today’s New York Times reports on the latest case, a book called “Love and Consequences” that even received a good review from the Times’ fearsome Michiko Kakutani. The most painful detail [...]
Over the weekend I finally finished reading The Scarlet Professor by Barry Werth, a biography of the literary critic and Smith professor Newton Arvin.
Arvin won a National Book Award and wrote several respected biographies — but he’s remembered as the target of a pornography bust in 1960, which targeted him because he was gay. And [...]
