This week, you can explore short-short stories, enjoy a tasty slice of long-gone Denver culinary history and listen to dramatic readings of poetry at celebrations of the printed word. Keep reading for the details. See also: Melanie Crowder: Audacity…
It’s the post-holiday dead of winter, when you never know when you’re going to wake up to a half-foot of snow. So this is a good time to work your way through the pile of books by your bed. But make a resolution to get outside, too, because this week’s…
“People sometimes write books and don’t know what to do with them,” says Arturo Garcia, editor at Ícaro Editores, a small press. “It’s a dream to see their work published. A lot of folks who get published, they want to fly with it. I tell them, be careful. Wings may…
Recent events have sparked the long-smouldering conversation about racism in America. While the Civil Rights movement peaked in this nation fifty years ago, some countries took a longer time to reach “equality.” Associated Press correspondent Donna Bryson was stationed in South Africa from 1993-1996 and then again in 2008-2012; she…
Same-sex marriage was the hot topic of the summer, with Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall following in the four-decade-old footsteps of her predecessor Clela Rorex, who’d issued the first same-sex marriage licenses in the country back in the mid-’70s. But with the U.S. Supreme Court’s deliberate inaction this…
Cary Elwes (whose booksigning originally scheduled for tonight at the Tattered Cover has been postponed until further notice), explains in the introduction to his bestselling book, As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of The Princess Bride, that he was inspired to pen the tome at the 25-year-anniversary celebration…
From such veterans as Connie Willis and Ed Bryant to newcomers Molly Tanzer and Rob Ziegler to Carrie Vaughn and Warren Hammond, the focus of Westword’s current cover story, Colorado’s science-fiction/fantasy writers are as wide-ranging as the genres themselves. The books that this state’s authors have produced over the decades…
Two local authors will be celebrating their just-published novels at the LoDo Tattered Cover tonight — one in the flesh, one in spirit. And since the authors have an intertwined history and the novels involve the latest exploits of series characters, it’s important to keep things straight. Former Denver Post…
Carrie Vaughn is missing. It’s a little after ten on a Sunday morning, and this year’s MileHiCon — Colorado’s oldest science-fiction and fantasy convention — is beginning its third and final day. In a Hyatt Regency Tech Center meeting room, a panel titled “Literary Genre or Marketing Label?” is five…
When mixed-citizenship families hear a knock at the door, they cower. It could be the immigration police coming to take away the parents, splitting them from their children, says Arturo Garcia, co-editor of Broken: The Forgotten Children of Immigration. Garcia, who will be discussing his book tonight at the American…
Jon Krakauer’s haunting biography Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless, a young man who severed his ties with his family and ventured into the Alaskan wilderness, where he died. The book has become a modern-day classic, widely read in college classrooms and hotly debated by some who…
Writer Nancy Stohlman doesn’t need a lot of words to make an impact. In fact, she needs fewer than a thousand. Stohlman has spent the last few years championing flash fiction, stories told in under 1,000 words. She will release her new solo anthology of flash fiction, The Vixen Scream…
When William Gibson published his first novel, Neuromancer, thirty years ago, he triggered a seismic shift in the landscape of science fiction. With its vision of a gritty near-future populated by cowboy computer hackers and cybernetically-enhanced mercenaries, the book singlehandedly established cyberpunk as a genre, in the process foreshadowing the…
This week, sit at the feet of an eminent poet, celebrate a rustic sleuth or examine the farm-to-fork experience in a new cookbook with a local twist. Keep reading for details. See also: Boulder Book Store Presents Chuck Palahniuk…
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, says the working title for his new book was Fifty Shades of the Twilight Cave Bear Wears Prada. In what became Beautiful You, he lampoons a few tropes from chick-lit and mommy porn. Palahniuk will be reading from the book on Tuesday, October 28…
Marrying George Clooney: Confessions From a Midlife Crisis isn’t actually a how-to book penned by newlywed Amal Clooney. Rather, it’s a memoir written by Amy Ferris chronicling her journey through menopause. Waking up in the middle of the night, Ferris would fantasize about marrying Clooney and simultaneously Google her ex-boyfriends,…
Jeff Miller’s grandfather never talked much about how he happened to meet Jeff’s grandmother while he was assisting civilian relief efforts in German-occupied Belgium during the Great War. That reticence stirred Miller’s writerly curiosity about the little-known exploits of the American-led Commission for Relief in Belgium, which went to ingenious…
When musician, performer (and sometime Westword contributor) Luke Leavitt set out to create “Pockets of Contextless Waste As Points,” he saw it as a way to finally cross paths with an Internet friend. The part-music, part-poetry, part-performance art event happening at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, October 18 at DIY space Hamsterdam,…
This week you can cheer on performance poets or listen thoughtfully to the literary variety; if you prefer novels to poetry, you can hear the author of one runaway bestseller discuss his next book. Keep reading for details. See also: Mountain to Mountain Author Shannon Galpin on Bicycles and Violence…
Cultural critics have been debating the virtues and perils of youth-obsessed literature all summer long. In the New York Times, A.O. Scott lamented “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.” Slate’s Ruth Graham wrote the screed “Against YA,” bashing older fans of young-adult fiction. Both say they fear that the…
The book of poetry penned by Uche Ogbuji that won a 2014 Colorado Book Award is titled Ndewo, Colorado. That name should give you some idea of the gorgeous contradictions between its covers, poetry that pays homage equally to landscape and scientific concepts, penned by a computer engineer and immigrant…
Breckenridge resident, women’s right activist and avid cyclist Shannon Galpin (whose adventures we featured in the July 2012 cover story, “Peak Performance”) has quite the story to tell in her just-released autobiographical tale, Mountain to Mountain: A Journey of Adventure and Activism for the Women of Afghanistan, which chronicles the…
