Forget Edward Cullen and his sparkly friends: If you want a modern take on vampires with a dash of romance and some real bite, check out Jeanne Stein’s Anna Strong vampire series. Stein’s heroine has starred in eight books since 2006, starting with The Becoming in 2006 through the brand-new…
The Youth Connection will host a poetry slam/open-mike event at 4 p.m. today in Civic Center Park, in conjunction with Senator Mike Johnston’s Summer of Safety program. The slam is the last in a three-part event series designed to provide local youth with healthy, safe and exciting activities — and…
The new selection for One Book, One Denver won’t be revealed officially until September 4. But in the August 2 Off Limits, we reported that Enrique’s Journey definitely had the inside track — and now there are many more clues that this book, which grew out of a Los Angeles…
Jenny Lawson made the most of her bizarre childhood. In fact, she turned it into a New York Times bestseller. But Lawson’s entry to the literary world was her popular blog, The Bloggess, which attracted the attention of a literary agent. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is her new, mostly-true…
Update: What a difference a year makes. Both Slam Nuba and the Denver Mercury Poetry Slam team went down in their semifinal rounds on Friday night, Slam Nuba in a sudden death slam-off against Da Poetry Lounge of Hollywood. Saturday Night’s winner? Slam New Orleans. Hopeful and pumped full of…
Maybe you finally finished a NaNoWriMo project, and now you’re not sure what to do with the manuscript. Perhaps you’ve been hard at work at the Great American Zombie Novel, but you can’t get the characters to gel. Or hell, possibly you’re convinced you could write some ladyporn that would…
Denver’s Month of Photography 2011, a citywide celebration of the art of the camera masterminded by local photographer and arts mover Mark Sink, was a picture-perfect success on all counts. One element, called The Big Picture, was particularly ambitious, adding an international flair and a sense of living, breathing drama…
The 2012 Slam Nuba slam poetry team has a big reputation to uphold when it heads to Charlotte on August 7 for this year’s National Slam Poetry Meet: It’s a new and differently configured team that will be defending the group’s 2011 first-place title. See also: – Meet your 2012…
Denver’s proved, again, that it’s a straight-up poetry town, and also that it takes a village to make it that way. The city’s stellar Minor Disturbance youth slam poetry team crowned its weekend by taking it all at the Brave New Voices 2012 national slam-off, following in the footsteps of…
In Abattoir, the new novel by local horror authors Christopher Leppek and Emanuel Isler, an aging building gets renovated into trendy lofts, but its violent past remains hidden beneath the new surface. The duo’s second novel — following 2001’s Chaosicon — is, as Leppek puts it, a “haunted house on…
With fires raging across Colorado, many artists are putting their talents by holding fundraisers or using events to simply send good vibes to those affected by the fires. Tonight Denver’s youth slam team, Minor Disturbance, a 2012 MasterMind winner, will use what it’s got to bring awareness (and raise some…
In author Sapphire’s new novel, The Kid (a semi-sequel to Precious — the Hollywood adaptation of her ’96 novel, Push), we are treated to another relentless marathon of abuse, rape, failed dreams and unsettling conclusions. “Commercial media looks at things in terms of heroes and villains,” Sapphire told us in…
In her 1996 novel Push, Sapphire ventured into the profoundly dark territory of a young black girl’s experience growing up in late-’80s Harlem. The book dealt with the difficult topics of incest, rape, AIDS, illiteracy, poverty and violence toward infants, yet none of this prevented the 2009 film adaptation, Precious…
Doron Petersan is the owner of Sticky Fingers Sweets & Eats shop in Washington, D.C., but folks around here know her as the vegan cupcake warrior who slayed the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars and Cupcake Wars All-Stars competition, alongside Sticky Fingers’ head baker Jenny Webb. Petersan’s become something of a…
For Colorado native and Hollywood screenwriter Daniel Pyne, writing a little Wild West thriller set in mining country in the Rockies is like a vocational vacation. The book in question, A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar, was inspired by a thread of truth — Pyne’s brother once…
Dark fantasy epics, as every hunger-gamer knows, are all the rage at the box office and on cable. The latest New Yorker to clog my mailbox is the special “Science Fiction Issue.” And I’m happy to report that Paolo Bacigalupi, Colorado’s own doctor of dystopia — who recently discussed his…
Aaron Angello is co-curator of “e-Poetry: The Past, Present and Future of Electronic Poetry,” both a showcase and laboratory for engaging works of digital literature, which comes to Counterpath Gallery + Performance Space at 7 p.m. tomorrow, on Saturday, May 26. “e-Poetry” will include multimedia installations and live readings from…
As it turns out, a good Twitter account doesn’t necessarily make a good television show. Nonfiction funny man Justin Halpern learned that lesson the nationally televised way when real-life anecdotes from his hilariously crabby father translated poorly from social media into a cheesy, laugh-grabbing sitcom starring William Shatner. (Captain Kirk…
In this week’s cover story, “Water World,” Westword writers explored the South Platte, the river that runs through Denver and is showing new life. Our favorite spot on the Platte, though, could well be my favorite spot in Denver: the point at Confluence Park where the past and the present…
You’ve heard of running away from home. But author Jennifer Wilson, after losing her savings to the stock-market crash, gathered up her family in Des Moines and ran away to home, or at least that’s the way she characterizes it in her memoir/travelogue Running Away to Home…
It seems counterintuitive for a business book to tout the virtues of unpopularity, but author Erika Napoletano has thoroughly embraced the concept of unpopularity — which is not a pejorative term, as she explains in the Q&A that follows. Basically, unpopularity means you don’t have mass appeal for everyone, which…
After racking up awards — Nebula and Hugo honors for Best Novel — for his debut novel The Windup Girl in 2009, Paulo Bacigalupi followed up with Ship Breaker, set in an equally dismal, dystopian future, and won another round of awards, including a National Book Award nomination and a…
