A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice. A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend--and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends--some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with a young straight man, conspire to fracture his defenses, while revealing hidden currents of resentment and desire that threaten the equilibrium of their community. Real Life is a gut punch of a novel, a story that asks if it's ever really possible to overcome our private wounds and buried histories--and at what cost.
A potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods, Suicide Woods is Benjamin Percy’s first story collection since his acclaimed Refresh, Refresh. Percy, whose recent work includes the werewolf novel Red Moon, the post-apocalyptic Lewis-and-Clark saga The Dead Lands, the paranormal/internet thriller The Dark Net, and the Green Arrow, Teen Titans, and James Bond comic book series, now brings his page-turning skills to these new stories, which have appeared everywhere from Esquire, VQR, and Ploughshares to McSweeney’s, Orion, the Missouri Review, and more.
Presented in partnership with the Arts + Literature Laboratory, three award-winning poets visit Madison for this special Watershed Reading. Featuring readings by Jeffrey Levine, founder of Tupelo Press and author of the new poetry collection, At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered; James Arthur, author of the brand new The Suicide's Son; and Anders Carlson-Wee, author of The Low Passions.
Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities, three of the country's foremost authors on Food Politics gather to discuss the transformative power of food in our communites, including food security, food justice, and food as means of liberation. Jennifer Gaddis, author of The Labor of Lunch, Monica White, author of Freedom Farmers, and Anne Zeide, author of Canned, will engage in a wide-ranging discussion about many of the most pressing food issues facing society today.
1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.
2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.
Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?
Wisconsin People & Ideas, the Wisconsin Academy’s magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture, presents a Wisconsin Book Festival reading featuring the winners of the statewide 2019 Fiction & Poetry Contests, hosted by editor Jason A. Smith.
Fiction readings include the 1st-place story “Exile,” by Steve Fox (Hudson),
2nd-place story “Spirit Box,” by Nikki Kallio (Waupaca),
and 3rd-place story “Mirror Box,” by Michael Hopkins (Neenah).
Poetry readings include
1st-place poem “Greyhound,” by Robert Russell (Madison),
2nd-place poem “Morning's Detour,” by Mary Wehner (Fond du Lac),
and 3rd-place poem “Nineteen Forty-Five,” by Jeri McCormick (Madison), along with other poems chosen by the award-winning poets.
Join us in celebration and support of Wisconsin's creative writing community!
Poets Kevin Coval, Shira Erlichman, and Angel Nafis come together for a joint reading to start the Wisconsin Book Festival off right!
About Everything Must Go: Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston. The book celebrates Chicago’s Wicker Park in the late 1990’s, Coval’s home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters. Allston’s illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it. The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities.
This eagerly anticipated follow-up to the breakout memoir How to Be an Indian in the 21st Century delves more deeply into the themes of family, community, grief, and the struggle to make a place in the world when your very identity is considered suspect. In Rebel Poet: More Stories from a 21st Century Indian, author Louis Clark examines the effects of his mother's alcoholism and his young sister's death, offers an intimate recounting of the backlash he faced as an Indian on the job, and celebrates the hard-fought sense of home he and his wife have created. Rebel Poet continues the author's tradition of seamlessly mixing poetry and prose, and is at turns darker and more nuanced than its predecessor.
The Wisconsin Book Festival and A Room on One's Own Bookstore present a joint reading by Oliver Baez Bendorf and Jennifer Nelson.
About Advantages of Being Evergreen: Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s remarkable Advantages of Being Evergreen is an essential book for our time and for all time. With rigorous compassion and great formal dexterity Bendorf imagines a new world for all of our animal selves in which we are truly seen and truly safe. At the same time these are poems that never shy from the shocking violence and cruelty of this world. Over and over again people come together to make their individual and communal body whole, knowing all the while that so much of the world seeks to wreck even the simplest kinds of safety. Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. This is a book of the earth’s abiding wonder. And the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom. - Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic.
CANCELED - Due to unforeseen circumstances, Timothy Faust is no longer able to appear on October 19th.
Single payer healthcare is not complicated: the government pays for all care for all people. It’s cheaper than our current model, and most Americans (and their doctors) already want it. So what’s the deal with our current healthcare system, and why don’t we have something better?
In Health Justice Now, Timothy Faust explains what single payer is, why we don’t yet have it, and how it can be won. He identifies the actors that have misled us for profit and political gain, dispels the myth that healthcare needs to be personally expensive, shows how we can smoothly transition to a new model, and reveals the slate of humane and progressive reforms that we can only achieve with single payer as the springboard.
