National Book Award. Pulitzer Prize. The cover of Time. Colson Whitehead is undeniably one of our finest and most important contemporary authors. He is a consummate storyteller. A true American original able to illuminate our nation’s darkest aspects with his incredibly vivid imagination. Over the last twenty years, he’s addressed racism with a story of elevator inspectors, gentrification with a zombie apocalypse, and taken a tour through the history of slavery on a literal underground railroad.
The swampy summer continues! Escape the city with these Staff Summer Picks: BEST BEACH READS!
KEATON'S PICK:THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead- This ripped-from-the-headlines potboiler follows up the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. A riveting and harrowing tale from one of our time's greatest writers. THE NICKEL BOYS is out July 16, and I can't wait.
Summer is in full swing here in the Bayou City, so we've put together a list of SUMMER STAFF PICKS to keep you well-read and your imagination well-fed for the summer season! With temperatures in the mid-90's that feel like the low 100's, we should all enjoy a little time with our home AC's and these STAYCATION READS!
This week Traci and Cassie sat down over lunch in Keaton's office for a Queer Staff Chat about Matty Layne Glasgow's new poetry collection DECIDUOS QWEEN. Matty's in-store reading on Friday, June 21 kicks off a weekend of PRIDE celebrations at Brazos Bookstore, followed by DRAG QUEEN STORY HOUR on Saturday, June 22.
Sometimes you pick up a picture book and you know immediately that this is a book you will be reading to your child over and over -- in fact, you’ll be reading it over and over, even when your kid isn’t in the room! Such is the case with TRUMAN, the sweet, funny, and very heartwarming story of a brave turtle, which releases July 9, written by Jean Reidy and illustrated by Lucy Ruth Cummins, who is not only a phenomenal author and illustrator of books for children, but also an art director at Simon and Schuster!
Brian Evenson is not only a master of horror, he is a master of the short story form. Each of the compact nightmares he concocts is an object lesson in suspense, subtlety, and manipulation of the most primal of human emotions--fear. However, it is a disservice to relegate his work to the realm of genre. While steeped in the tropes of horror, science fiction and fantasy, Evenson’s fiction is highly literary and elusive--leaving his readers with more questions than answers as he chaperones us further into the uncanny with each word.
One of the things that always fascinates me is when authors I’ve loved in one genre or type of book try their hands at another. I’ve known Kim Tomsic as a middle grade novel author (her 11:11 Wish is absolutely adorable!) but now she’s written a truly fascinating nonfiction picture book called Guitar Genius: How Les Paul Engineered the Solid Body Electric Guitar and Rocked the World! It’s Illustrated by Brett Helquist and out now from Chronicle books.
This Sunday afternoon I nestled in with a cup of coffee, my own mechanical typewriter resting quietly nearby, and hopped on a call with Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig, a novel birthed from the keys of an Olivetti Underwood Lettera 32 in Austin, Tx. Hammered out in a four month fever dream, Flores wrote Trufflepig in late 2014, but his mythical depiction of the Texas-Mexican border is filled with details and insight that read like prophecy.
Talking crows. Troublesome earth spirits. The worlds Max Porter weaves in his fiction are fantastical ones, where myth bleeds constantly into reality. Yet the concerns of his prose--even as he reinvents the concept with his poetic and formal experimentation--are always completely human. Dead parents. Missing children. The need for an explanation. The need to place blame. With Lanny (out 5/14 from Graywolf Press), these concerns come to a head when an odd child meets an implacable and timeless force.
