David Abrams's Blog, page 75

A Year of Reading: Best Poetry of 2015

Poetry forms the core of my well-being. I begin each day by reading two to four poems, cleansing my brain first thing in the morning with compressed stanzas sturdy as bars of soap. I recommend this kind of ablution to everyone. (Of course, verse is perfectly acceptable for noontime or eventide reading as well.)

This year, my poetry reading was dominated by Edna St. Vincent Millay. While reading Savage Beauty , Nancy Milford’s first-class biography of the early 20th-century poet (as well as a t...

My First Time: James Tate Hill

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is James Tate Hill, author of Academy Gothic , winner of the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel. His fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Sonora Review, and The Texas Review, among others, and he is the fiction editor for Monkeybicycle . Originally from Charle...

A Not-Quite-Definitive Young Adult Reading List

A few days ago, a friend of mine posed a question to me on Twitter: Any good recs for very smart 15 year old girls? I have 2 on my list, and I’m looking for things I don’t know about.

While I’ve read and enjoyed my share of Young Adult literature (starting from the time I was a young adult myself), the genre has really bloomed and boomed in recent years, leaving me a little out of the loop. So, I turned to the Hivemind in my social media circles and asked them for recommendations. To put it m...

Sunday Sentence: Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.


To those of you who enjoy the comfort of a nice set of thumbscrews, allow me to recommend any of the crucifying holiday plays and pageants currently eliciting screams of mercy from within the confines of our local elementary and middle schools. I will, no doubt, be taken to task for criticizing the work of children but, as any pathologist will agree, if there’s a cancer it’s best to trea...

A Year of Reading: Best Gift Book of 2015 for Bookworms

Books take us on journeys. Whether it’s down a rabbit hole, across the windswept moors of England, floating on a raft down the Mississippi River, or circling the world in eighty days, we go places when we read.

Some books, particularly those in the fantasy and historical fiction genres, provide literal maps in their endpapers; but for the majority of novels, readers navigate the terrain freestyle, using their imagination to picture the latitude and longitude of story.

In Plotted: A Literary A...

Friday Freebie: The Journey of the Penguin by Emiliano Ponzi

Congratulations to Rhonda Lomazow, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest:  Black Valley and The House on the Cliff by Charlotte Williams.


As a long-time fan of the publisher Penguin Books, I'm pleased to say this week’s book giveaway is a copy of the new hardcover picture book The Journey of the Penguin by Emiliano Ponzi, which tells the (imagined) story of how the publishing colophon came into being (for more about a menagerie of publishing colophons, go here ). Keep reading for mo...

A Year of Reading: Best Short Stories of 2015

2015 Best of the Shorts (Not Talking About Boxers)
by Jodi Paloni

’Tis the season of lists. That time of year when morning shows and radio programs, magazines, newspapers, on-line journals and blogs bring us the “top tens” and “best ofs” from the most tasty whitefish recipes to sought-after child-friendly cities. We list the over-rated and the under-rated; leather boots, micro-brews, and on-demand TV series. By nature, lists are a structure to help us to pare down an otherwise unwieldy glut....

A Year of Reading: Best First Lines of 2015

I’ve said before that first sentences are like a book’s doorknob . Turn. Push. Enter. Here are the best opening lines from books published in 2015 which beckoned us inside their pages.



When I was born, the doctor said, “I’m sorry.”
Above Us Only Sky
by Michele Young-Stone



The happiest moment of my father’s life was finding his name on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.
Excommunicados
by Charles Haverty



They found him inside one of seventeen cauldrons in the courtyard, steeping in an indig...

A Year of Reading: Best Book Cover Designs of 2015

As it turns out, you can judge a book by its cover...or at least I do. Unfair or not, the art and design of book covers can sometimes be the one factor that either persuades or dissuades me from initially picking up (or clicking on) a book with which I’m not familiar. True, I’ve read some really great books which were dressed in lousy clothes; but the opposite is also true: some truly beautiful jacket designs turned out to be window dressing for some meh writing inside.

We’re now in the “best...

My First Time: Leslie Pietrzyk

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Leslie Pietrzyk, author of This Angel on My Chest . A collection of unconventionally-linked short stories, This Angel on My Chest won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Leslie is the author of two...