the blog of Ecotone magazine and Lookout Books
‘She wants to be very, very thin,’ said Richard… ‘she wants to become a bug and live on the air… and a drop or two of nectar. She thinks- she sometimes thinks- she was meant to be born an insect.’
beauxland: The place by the water –
“Cornelia had had her eye on it for years. It reminded her of the cottage of a gnome. “Guhnome,” Aunt Shelley used to miscorrect. The other houses in the loose settlement by the pond were darkly weathered wood, but Cornelia’s was made of the local pale gray granite, sparkling here and there with…
– Edith Pearlman, “Self-Reliance,” Binocular Vision, 2011
In the second part of our literary Valentine’s Day series, we’re suggesting taking your loved ones out on a literary date. The North Castle Public Library’s Olde Firehouse book club is meeting tonight in Upstate New York to talk about “the dilemmas of Jewish love stories.”
But in case you can’t get there by tonight, find a local reading. You can find a calendar at Poets & Writers, your library, community centers, colleges, and city listings.
Ben Miller’s book, River Bend Chronicle, just arrived to us on the delivery truck!
Wow! I can’t believe the Fall semester here at Lookout Books has come to an end. We’re a teaching press (as you probably know already). Our staff is almost entirely made up of graduate students doing design, marketing, editing, blogging, social media, and way more.
As blog editor, it has been an absolute pleasure to work with our current staff: Joe Worthen, Katie Jones, Ethan Warren, Anna Sutton, and Ana Alvarez. I’d like to thank them for their hard work and take a brief moment to re-cap my favorite blog posts this semester:
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by Ethan Warren, Lookout Intern
I love unreliable narrators. They call attention to something interesting about fiction, and writing in general—we’re all unreliable. We process the world through our own lenses, and any story we tell is implicitly our version of events, no matter how fair and balanced we try to be. Nonetheless, some narrators are more unreliable than others, so here are five examples of narrators at their most unreliable.
1. Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Holden is far from the earliest example of an unreliable narrator, but he’s the one that always pops into my mind first, and I bet I’m not alone on that. Holden has a giant chip on his shoulder, and he doesn’t care about being fair to the people he’s telling you about. Everyone’s a phony to him, and if they have their own side to the story, he doesn’t particularly care.
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Shortlist has a great collection of redesigned book covers. Here are a few of our favorites…
There are some excellent designs here! Great seeing these old classics get some new looks!
I tend to get work done while listening to music… possibly to the chagrin of the Lookout Books crew. Sorry, guys. Recently, I’ve been trying to combine the two by finding songs or artists with literary themes. Here’s a list of book-related music I’m listening to this week:
A few song titles to fit the mood…
A nicely named album or concerto titles that seem appropriate for reference…
And, of course, band names!
What book-related music do you listen to?
A powerful silence graced the room as Rybicki weaved through anecdotes of time spent with his wife and passages from his books. As he finished, most felt not a deafening sense of sorrow but rather a promised notion of his fortitude in overcoming a grave loss.
“He makes his poems out of true feeling — he lives his poetry,” said creative writing professor Robert Fanning, who introduced Rybicki to an audience of more than 100. “He’s doing things that are so far beyond what we can do in our best hour with our sharpest pen.”
This excellent article was published by CMU’s student-run publication, Grand Central Magazine. Read onward (more photos included).
You may have noticed that Lookout is celebrating Banned Books Week, which runs from September 30 – October 6.
Here in Wilmington, Old Books On Front St. hosted a Banned Books Read-In on October 1st. The YouTube channel Banned Books Week Virtual Read-Out features readers “exercising their First Amendment Right to read a banned book.”
Hopefully many readers across the U.S. have been spending this week feeling grateful for—and inspired by—the opportunity to read banned books and fight back against the egregious acts of censorship that have prevented many readers from accessing these titles.
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