A new home, a new marriage, a new family. It’s a lot to sort out. But before medicolegal death investigator Mattie can smooth out the unexpected chaos of her new life, duty calls. At the local ER, a battered and bruised teenage girl has been brought in by a mysterious man who claimed she’d fallen out of a car. The staff is suspicious, but while they attend to the teenager, the unidentified man slips out. Then the girl dies, but not before informing social worker Hildy Schneider that the man had her little sister as well.
Mattie’s exam reveals forensic evidence of long-term IV drug use and physical abuse, findings consistent with Hildy’s suspicion that the girl was a victim of human trafficking. They are able to confirm her identity as a teen who went missing six months ago, along with her sister—facts that are deeply unsettling to Mattie who now shares a home with her husband’s teenage daughter.
Working closely with Hildy and Sorenson homicide detectives, including her husband Steve Hurley, Mattie must delve into a dark underworld to stop the ruthless trafficking of human lives—before it's too late for another young girl...
***Mary Kowal is no longer able to attend this year's Wisconsin Book Festival due to illness***
Three of the most exciting and, of course, fearless women writing today discuss the state of writing (and reading) Science Fiction and Fantasy.
About The Calculating Stars & The Fated Sky: Perfect for fans of the hit book and movie Hidden Figures, this new duology from Mary Robinette Kowal expands on her Hugo Award-winning novelette “Lady Astronaut of Mars.” Following The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky brings the mathmetician, pilot, and “lady astronaut” Elma York all the way to Mars on her new mission. The Calculating Stars introduced Kowal’s alternate 1950’s America where a meteorite causes a climate cataclysm. The International Aerospace Coalition draws on every available talent to colonize space before the earth becomes uninhabitable — and Elma York, a WASP pilot and mathematician, makes sure women have the opportunity to become astronauts too.
A panel discussion of debut YA writers living in the Midwest. The authors will discuss their books, their paths to publication, their thoughts on writing for young adults, and their works in progress. The authors write in a variety of genres within YA, including mystery/thriller (Amelia Brunskill - The Window), science fiction (Adrienne Finlay - Your One & Only), and fantasy (Madeline Reynolds - Illusions).
Ascending to the throne was only the beginning... Now Margaret George, the author of The Confessions of Young Nero, weaves a web of politics and passion, as ancient Rome's most infamous emperor cements his place in history. With the beautiful and cunning Poppaea at his side, Nero Augustus commands the Roman empire, ushering in an unprecedented era of artistic and cultural splendor. Although he has yet to produce an heir, his power is unquestioned. But in the tenth year of his reign, a terrifying prophecy comes to pass and a fire engulfs Rome, reducing entire swaths of the city to rubble. Rumors of Nero's complicity in the blaze start to sow unrest among the populace--and the politicians...
Poetry. Women's Studies. Indictus re-imagines various creation myths to bear the invisible and unsaid assaults of women. In doing so, it subverts notions of patriarchal power into a genre that can be demolished and set again. Indictus is a Latin word, from which other words like "indict" and "indicate" are born. It translates literally as "to write the unsaid." There is an effort in this book to create the supernatural through the utterance of violence, because jurisdiction fails in real time. That sexual assault can so easily become a science fiction when power is rearranged to serve the victim speaks to the abject lack of control within victims to ever be redeemed. Crimes resolve to misdemeanors. In a world without my abusers, how can I soon become myself? Combining the mythological and autobiographical, this book attempts to indict us, so that the wounded might one day be free.
“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision.
In luminous, vivid, searingly honest prose, the stories in White Dancing Elephants center on the experiences of diverse women of color—cunning, bold, and resolute—facing sexual harassment and racial violence, as well as the violence women inflict upon each other. One woman’s miscarriage is juxtaposed against the story of the Buddha’s birth. Another cheats with her best friend’s husband, only to discover it’s her friend she most yearns for. In three different stories, three artists struggle to push courageous works into the world, while a woman with an incurable disease competes with her engineer husband’s beautiful android.
Combining the speculative elements and wry psychological realism beloved by readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Margaret Atwood, Danzy Senna and Sandra Cisneros, this collection introduces Chaya Bhuvaneswar as an original and memorable new voice. White Dancing Elephants is the winner of the 2017 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize.
As the mother of Wes Moore, whose memoir about overcoming the obstacles that face a fatherless young black man was a huge bestseller, Joy is constantly asked: How did you do it? How can you be a good parent, have a career and stay healthy when you don’t have a partner to pick up the slack? How do you connect with a child when you can’t always be there? Joy’s answer is “presence.” Specifically, seven different ways of being a force in a child’s life, ensuring that they feel your influence. We can’t always be physically there for our children, but the power of presence can help us to be a voice in the back of their minds that guides them through difficult times.
