Commissioned to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 2016 formation of the National Park Service, the book is a joy to peruse. At a whopping 288 pages, this coffee-table-size tome brings the Grand Teton Range and Jackson Hole area to life in two dimensions. From “Trappers and Traders” to more contemporary works (by Poor Yorick’s Brad Slaugh, for one) it includes more than 375 paintings, drawings and photographs of the Tetons landscape and its wildlife covering over 200 years.
In the 15th Century morality play Everyman, the common conceit is that mankind will come upon a day of reckoning whereupon each man’s life will be scored by each of his good deeds. Everyman, reminded of death at all turns, seeks assurance from his fellows that he has […]
Reviewed by Jennifer Tonge Danielle Beazer Dubrasky’s new chapbook collection, Ruin and Light (The Anabiosis Press), begins in sleep and dreaming, and the shape-shifting lines of its lovely first poem, previously published in 15 Bytes’ Sunday Blog Read, contain in microcosm the themes, motifs, and movements of everything […]
There’s a moment in A Song for Issy Bradley, Carys Bray’s luminous first novel (and 15 Bytes Book Award finalist this year), when a teenage Mormon girl named Zippy is asked at a party she’s not supposed to be at, “[I]f you weren’t already a member, would you […]
by Lisa Bickmore When, at the beginning of the New Year, the great separation occurs—I’m talking about the separation between the resolution makers and the resolution deniers—you’ll have to count me among the makers. I like the idea of a reassessment, a chance to reflect and set a […]
Braden Hepner’s first novel, Pale Harvest (Torrey House Press), is a Sisyphean tale of a young man yearning for more than warm udders, manure, and the patience to make a straight-line furrow with an old tractor held together with bailing wire. The novel is set on a […]
David Lee will be reading and discussing his work, including the book reviewed below, at four different sites in Utah during October as part of the Utah Humanities Book Festival: 10/8 at the SLC Public Library (4th floor) in partnership with City Arts (with poet Gailmarie Pahmeier); […]
We are pleased to announce the 2014 15 Bytes Book Awards. The 15 Bytes Book Awards, currently in its second year, celebrates exceptional books of poetry, fiction and visual art published in the previous calendar year based on each book’s quality/craftsmanship of writing, level of engagement and how […]
The Supermodel and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics From the World of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014. ISBN 978-1-137-27908-8, 288 pages. Ten Rather Eccentric Essays on Art: Reflections on Damien Hirst, postmodernism, the art market, food in art and more […]
Nate Liederbach’s Negative Spaces is a short collection of three stories — just 82 pages — packed with magical writing and imagery that sticks with you long after you’ve closed the covers. Set in the American West and Midwest — Idaho, Colorado, Kansas — this is a challenging […]
For a father, raising a son is fraught with missteps and reversals, aggravation and joy. I can say this with confidence having raised a couple of sons of my own and still working on a third. The hardest part is finding ways to relate. I’ve tried all […]
For fans of experimental or metamodern fiction, Lance Olsen is a well-known name. He has published over twenty volumes of fiction, essays, and “anti-textbook” work, with another forthcoming. There are few writers working today who are more prolific, inventive and as simultaneously micro- and macrocosmic in scope as […]
In an interview with 15 Bytes on the occasion of the its publication, Max Werner explained that his fourth book, Evolved: Chronicles of a Pleistocene Mind, was actually written before the three that preceded it into print: Black River Dreams, a collection of literary essays about fishing, Crooked […]
C. Wade Bentley’s poetry chapbook Askew is appropriately titled because so many of its poems accentuate the way reality can be tilted through verse to expose bits of newness in the monotony of everyday life. Bentley’s poems are often narrative in that they tell a story in miniature, a small […]
In his 2012 collection House Under the Moon, it’s clear that poet Michael Sowder has suffered for his art, as spiritual seekers do. The first section (“Homecoming”) starts with a kind of post mortem of the life previous—another marriage, a father whose marginalia in a book sends the […]
