It might not sound like a comedy: A twice-divorced single mom living with her mother tries to save money from her food service job to move into her own apartment. But Penelope Lemon: Game On!, is just that. “It’s hard to describe why something is funny,” says Inman Majors, an English professor at James Madison […]
It might not sound like a comedy: A twice-divorced single mom living with her mother tries to save money from her food service job to move into her own apartment. But Penelope Lemon: Game On!, is just that. “It’s hard to describe why something is funny,” says Inman Majors, an English professor at James Madison […]
A few months ago, artist Uzo Njoku was in the market for a new coloring book. She noticed that most coloring books geared toward adults, like the ubiquitous Enchanted Garden, featured densely outlined flora and fauna, medallions, and mandalas, and that most coloring books for children contained cartoonish figures. Njoku, a UVA studio art major […]
There’s no denying it: Charlottesville is a wordsmith-rich town. Whether you’re looking for a page-turner for the beach, autumnal meditations in the form of poetry, or a fireside companion for a winter’s night, there are enough local writers publishing books each year to keep your shelves well-stocked. Here are some of the titles published by […]
As the weather starts to turn cool, now is a good time to find a book to curl up with on those chilly, overcast days. Local author releases this season offer a wide array of subjects from which to choose, such as history, fiction, psychology and memoir. Here are some highlights: Lisa Jakub, Not Just […]
For Charlottesville-based author Stefan Bechtel, mystery is the essence of life. “I grew up in Chicago, in the white-bread suburbs where every lawn was perfect. But way out on the edge of town there was a swamp. Lincoln Swamp,” Bechtel says. “We would ride our bikes all the way out to Lincoln Swamp, and we […]
By Ken Wilson – Up and down Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall on a recent Saturday morning, the literati were looking. At New Dominion Bookshop, the oldest bookstore in town, dating back to 1924, a woman was checking out the Lit Crit section. At the Blue Whale, where original prints, antiquarian maps, and rare volumes sit alongside […]
There’s something about Charlottesville. Recently included in “The Ultimate 50-State Road Trip for Book Lovers,” this small city’s appeal to writers and bibliophiles can be attributed to the annual Festival of the Book, Edgar Allan Poe’s enshrined West Range room at UVA, Thomas Jefferson’s library at Monticello, the Rare Book School, the Virginia Art of […]
In the epilogue of her book, Scattering Ashes: A Memoir of Letting Go, Charlottesville-based author Joan Z. Rough describes the process of writing about her aging alcoholic and emotionally abusive mother as “the day-by-day knitting together of a broken bone.” In this way, she says, “The writing of the book was probably the most healing […]
Charlottesville writer Charles Shields was not surprised to learn that more than 50 years after the publication of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, To Kill a Mockingbird, a second novel has been discovered and will be published this summer. “I knew of its existence,” said Shields, who wrote Mockingbird, an unauthorized biography of Lee, in 2006. […]