This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...more
Posts Tagged: Alaska
The Crack-Up
If I slept… All night, I stayed awake.
...more
My Blockbuster
Time has put those lovely nostalgia lenses in front of our eyes, and I am not immune.
...more
Allowing Space: A Conversation with Chia-Chia Lin
Chia-Chia Lin discusses her debut novel, THE UNPASSING.
...more
Beautiful Evil: The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
Alaska attracts those looking to be free from the constraints of society.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: My Souls Are Out A-Wandering
What is marriage but another form of colonization? A renaming? A power taken, a power taken away?
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: An Audience with the Husband
To ask for a truly great love is to ask for death at the same time.
...moreThis Week in Essays
Jordan Ritter Conn tells a devastating story about a group of people connected around the Pulse nightclub shooting for The Ringer. [Note: gun violence, descriptions of the attack.] Could gondolas be the next frontier for public transportation? Duncan Geere’s informative piece explores the possibilities at How We Get To Next.
...more
A Place with Teeth
It will be fine, I had told them. It will be an adventure. I was in love. Love is an eternal optimist.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Russell Banks
Russell Banks discusses his new book, Voyager: Travel Writings, why we are never free from our history, and how writing saved his life.
...moreHow to Write Wilderness
At The Millions, Mary Catherine Martin responds to the flaws she found in Dave Eggers’s representation of the Alaskan wilderness in his most recent novel, Heroes of the Frontier. She explains why writers who “write wilderness” have a responsibility to understand the great outdoors before putting pen to paper: If there’s anything wilderness can teach you, […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Blair Braverman
Blair Braverman discusses her latest book, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North, gendered travel narratives, and the pressure to write about personal trauma.
...more
Sitting on Something
I’m still learning how to live after healing. I’m still healing.
...more
Out the Road
Long before reaching it, I knew about the end.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
One of the missing Hong Kong booksellers has been returned, and gave a speech warning about the power of China’s central government and the waning independence of Hong Kong. Tiny, the cat that lives in Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore, had a big adventure in the city—he disappeared, causing panic among the store’s employees, before deciding to […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Brendan Jones
Brendan Jones talks about his debut novel, The Alaskan Laundry, living in Alaska, his time as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and living and loving what you write.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Debbie Moderow
Debbie Moderow talks about her new memoir, Fast Into the Night: A Woman, her Dogs, and their Journey North on the Iditarod Trail, the realities of dog sled racing, and climate change.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
James Patterson is giving away $2,000,000 in holiday bonuses to bookstore workers and libraries. An adults-only sex shop in Anchorage, Alaska is getting remade into an indie bookstore. Philadelphia’s Hakim’s Bookstore, a landmark African-American shop, is a small business on the brink of closure. Now, there is a call to help save the store. A […]
...moreLost Words For A Spruce Tree
Over at The Hairpin, Isabelle Fraser interviews Ann Wroe, obituary writer for The Economist. Wroe has written obituaries for J.D. Salinger, Aaron Swartz, and the 25-year old carp that was “England’s best-loved fish”. On Marie Smith, the last person to speak Eyak, an Alaskan language, she relates: “She was the only person left who remembered all the different […]
...moreAlaska Native Culture as a Game—But Not a Joke
If you liked reading about narrative video games about the trans experience, you’re sure to enjoy this Polygon piece on “the first indigenous-owned games company in the United States.” Like a heist movie, the essay introduces the players (an Alaska Native educator and two games developers), sets up the stakes (the stereotypes of Native Americans […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Newman
Balancing love and truth probably requires a very rigid, if not anal avoidance of glory and shame, when it comes to the portrayal of the people in the story—be they family members or characters.
...moreSounds of Leigh Newman’s “Still Points North”
“The story was there in the music, down to the epilogue.” Leigh Newman’s memoir, Still Points North: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-up World, One Long Journey Home, gets a unique treatment over at Largehearted boy‘s Booknotes, a column where authors are asked to compile a sort of soundtrack to their process. It gives very rich context […]
...moreMush!
It’s that time of year again, the time we’ve all been waiting for: Iditarod season. What? You don’t follow the annual dogsled race through a thousand miles of brutal Alaskan wilderness commemorating the 1925 transportation of life-saving diphtheria serum from Anchorage to Nome?? Your browser’s spell check doesn’t even recognize “Iditarod” as a word???
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #42: Aimee Loiselle in Conversation with Grace Smith
I met Grace Smith (Yup’ik) when I was researching an article for The Circle, a Native American newspaper in the Twin Cities. The Native community in the Twin Cities is very complex, with people from many different tribes and nations.
...moreAdam Robinson: The Last Book I Loved, Alaska
I can’t figure out why James Michener gets such short shrift. Is it because he’s too popular? Or because he had help with his painstaking geographical research? The critical disregard doesn’t bother me, though, except that I wish there was someone with whom I could chat about the most recent book I loved, Alaska.
...more