JavaScript disabled or chat unavailable. Find a librarian.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in 1977 in Odessa, Soviet Union (now Ukraine) and immigrated to the U.S.A at age 16 when his family sought political asylum. Before Dancing in Odessa he published two chapbooks, one in Russian called The Blessed City, and one in English...
This book won the 2005 Whiting Writers' Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship as well as the Dorset Prize. And these prizes were well deserved according to most critics. The Philidelphia Inquirer had this to say:
"It seemed to take...
Manning Marable. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Viking, 2011.
Burling 1st floor BP223.Z8 L57636 2011
Manning Marable argued that Malcolm X was the most important black leader of the twentieth century. On its face this is a bold assertion; Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention stands as a forceful testament to the veracity of Marable’s audacious claim. This long awaited book (twenty...
I posted an article recently about the use of the word "consumer" rather than "citizen," and Katie Dunn, formerly a librarian at Grinnell College (and greatly missed!) and currently a librarian at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY, responded with her thoughts on a book she is...
". . . I am in the middle of this really cool book, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. It has a lot about how marketing was used to get people used to the idea of replacing things before they were actually worn out, and to give up the idea of saving/reusing/repurposing...
Andre Breton was a Dadaist and Surrealist poet writing from the 1920s to the 1960s. He also wrote the novel Nadja.
Sometimes you say marking the earth with your heel the way in a bush the eglantine grows
Wild as if it's made only of dew
You say The whole sea and the whole sky for a single
Childhood victory in the land of dance or better for a single
...
Sad Steps
BY PHILIP LARKIN
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes...
By Mark Baechtel
If I watch long enough, the pencil will give up its soul.
in this it is like any thing: it has its ways, and observation
cuts down into them, a killing knife.
What can I look at without dismembering it?
The day limps home after I...
Michael Lewis. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. NY: W.W. Norton, 2010. Submitted by Grinnell College Circulation Supervisor Nathan Clubb ’10
The massive scale of the latest financial crisis and my deep interest of both economics and finance sparked a desire to learn more about how the world’s financial markets fell so far, so quickly. The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, examines some of the key contributors to the...
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. Pantheon Books, 2000. [on order for Burling Library/Smith Memorial]
The release Mar. 4 of The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, will send some movie-goers back to their sources to review author Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre. They should. This seminal author’s 46 books and 121 short stories have been adapted to 10 films....
Theresa Cha was born in 1951 in Korea. She moved around a lot in Korea as a child because of the war and then her family immigrated to America. She received her B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. from University of California, Berkeley. She also moved to Paris for her Post-Graduate study....
"The story contained in [Dictee] is of several women. First there is a Korean revolutionary, Yu guan Soon; then Joan of Arc and St. Theresa of Lisieuz make an appearance, as well as Cha's mother and...
Monique Truong was born in Vietnam in 1968 and immigrated to the United States in 1975. She graduated from Yale University in 1990 and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She won the Bard Fiction Prize in 2003 and the Young Lions Fiction Award in 2004,...
"Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt is set in the household of writers Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1920s Paris. Revolving around a Vietnamese cook the lesbian couple have hired, a man named Binh, the...
