Growing up, the library was not just Amanda Oliver’s favorite place but also her “first beloved destination, first embodied center… it was absolutely sacred.” However, soon after Oliver began her career as a librarian at a Title I school and then in the D.C. public library system, she witnessed how systemic racism, income inequality, the […] The post America’s Public Libraries Reflect the Systematic Failures and Social Inequality of Our Country appeared first on Electric Literature. Continue reading at 'Electric Literature'
[ Electric Literature | 2023-01-05 12:00:00 UTC ]
When I started reading Chloe Caldwell’s new book, The Red Zone, a memoir about identity, love, health, and pain, all told through the lens of her relationship to her period, I didn’t think I had period hang-ups of my own to work through. I do have pudendal neuralgia, a nerve pain condition that... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-05-12 11:05:00 UTC ]
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The first time I read a book about a person who even minorly resembled me, I was 19 and teaching at a creative writing summer camp. My coworker Sophie Lee’s YA novel What Things Mean tells the story of a young Filipina girl named Olive who uses reading to cope with feelings of loneliness and... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-05-06 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Many of us know Michelle Hart from her wonderful work highlighting queer writers when she was the assistant books editor at O, the Oprah Magazine. Now, she has her own novel to add to the fold: We Do What We Do In The Dark, an exquisitely written, intimately affecting novel about Mallory, a... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-05-03 11:00:00 UTC ]
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In 1995, I left the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle to teach English in Vietnam. Around that time, my friend and fellow bookseller Janet Brown traveled to Thailand to teach as well. There was no email then, and overseas phone calls were a luxury. So we wrote to one another, meditating on the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-28 11:00:00 UTC ]
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In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?”, we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month, we’re featuring Jason Schwartzman, an essayist, and fiction writer, and author of the memoir No One You Know: Strangers... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-27 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Matthieu Aikins’s olive complexion, dark hair, and ambiguous features means that he is often mistaken as a local in Afghanistan and the Middle East where he has lived since 2008. In his non-fiction book The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, the Japanese Canadian journalist goes undercover as an Afghan... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-22 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Last Thursday's Independent Book Publishers Association's “The Battle for Free Expression: Indie Publishers and Libraries in the Fight Against Censorship.” panel offered insights from digital media, public libraries, academic research, and online education on the rise in book banning. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-04-22 04:00:00 UTC ]
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New legislation in Kentucky gives complete control of public library board appointments to county judge executives. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2022-04-19 13:08:55 UTC ]
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The theatre is a perennially popular setting for novelists and no wonder. The tawdry glamour and sense of spectacle make it a rich gift for any author, but it’s what happens behind the scenes that I find the most interesting. This is particularly true for those novels set on the 19th-century... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-14 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Aamina Ahmad’s debut novel The Return of Faraz Ali begins with a moment of no return. Born and raised in Lahore’s old city, the young Faraz is forced to leave behind his mother and his sister Rozina. It isn’t until Faraz is an adult in 1968 working as a policeman, that he goes back to […] The... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-07 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut novel When We Were Birds begins in the time before time and follows the uneasy truce between the living and the dead. Cigarettes are offered, liquor is poured, prayers are said, all in the hope that the buried stay buried. This is the story of Yejide, a young woman who... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-04-01 11:00:00 UTC ]
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The grocery store of all places was my initial indoctrination into the world of horror. As my father shuffled up and down the aisles, dutifully stacking groceries in the cart for our family, I would sneak away to the magazine section and my eye was always drawn to the shiny paperback display... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-31 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Mine is the story of the woman who thought she was making a book about others; realized only as it was about to be published, that she was the broken one the book talked about. The fragmented, the dispersed, the uprooted. When I was editing the anthology Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-29 11:00:00 UTC ]
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In Sensorium by Tanaïs is, at once, a sensuous and gut-wrenching experience in expansive memoir that bleeds across genre and time. Using perfume as a framework, Tanaïs builds the work slowly, moving from the base to the heart to the head notes, recounting alienation and life on the margins as a... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-25 11:00:00 UTC ]
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The poll found that 71% of voters oppose efforts to remove books from public libraries, including majorities of voters across party lines. Furthermore, 74% of parents of public school children expressed “a high degree of confidence” in school librarians to make good decisions about which books... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-03-25 04:00:00 UTC ]
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At the risk of seeming obnoxiously obsessed with ourselves, writers and readers do tend to love books about writers and readers—especially when those fictional writers and readers behave badly. (It’s no wonder, really, why the Bad Art Friend discourse hit a nerve; so many people were frantic... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-11 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Qian Julie Wang’s debut memoir Beautiful Country is a compelling and intimate portrait of an undocumented childhood. Much like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, we are carried into the heart and mind of a child: this time, a young, undocumented girl in... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-10 12:00:00 UTC ]
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At Public Libraries Online, Jane Pek discusses her debut novel, The Verifiers, which follows Claudia Lin, an amateur sleuth who investigates the potential suitors of lovelorn New Yorkers. “When I read, above all it’s about becoming invested in the character,” Pek explains. “Once I’m invested,... Continue reading at The Millions
[ The Millions | 2022-03-09 21:30:56 UTC ]
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When I got to an age where I could read the same books as my mom, she started passing them along to me after she had finished. One of the books she gave me was Reading Lolita in Tehran by New York Times best-selling author Azar Nafisi, a book that I remember not only for […] The post Resist... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-03-08 12:00:00 UTC ]
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US public libraries are more popular than ever, but library workers are mostly not paid a livable wage: new research into library data. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2022-02-09 11:45:00 UTC ]
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