The 2012 High Plains Book Awards were announced last Saturday at the Yellowstone Art Museums in Billings, Montana, and winners included a hometown heroine: Jenny Shanks, who took Best Fiction honors for The Ringer. Shanks, who lives in Boulder, loosely based her book on the 1999 slaying of Ismael Mena,…
Is there life after death? After eighteen years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, most of them spent in the debilitating confines of death row, Damien Echols plans to find out. In 1993 Echols, then eighteen, and two other Arkansas teenagers were arrested and charged with the murders…
The Tarot is often seen as an obscure art, but Tarot Life Cards: Using Your Birthday to Chart Your Course, by Connie Lehman and Irene Clurman, makes it more accessible. Lehman has been drawing, sculpting, embroidering and curating in Colorado for decades. In 2004 she began illustrating Tarot cards for…
Local author (and Watercourse Foods owner) Daniel Landes will be signing copies of his new book, Joonie and the Great Harbinger Stampede, tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Tattered Cover LoDo. Portions of the novel, which features art by local painter Ravi Zupa, will be familiar to diners who’ve frequented WaterCourse…
Women are natural born leaders, according to Alexia Parks; in fact, she says, female leadership could save the world. Parks will talk about this theory and the science behind her book Hardwired: The 10 Major Traits of Women Hardwired by Evolution That Can Save the World tonight at 7 p.m…
Twelve years ago, Shaun Daggett was at a job interview in Colorado Springs, and although he declined the position, the company told him to think about it for a while — a suggestion that ended up changing his life. With time to kill before his plane took off, Daggett decided…
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released five years ago, ending an adored, epic series that kept devoted fans buried in books for almost ten years. Tomorrow, J.K Rowling’s first “adult” novel, The Casual Vacancy, will finally be available. Will the magic and mystery that Rowling fans have come…
In Rudy Ch. Garcia’s debut novel, The Closet of Discarded Dreams, a man awakens in a strange, surreal world made up of dreams — his own, and everyone else’s. In this bizarre place, Che Guevara and Marilyn Monroe debate philosophy and no one ever dies, but not everything is as…
Over the last four decades Gary Hart has been a major force in politics — from “inventing” the Iowa caucuses while managing George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, to unintentionally creating the template for political sex scandals with the “monkey business” photo during his 1987 run for the Democratic presidential nomination,…
Do you like scary movies? Bruce Kawin, a professor of English and film at the University of Colorado Boulder, likes them so well he’s written a book, Horror and the Horror Film, on the topic. Covering hundreds of movies across the history of horror, the book explains what makes a…
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…
