December 2009
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"I wanted the subtitle to suggest, as is often observed, that being a model is like being a piece of fruit or furniture at first glance, but upon closer examination, it’s dynamic: the object is thinking, the object could be judging you back. Also, I wanted both title and the subtitle working in tandem to cause readers to consider the objectification of women, and the empowerment and submissiveness that circulate around nudity, especially female nudity."
by
Elizabeth Hildreth
I wish I had a uniquely American term for what I’m feeling right now, for this irritating exhaustion with “the media,” with publicity, with mass-publishers and tiring, bad literary magazines and TV commercials and mediocrity. I would need this special word to talk about the memoir boom, about the planet-sized flurries of murdered trees, and the trillions of pixels devoted to true stories of people going on benders or torturing their children in basements or setting themselves on fire or getting divorced or getting married or being crippled or having sore genitals or lymphoma or a disabled baby. If Oprah ruled the world, and she does, every last one of these stories would end with someone transcending all of their titillating hardship and abuse and finding his or her Best Life, transitioning from being a Child Called “It” into a happy (and rich) Man Named Dave.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"We like to turn these things into monsters, werewolves and vampires, but perhaps the most terrifying thing is that they are not -- they are human beings. The tabloid press is always great at generating "monsters" and they have their part to play in this story. But I wish they wouldn’t. By separating "monsters" from the rest of society and keeping them apart from "us," they deny rational thought and serious consideration into the issues that forge murderers and the chance to try and understand and change things. They like to keep us in the dark, like medieval peasants with their torches, controlled by a constant atmosphere of fear."
by
Alan Kelly
"It hasn’t been easy to start a press on a shoestring, but it’s certainly a lot easier than trying to convince some publishing company to change the way they approach acquisitions and design and marketing to suit the needs of an inexperienced writer fresh out of graduate school. And it’s been a lot more fun than trying to pare the stories down to magazine length or stretch them to proper novel length. Maybe a better writer wouldn’t have any trouble doing that, but I like the idea of the format of the book accommodating for the content within the book, rather than the other way around. As soon as I started looking into forming a little publishing company to house these stories, everything else fell into place without much trouble."
by
Terry Hong
"I've been fascinated by Little Jock for a long time. I first heard about the story in 1994, when I was editing the introduction to a dictionary called Convicts in Western Australia. One of the coeditors made a chance remark that I would never forget. She told me that of the nearly 10,000 convicts who were transported to the Swan River Colony in the middle of the nineteenth century -- all of whom were supposed to be male -- one might have been a woman."
by
Jessa Crispin
And that night, Clarence himself seemed a little freer, a little more mobile, a little less shackled by his body. Near the show’s end, he initiated a long, long embrace with Bruce, a full-body clasp that for this observer brought together past, present, and future concert nights. It echoed a passage of Don’s in the book, where he says that Bruce and Clarence 'are the complete contradiction and the complete explanation all in one moment, and the moment itself floats away, breaks away from time like an iceberg and floats into our collective memories of yesterday and our plans for tomorrow.'
by
Barbara J. King
"In the seventies, in the early years of the Uruguayan dictatorship, people would attempt to escape to Argentina. They didn’t realize that the generals of one country very much shared information with the other, as part of a plan called Operation Condor. If you were a Uruguayan exile, your name was probably not only on the Argentine list, but also on the list in post-Allende [Pinochet’s] Chile. For this reason, some of the people who 'disappeared' in Argentina were actually Uruguayans searching for safety."
by
Richard Wirick
When it comes to gift giving for the age-ten-and-up crowd, unless you have a teenage girl who is rabid for all things Twilight, it can be tough for the aunts, uncles and grandparents (let alone parents) to figure out what to buy. While I love a novel as much as the next person, I think there is a wealth of exemplary nonfiction available for kids and teens that truly must be seen to be believed. If you have a curious reader there is no reason not to indulge their favorite subject this time of year. Buy a book that makes them think and lets them dream and then sit back and see what good things come to pass about the real world.
by
Colleen Mondor
"I always like to leave my endings a little open. I consider my job as an author to get my character to the point where they are headed in a new direction. In the end I want to feel like they’ve made it somewhere. I don’t want them to complete the process. I want them to end it from a new beginning. I want to tie up all of the plots. Any ball in the air, I catch. I hate it when I read a book and there’s a ball in the air and it never comes back down."
by
Gili Warsett
