Katharine Coles couldn’t trust her senses. On a grant from the National Science Foundation, she boarded a ship to cross the infamous Drake Passage, the world’s roughest crossing, to live in Antarctica. For the celebrated writer, it was a hunt for poetry and instability, a dislocation from ordinary life. But she also found fear, the...
...
read more
Jana Richman’s Ordinary Truth
In a tense moment near the climax of The Ordinary Truth, a woman in her seventies wades across a rocky creek in a remote forest in the dark of night. As she feels her way, her senses heightened by danger, she conjures for readers the feeling of finding their way in the dark by the...
... read more
... read more
Gravity Hill, by Max Werner
A bee at work in the cherry blossoms Gravity Hill, by Maximilian Werner For an essayist and fishing enthusiast, popular University of Utah writing professor Maximilian Werner didn’t do too badly with Crooked Creek, his first novel. Nominated for the Utah Book Award, it went up against In This Light, a collection of short stories...
... read more
... read more
Alex Danchev’s Cézanne, A Life
Artworks can make visible the success of their makers, but to understand the struggles that produced them, and so the triumph they represented, something more is needed. Paul Cézanne was an artist who mastered his chops long before he was accepted by the gatekeepers, and the stories of his masterworks, and the fates that befell...
... read more
... read more
The Scholar of Moab by Steven L. Peck
We’ve always thought Sundays are a great day for reading — whether in an easy chair with your favorite paper, curled up on a couch with a good book or out in the park with your favorite ereader. With that in mind, we’re going to be running a regular Sunday feature about books and writing....
... read more
... read more
The Viewer’s Duty
Ann Poore sent this to us recently, a snippet from the acclaimed autobiography of New Zealand writer Janet Frame: During the day Lawrence and I would take the usual route to Soho, followed by a “gallery crawl” inspecting the new paintings in each gallery. This was his duty, he said. Someone must take the responsibility...
... read more
... read more
Utah Book Award: And the Winners Are . . .
The Utah Humanities Council and the Utah Center for the Book have announced the winners for the 2011 Utah Book Awards. Winners were selected from three finalists (see our article in the October 2012 edition of 15 Bytes) and books from each category must have been published in 2011 and have been written by a...
... read more
... read more
Dorothee Kocks’s The Glass Harmonica
by Shawn Rossiter The history of the glass harmonica is fascinating. The invention of Benjamin Franklin, the instrument was once the rage of two continents. Mozart and Beethoven composed for it, women swooned at its eerie sound, and some towns even banned it as dangerous or immoral. Set in a harpsichord-like case, with a series...
... read more
... read more
Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Lovely Asunder
by Caitlin Erickson Lovely Asunder, the first collection of poetry by Danielle Cadena Deulen, a 2011 Utah Book Award finalist, is inquisitive—the first poem, “Interrogation,” is composed entirely in questions. As the book progresses, inquiries move from the concrete: “How did you get here in the wet garden/ on your bloody knees, and where is/your...
... read more
... read more
Don D. Fowler’s The Glen Canyon Country
by Shawn Rossiter You have to watch who you tell about your trip to Lake Powell. In some circles that name is a dirty word: ever since the Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1966 and water filled in the gorges behind it, Lake Powell has been anathema to environmentalists. My grandparents and great-grandparents were...
... read more
... read more
Jacqueline Osherow’s Whitehorn
by Esther Allen Reading Whitethorn, the recent collection of poems by University of Utah Distinguished Professor Jacqueline Osherow and a finalist for the 2011 Utah Book Award in Poetry, is like imagining that I have lived through the famed Vesuvius eruption at Pompeii. Some poems are heavy enough to stifle. And yet, by the final...
... read more
... read more
Thomas J. Harvey’s Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley
by Ann Poore In this finalist for the Utah Book Award, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Thomas J. Harvey shows how the Rainbow Bridge and Monument Valley landscapes in Utah and Arizona have become iconic images representing all of America — in large part due to the films of John Ford but also, recently, due to...
... read more
... read more
Melanie Rae Thon’s In This Light
by Geoff Wichert In This Light, University of Utah English Professor and award-winning author Melanie Rae Thon’s most recent story collection, brings together works from a quarter century of her writing, thus becoming in effect a cross section of her artistic development. It begins with two of her early stories, which are accessible if almost...
... read more
... read more
Utah Book Award Finalists
Maximilian Werner’s Crooked Creek
The Utah Center for the Book has announced the finalists for the 2011 Utah Book Award (the date refers to the year of publication rather than then year of the award). Winners will be announced jointly by the Salt Lake City Main Library and the Utah Humanities Council at a program held on October 5th,...
... read more
... read more
