Posts by author
Kelly Lynn Thomas
-
Unboxing a Rainbow of Books
Rainbow Boxes is a project by Cori McCarthy and Amy Rose Capetta, two YA writers who want to send a collection of LGBTQIA-themed books to one library and one LGBTQ homeless shelter or GSA in all 50 states: The hope…
-
Looking Back on Frank Herbert’s Dune
The idea for the novel Dune evolved from a magazine article Frank Herbert began researching about the government’s efforts to stabilize shifting sand dunes on Oregon’s coast in 1959. At the Guardian, Hari Kunzru looks at how the science fiction…
-
Textbook Crisis in India Turns Violent
A massive delay in textbook printing in India’s southern state of Kerala has led to accusations of corruption in the government education ministry and violent protests. Government officials suggested schools print the books themselves, but for low-income areas this solution is…
-
George Plimpton: Paris Review Founder, Fireworks Connoisseur
At The Daily Beast, Anthony Haden-Guest reminisces about the annual Fourth of July party thrown by George Plimpton, founder and editor of the Paris Review. Not only did Plimpton throw the biggest and best fireworks parties in the Hamptons, he requested…
-
Choose Your Own Cover Art
It’s well-known by the literary crowd that authors don’t get to choose the artwork for their book covers. Except when they do, as in the case of Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, who convinced her publisher…
-
451 Sets of Bookends Made from Ray Bradbury’s Former Home
The bookends, which cost $88.50 per set, have already sold out (and the two sets that made their way to eBay as of this writing sold for $275 and $300). Architect Thom Mayne and his wife purchased the house and…
-
Sharing the Spotlight
The campaign to get a woman on an American paper bill has been long, but even with the decision to reissue the ten-dollar bill in 2020, advocates aren’t completely satisfied: This decision, announced last week by Secretary of the Treasury…
-
The Greatest Experimentalist You’ve Never Heard Of
She felt that this approach illuminated a fundamental truth about language: The very act of using language, she once told an interviewer, involves a ‘castration. The moment we utter a sentence, we’re leaving out a lot.’ A “nanopress” has begun…
-
Our Books Will Go On
Danika Ellis, a bookseller who works at a used bookstore, has learned through her work to see books differently—not as objects that belong to her, but objects that she possesses for the moment: I don’t consider myself the final owner…
-
Stop Measuring the Humanities with Dollar Signs
Even though liberal arts degrees are actually good for business, Matt Burriesci (author of Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World) believes that supporters of the humanities should lay that argument to…
-
Are Books Getting Dumber Because We Want Them To?
Over at Bloomberg View, Stephen L. Carter examines the Amazon of the Victorian era, a book distributor named Charles Edward Mudie, and how readers are really to blame for literary fiction’s struggle to find a readership. Carter writes about Mudie…
-
Novelist Anne Roiphe on 50 Years of Writing
After her first marriage to a writer ended when she was twenty-seven, Roiphe decided to tell her story in the autobiographical novel, Digging Out, and it launched her long, successful career: I look at the long shelf of books I…