Arts Culture

Worthy journey

Though Emma Copley Eisenberg is known for her acclaimed true crime memoir, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns/Poe Faulkner fellow. Her new novel, Housemates, is a queering of the classic road […]

Sarah Lawson | May 22, 2024

Arts Culture

Ecological wonder

“To tell you about the beauty, I must also speak of threat,” writes Greg Wrenn in Mother­ship: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis. A complex exploration into personal and ecological trauma that also investigates alter­native healing and the cultivation of wonder, this book is as much a prompt for personal reflection as it is a […]

Sarah Lawson | April 10, 2024

Arts Culture

Pandemic dwellings

Drawing inspiration from The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights, Fourteen Days is a “collaborative novel,” which brings to mind thoughts of exquisite corpses and shared Google Docs with a slew of anonymous animals. However, it is effectively a collection of short stories by 36 American and Canadian authors, edited by Margaret Atwood and […]

Sarah Lawson | April 3, 2024

Arts Culture

Honest and direct

Ben Sloan’s second book of poems, Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky, is a collection of work that speaks to various themes and eras, highlighting the far-ranging interests of its author. As an object, the book is a delight, an elegant pamphlet with a cover that captures the bright blue of sky and a […]

Sarah Lawson | February 16, 2024

Arts Culture

Addiction and identity

Poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!, explores themes of addiction and sobriety, grief and grace, trauma and love. Rich with Daedalian prose, this semi-autobiographical bildungsroman tells the story of Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American poet and recovering alcoholic.  Born in Iran but currently living in an Indiana college town, Cyrus is drifting, purposeless, and […]

Sarah Lawson | January 24, 2024

Arts Culture

Life among the ruins

“The loveliness of deer might go without saying, but still, there it is: The more you look, the more they seduce,” writes Erika Howsare in her debut nonfiction book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors. Published earlier this month, the book showcases Howsare’s keen journalistic skills as well as her […]

Sarah Lawson | January 10, 2024

Arts

Local author Emma Rathbone stays focused with Losing It

Writing a novel isn’t easy by most measures, but it’s said that your second novel is where the anxiety really kicks in. Pressure builds to craft a book that’s readable and critically embraced, without being too similar to its predecessor. Of course, this is even more true if your first was met with popular success. […]

Sarah Lawson | July 19, 2016

Arts

Chris Keup launches music publishing company Salinger Songs

It’s no secret that Chris Keup’s White Star Sound studio has a knack for producing stellar tracks for local as well as nationally known musicians. Now Keup is working to expand his purview with a new venture in music publishing: Salinger Songs. Related Links: White Star Sound offers musicians a full-service lift-off A musician and […]

Sarah Lawson | July 6, 2016

Arts

Matthew Gatto’s Parlor of Horrors seeks new home

When was the last time you fell asleep thinking about monsters in the other room? For most of us, that thought fades after childhood. But Matthew Gatto knows there are monsters just 10 feet away from where he sleeps. They reside in his living room or, as it’s more commonly known, the Parlor of Horrors. […]

Sarah Lawson | June 22, 2016