Content Tagged ‘amreading’

The annual AWP conference, held this year April 8–11 in Minneapolis, featured more than 700 exhibitors, making it the nation’s largest pop-up bookstore for independent literary presses and magazines. In this edition of What We’re Reading, four savvy Lookout staffers pick the books that caught their attention this year. (Read on, and you just might detect a pattern: compelling cover + dynamic author reading + good story behind the book = sale.)

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride  

I was first intrigued by Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing because of the title. Then I saw the cover, and my curiosity increased. Then I heard the story behind the story: McBride, at twenty-seven, had written this daring, difficult, Joycean novel in just six months, and spent the next nine years searching for a publisher. Then I passed the Coffee House Press table and saw it again—the wonderful title and alluring cover now representing a glowing success of art over industry—and opened to the first sentence, which is, of course: “For you.”
—Anna Coe

Hum by Jamaal May

Friends had suggested Hum to me, but like with most books, I’d not gotten around to reading it. Then, I attended a panel on poetic extremes and emotion—love and ecstasy, violence and agony, a poet’s favorite things—because Nick Flynn and Tarfia Faizullah were on it, and I’d waited a long time to hear them read. Though I didn’t know when I arrived that Jamaal May was also on this panel, two lines into his first poem, I was hooked. He was such a dynamic reader and compelling speaker that, after the panel, I immediately headed to the Alice James Books booth to buy Hum. (I was not the only person who did this.) I started reading it on the plane home, and I’ve been thinking about it all week.
—Katie Prince

The lovely Kate McMullen models our AWP bounty.

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving week with another installment of What We’re Reading. As Anne Lamott writes, “Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of the things that you don’t get in life … wonderful, lyrical language, for instance. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention and this is a great gift.”

Lookout intern Becky Eades is reading Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke.

Space, in Chains vibrates with memories of Kasischke’s youth, coupled with wrenching poems about her father, to form a narrative of both celebration and grief. The surprising image in “Hospital parking lot, April,” for example, tells us everything we need to know: “These seagulls above the parking lot today, made of hurricane and / ether, they // have flown directly out of the brain wearing little blue-gray masks, / like strangers’ faces, full // of winged mania, like television in waiting rooms.”

Today we kick off a new category, in which we reveal the books on our nightstand. Each week we’ll tell you what a few of our staff members are reading, or we’ll offer a peek at the stacks of our authors and friends. We may have disparate tastes, but the one thing we all share is a love of books.

Katie O’Reilly, Ecotone’s managing editor, is reading Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay.

This week I had the pleasure of starting Bad Feminist, Gay’s recently released essay collection. Beyond bearing my favorite nonfiction qualities (i.e. being wryly funny and painfully honest and entertaining), Gay’s subject matter speaks to pop culture sensibilities. She also explores society’s tenuous relationship with feminism, detailing how she is “a mess of contradictions,” how most of us are. Although she doesn’t wrap anything into a tidy conclusion—another quality I respect in an essayist—I feel better already about being a member of that “messy” camp of feminists, those of us who fall subject to hypocrisy, who can’t always keep the rules straight, but who understand the importance of engaging in the kinds of conversations that Gay presents.

—Katie