This guy has a very soothing library voice…
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Wisdom belies her mere 36 years on this earth. She came on the scene at 19, becoming the youngest poet to win the Nuyorican Grand Slam competition. She then tossed aside her laurels and leaped headlong into the raging river of struggle. When we first met in 2016, at a movement retreat in Fruitland, Fla., I knew her as a lead organizer with the Dream Defenders. No one had to tell me she was a poet. Her words, voice, cadence and fiery imagination, blazing like the Florida sun, gave her away. She wasn’t just a movement poet. She brought poetry to movement — to the Community Justice Project, to Say Her Name, to the arts collective she co-founded, Smoke Signals Studio in Miami. And she brought movement to poetry, through live performances and books, including “The Black Unicorn Sings” (2010), “Inner-City Chants and Cyborg Cyphers” (2015), her landmark collection “My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter” (2017) and the much-anticipated “Florida Water: Poems” (2023).
Read, listen and study everything aja monet does. Below is a very brief distillation of a two-hour conversation. We barely scratched the surface. And she’s not done.
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The mystery no one was aware they wanted to be solved has been solved: we now know who painted the cover of the 1976 paperback edition of A Wrinkle in Time.
Archived link of a paywalled article:
I didn’t grow up with that edition. Not sure I could have handled that staring at me from the shelf when I was in elementary school.
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Been on something of a Walter Tevis bender recently…
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Mockingbird
Currently reading The Queen’s Gambit.
An underrated writer it seems to me or that might just be my perception, but they are excellent reads.
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Just finished Grendel, by John Gardner. A retelling of the myth from the monster’s perspective. Has one of the best depictions of a dragon’s ancient, detached existence.
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Definitely an under appreciated author! Mockingbird has held up really well. I couldn’t bear to watch the Queens’s Gambit miniseries in case they did terrible things to it. I know a lot of people did get the book after watching, so that’s nice.
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I’ve yet to watch it, thought i may as well read the book first because i only recently discovered he wrote it.
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Just FYI, if your interested in John Scalzi and like audio books, Wil Wheaton narrated his most recent one…
And also, check out Wil’s book shelf of geeky goodness! Live Long and Be Fabulous! LOL!
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I think this is actually the 11th Scalzi audiobook narrated by Wheaton! They make a good team.
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I blazed through Rouge, by Mona Awad. I really like her work. Not sure I get some of the magical stuff / craziness. But the fever dream stuff works for me. I see some critics find it boring.
Looks worth the read, for those of us who have gravitated more to non-fiction:
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I’ve just finished this:
It’s excellent.
Edmondson is best known for The Young Ones, a classic, bonkers 1980s sitcom, but there’s a hell of a lot more to him than that.
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Thanks for that. Loved The Young Ones on MTV when I was in High School.
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I have a couple of new books to mention, but am going to write a post, as there are a few. In the meantime, I went into the bookstore today and found @doctorow’s new book, autographed copy.
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I have it but I’m reading a book for fun and one for work at the moment. This would count as both so … soooon.
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Is it really dead?
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This is my last month or so. I have been on a horror/thriller kick. Not typical genre, but here is the progression. Also, I got some of these from a Reddit list of books to read when I was reading Rouge by Mona Awad.
Comfort Me with Apples, Catherynne M. Valente - Wow. Short one. Not sure what the right descriptor is: magical realism? Fantasy? Publisher calls it a Thriller.
City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit - Elmore Leonard - I have a Raylan Givens 3 book collection and it is a great palate cleanser after some of these others ;-). Also, trying to motivate myself to watch the original Justify and now the new series. Instead I’m rewatching Veep and Deadwood.
Maeve Fly, CJ Leede - This was highly recommended from that Reddit list by a few folks and didn’t disappoint. I like fiction based in Los Angeles, or here Hollywood is more like it.
Not Forever, But For Now, Chuck Palahniuk - I’ve been making my way through this for a while now. I’m finding Palahniuk less…something since I started reading Mona Awad’s work and some of these other authors. Anyway, it’s on my list.
Les Liasons Dangeruses, Christopher Hampton - Dangerous Liaisons is one of my favorite movies and this play has so much of the dialogue from the movie.
And just last night I finished Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy. Not sure what to make of this one. Male author writing horror story whose protagonist is approaching menopause and hot flashes are a plot point. I’ll read more of his work.
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There really is nothing sacred in the world if they’re coming for the Scholastic Book Fairs now…
Literary fiction will never die. But it really doesn’t need a special section in the store.
The description given in the article was just about perfect. Literary fiction is to be specially regarded but not necessarily enjoyed. And you can just tell sometimes. The writing smacks you in the face with the weight of its self-importance almost immediately.
I recently read A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it’s that kind of style that severely slows my reading in some novels. It was not an enjoyable read, the characters were not likeable, and the ending was both clever and somehow unearned. But leaving readers with questions and ambiguity is a feature in these stories, not a bug. Reading it reminded me of college. Books exist as prompts for papers.
There are some I really enjoy, though. Probably for the exact same reasons I dislike others. Time’s Arrow surprised me, especially with how far the author was willing to go with its gimmick of telling the story of a man’s life from end to beginning, with the (disembodied, along for the ride with us) narrator experiencing and explaining everything as if this reversed time were normal. Then there’s The Mezzanine, only briefly referenced in the article. The plot is literally just a guy’s thoughts as he goes on lunch break. But those footnotes! Nothing could prepare me for the joy I found in discovering that book.
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