It may seem downright unChristmasy to be talking about the dead, grateful or not, at this time and season. But if you’ve got an eccentric, contemplative, bookish, introspective type on your shopping list, then I have a suggestion: Dayton Foster’s The Dead Do Speak To Us…of Love, Life & Death…
As a member of Rabbit is a Sphere and Everything Absent or Distorted, Robert Rutherford helped bring some of Denver’s finest indie rock and pop to life. Those bands have since ceased to be, but Rutherford is still writing in the same idiom, even if the final form is a…
A trip across the plains over Thanksgiving reminded me how much I love Kent Haruf’s books — 1999’s Plainsong and its sequel, Eventide, at least. (Benediction, the third in the sort-of series about the fictional town of Holt, seems almost like a parody.) Haruf, who now lives in Salida, grew…
With Cars, Cards and Carbines, author Travis Heermann is aiming to bring some fun back into the world of speculative fiction. The forthcoming anthology — aiming for a December 2014 release and currently seeking funding via Kickstarter — is primed to do just that with a series of action-packed stories…
Poet and conceptual writer Robert Fitterman tackles a heavy topic in his latest work, Holocaust Museum, a recontextualization of captions for photographs displayed in the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Fitterman sees modern poetry moving toward appropriation as a means to critique and create conversation around a…
Is Lumber Baron Inn: Denver’s Mystery Mansion, Denver historian Phil Goodstein’s latest book, really about just one building? “Yes, it is,” replies Goodstein. “Compared to a lot of my books” — like the recently released Denver History Index, about where to find out more about the city’s past and present…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
“Whatever a community goes through affects its artists as well. What poets bring to the healing process is a kind of articulateness, a way of expressing what many of us feel and need to find the words for,” says David Mason, Colorado’s poet laureate, who will be sharing poetic reactions…
With Halloween on the horizon, the time was right to touch base with Miguel De La Torre, author of The Quest for the Historical Satan, to find out just how scared we should be this season. De La Torre is an ordained Southern Baptist preacher as well as a social…
You can find a lot of interesting characters on Broadway, and this past week Mutiny Information Cafe added a few more. Painted on the store’s previously blank north wall is a mural complete with flying monkeys, alcoholic authors, a Westword Best of Denver cow and legendary blues guitarists — all…
Author/journalist Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Visit From the Goon Squad, writes with equal ease about punk rock, the ravages of time, the oddities of technology and, of course, the complexities of love. Goon Squad also has a strange focus on lists, and…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
Our workaday world is so minutely mapped and Googled that we sometimes forget just how much of it was, until fairly recently, unknown and feared — particularly the sea, home of seals mistaken for mermaids and even more fantastic creatures: the sea serpent and the kraken, whales as big as…
Nuclear warfare, biological warfare, meteor impact, global pandemic, global warming, supervolcano, alien invasion, zombie apocalypse… sharknado? All are theoretical ways that human civilization could meet its demise. And while all are gruesome, most would allow the human race to depart Earth with at least a strand of dignity still attached…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are only a small sample of the top 100 banned or challenged books of the past decade. Banning books might sound like a problem of the past, but there are still attempts to…
What helped Rebecca Rosen out of her deep depression wasn’t Zoloft or visits to a therapist. It was guidance from her dead grandmother. The then-college student prayed for help and started communicating with the beyond, which led her to write her first book and heal herself. Since then, Rosen has…
When indie rapper Mac Lethal launched a Tumblr blog to share the profanity laced, English-challenged, semi-delusional text messages that his cousin Bennett sent him, he had no idea it would become such a phenomenon. Now, three years and several million pageviews later, the site has evolved into Texts from Bennett,…
Not the average self-help guru, rock-and-roller Kerry Pastine found that after tapping into her own best self, she was able to show others how to do the same. A life coach for close to two decades and lead singer of The Informants, Pastine recently penned and self-published Know Thyself, a…
While researching his new book on Charles Manson, Jeff Guinn was surprised to learn that the criminal sociopath’s explanation for the Tate-LaBianca murders, which he instructed his “family” of followers to commit, was nothing new. Through interviews with new sources, including Manson’s sister and cousin, Guinn discovered that even as…
Denver’s two premier adult slam-poetry teams — Slam Nuba and the Mercury Cafe, both national winners in years past — have started their weeklong journey toward possible glory in Boston, where the 2013 National Poetry Slam is under way. But here in town, their youthful counterpart, Minor Disturbance, is already…
When Ann Bolinger-McQuade went to get a mammogram in 1986, she wasn’t prompted by her doctor or any signals from the rational world. She was prompted by pure intuition, which turned out to be correct: She had breast cancer. Due to early detection, though, the cancer was treatable. Bolinger-McQuade’s new…
