Book reviews on visual arts books and books related to Utah’s art community.
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 […]
One of Britain’s most famous artists, David Hockney has survived the various “funerals” held for the art he has practiced for over five decades: painting. His works from the sixties and seventies – paintings of swimming pools and portraits of his friends – have become iconic images of […]
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 […]
Ann Poore takes a look at the new definitive work on LeConte Stewart.
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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/ […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
For your Sunday reading pleasure, an entry too late for our What We Read On Our Summer Vacation article . . . In the land of Mozart, three talented music students become life-long friends. One, Glenn Gould, becomes the most famous pianist of his time. Another, on realizing […]
Carol Fulton I never go wrong when I choose a King’s English employee’s pick. This time it was Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, not only the best fiction I’ve read this summer, but probably the best in years. In New York City in the early 70’s […]
. . . this novel imagines what might have happened during simultaneous forays among the antiquities lining the Nile River that were actually undertaken in 1850 by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert.
by Geoff Wichert From the Renaissance on, the theme of history has been expansion: the Age of Exploration carrying adventurers and map-makers to every corner of the globe; the Reformation replacing a monolithic church with religious diversity; philosophy yielding to ideology; capitalism finding the price of everything while […]
Would you be surprised to learn that Salt Lake City is one of the “most well-read” cities in the country? And not just, like, 19th on a list of twenty, but actually in tenth place, beating out cities like Seattle and Atlanta. That was the news that came […]
by Stefanie Dykes I’ve pretty much marked up every chapter with underlined passages, circled paragraphs, and left sticky notes to myself. What do I make of all this? That’s the first question I asked myself when I began reading Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, When Women Were Birds. […]
