Still Standing
I whisper into my own ear: you are safe, you don’t need to run.
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Posts Tagged: California
What to Read When the World Is Ending
Books to read in this fraught political moment.
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Don’t Miss the Napa Valley Book Fest!
Celebrate local writers and booksellers at Napa Valley Book Fest!
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstores news from across the country and around the world!
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Follow Your Nose: A Conversation with Daniel Gumbiner
Daniel Gumbiner discusses his debut novel, THE BOATBUILDER.
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A Pointed Narrative Choice: Talking with Lydia Kiesling
Lydia Kiesling discusses her debut novel, THE GOLDEN STATE.
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Emboldened to Ask: A Conversation with Natalie Singer
Natalie Singer discusses her debut memoir, CALIFORNIA CALLING.
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The Thread: American Garbage
The molecules are valuable even if the plastic we see is not.
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A Community of the People: Tommy Orange’s There There
THERE THERE does not settle, it unsettles.
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The Abattoir
This is what my mother doesn’t want me to see: the death rattle in a forbidden room. This is what she doesn’t want me to know: how one life is sacrificed for another to live.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Bethany C. Morrow
Bethany C. Morrow discusses her debut novel, MEM, how it felt to read Toni Morrison for the first time, and her hope for Black girl readers.
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To Choose Music: Aja Gabel’s The Ensemble
The Ensemble offers its readers the chance to breathe the rarefied air of an elite pursuit.
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The Girl Next Door: Pot Docs and Loss on the California Coast
[A]s with any documentary, every one of our stories eventually becomes a ghost story. On a long enough timeline, that is.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #129: L.A. Johnson
“Right now California is burning and yet there’s snow on mountains that I can also see from my window.”
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Moving Targets
Love twists itself into fear, into statistics, into things people can live with.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Victoria Ruiz’s Grandma’s Grocery Board
I’m not a trained musician, but my grandma helped me to become fearless…
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Something Bigger and of Greater Value: Talking with Bruce Cockburn
Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn discusses his new album, Bone on Bone, songwriting, and the benefits of not selling out.
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Outlaws in the Garden: A Conversation with Denise Newman and Hazel White
Poets Denise Newman and Hazel White discuss their most recent collaborative project, Biotic Portal, how they initially met, and loving their garden’s “outlaws.”
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The Meaning of Truth: A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise by Sandra Allen
The way the book is organized reflects Allen’s experience: the ability to meet a book with skepticism and find much to be admired.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #119: Joyce Maynard
“I was diving straight into the wave, right into the source of my greatest grief.”
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Setting aside Time for Magic: Talking with Myriam Gurba
Myriam Gurba discusses her new memoir, MEAN, her writing process, and why she has hope for patriarchy’s dissolution.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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The Miracle Bowl
Praise the family that tethers me. Praise the well-used kitchen utensils and scoured mixing bowls and butter knives, thick slabs of jelly on the bread.
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To Look for America: A Road Trip, a Soundtrack
One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
...moreThis Week In Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Spaces of Exception vs. Spaces of Redemption: The Films of Ana Lily Amirpour
Diasporic communities live inside a host nation, but they also live with difference.
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What to Read When You Want to See a World More F**ked up Than Ours
Reading suggestions from author Celeste Ng for these f**ked-up times: worlds more—or, okay, just differently—f**ked up than ours.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #82: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark: A Symposium
…yet she did what she did, and in the process made the most successful album of her career.
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Home Is Here
There is no singular Muslim story, no definitive identity for the entire religion. […] Here, four women discuss what it’s like to be a minority in America in 2017, post-9/11 and post-Trump.
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