Perhaps the best critic ever to come out of Texas — certainly the wittiest – Dave Hickey will be lecturing March 29 at the Amon Carter Museum in connection with the current exhibition, Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s. Author of the terrific essay collection, Air Guitar, and an art and literary critic [...]
The original line-up of the landmark punk band X plays the House of Blues, author Anne Lamott is presented by Arts & Letters Live while Cara Mia Theatre is at the Latino Cultural Center with Petra’s Pecado by Rupert Reyes — so says Gini.
Actor Forest Whitaker will be speaking at UT-Arlington, the Professor’s Corner literary discussion group will be talking about Louise Erdrich and Native American women authors in Denton while the North Mississippi All-Stars will hold forth at the House of Blues. And you can hear Gini talk about other events:
_________________________________________________________ Hillary Jordan will be reading and signing copies of Mudbound tonight at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble in the Preston Royal Shopping Center. You can listen to this review here. _________________________________________________________ Author Hillary Jordan spent her childhood in Dallas and Oklahoma, but her debut novel, called Mudbound, is set on a Mississippi [...]
They have Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, says the NYTimes. What more does any reader need? Does this mean all our books will be published … damp?
Reason magazine has a fascinating Q&A with University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Margaret Dorsey, author of Pachangas. She has followed the great Americo Paredes (With His Pistol in His Hand, the source for the film, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez) in studying the Texas-Mexico border culture, specifically, the pachanga. It’s a local institution whose forms range [...]
Science Daily reports that recent neuroscientific studies of children have found corelations, if not definitive causal relationships for the following: 1. An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance. 2. Genetic studies have begun to yield candidate genes that may help [...]
The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York. Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Sam Anderson Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: Emilie Buchwald, founder of Milkweed Editions Criticism: Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Poetry: Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf [...]
Daniel Menaker’s Titlepage show debuted Monday, and this attempt by the former fiction editor at The New Yorker to create a low-cost web alternative to the near-zero of book shows on network or cable TV is pretty much as I feared — a kind of droney cocktail party that ran out of liquor 30 minutes [...]
Novelist Michael Chabon writes affectionately in the New Yorker on the fantasy nature (ie., utterly unreal quality) of the superhero costume. Anyone who has been to a sci-fi or comic book convention in recent years can testify to the sagging-tights nature of “cos play” — fans obsessively dolled-up as their idols with capes and boots and home-made utility belts. [...]