In The Power of Presence, Moore explores seven pillars of presence–heart, faith, mind, courage, financial freedom, values, and connectedness–that all parents can use to positively influence their children. Using compelling stories from women who have been there and practical advice on everything from savings accounts to mindfulness, this book is a compassionate look at what it takes to raise great kids even in less than ideal circumstances.
With the birth of her first child, soon-to-be professor Laura Jean Baker finds herself electrified by oxytocin, the “love hormone”—the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Over the next eight years, her “oxy” cravings, and her family, only grow—to the dismay of her husband, Ryan, a freelance public defender. As her reckless baby–making threatens her family’s middle–class existence, Baker identifies more and more with Ryan’s legal clients, often drug–addled fellow citizens of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Is she any less desperate for her next fix?
Baker is in an impossible bind: The same drive that sustains her endangers her family; the cure is also the disease. She explores this all–too–human paradox by threading her story through those of her local counterparts who’ve run afoul of the law—like Rob McNally, the lovable junkie who keeps resurfacing in Ryan’s life. As Baker vividly reports on their alleged crimes—theft, kidnapping, opioid abuse, and even murder—she unerringly conjures tenderness for the accused, yet increasingly questions her own innocence.
A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere.
Wisconsin People & Ideas, the Wisconsin Academy’s magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture, presents a reading featuring the winners of their 2018 Fiction and Poetry Contest.
Fiction readers include:
[1st place] Michael Hopkins, Neenah -- "Static"
[2nd] Jack Harris, Mazomanie -- "Aeshnidae"
[3rd] AnnaKay Kruger, Madison -- "A Sweet Thing"
Poetry readers include:
[1st] Jenna Rindo, Pickett -- "Head, Thorax, and Abdomen"
[2nd] Thomas J. Erickson, Milwaukee -- "November"
[3rd] Justine Jones, Madison -- "The Act"
The 2018 Fiction & Poetry Contests were supported by Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the following sponsors: Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Book Festival, Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts. Learn more about how to submit your work to our annual fiction and poetry contests here.
Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the World is a magnificent compendium of poetry, photography, and essay (a form of Japanese haibun). Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander explores tensions between the familiar and foreign. His eloquent new work voices an ethical concern for others, exploring empathic relations in which the world itself is fundamental. Taking us around the globe to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, Core Samples shows how Gander’s “sharp sense of place has made him the most earthly of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson”
Eighteen-year-old Robert Weekes is a practitioner of empirical philosophy—an arcane, female-dominated branch of science used to summon the wind, shape clouds of smoke, heal the injured, and even fly. Though he dreams of fighting in the Great War as the first male in the elite US Sigilry Corps Rescue and Evacuation Service—a team of flying medics—Robert is resigned to mixing batches of philosophical chemicals and keeping the books for the family business in rural Montana, where his mother, a former soldier and vigilante, aids the locals. When a deadly accident puts his philosophical abilities to the test, Robert rises to the occasion and wins a scholarship to study at Radcliffe College, an all-women’s school. At Radcliffe, Robert hones his skills and strives to win the respect of his classmates, a host of formidable, unruly women. Robert falls hard for Danielle Hardin, a disillusioned young war hero turned political radical. However, Danielle’s activism and Robert’s recklessness attract the attention of the same fanatical anti-philosophical group that Robert’s mother fought years before.
We are teen moms, baby mamas, mothers who once sex worked and were addicted to crack. We're not your average good girls. We are survivors of domestic abuse and sexual trauma. But don't call us damsels in distress. We are women with moxie and grit--game changers and powerhouses. We did more than go through the belly of hell and survived, we brought something good back. Coming out on the other side as doctors, artists, nurse practitioners, homeowners, counselors, and so much more, we are 20 women who make a difference in this world. Read our stories and witness how.
In Dead Presidents, public radio host and reporter Brady Carlson takes readers on an epic trip to presidential gravesites, monuments, and memorials from sea to shining sea. With an engaging mix of history and contemporary reporting, Carlson explores the death stories of our greatest leaders, and shows that the ways we memorialize our presidents reveal as much about us as they do about the men themselves.
With macabre humor, You, Beast explores the roots and limits of human empathy. Nick Lantz examines our strange, absurd, and often brutal relationship with other animals, from roaches scuttling across the kitchen floor to pigs whose heart valves can replace our own. In poems ranging from found text to villanelles, and from short plays to fables, this lyric collection tracks the troubled ways we define our humanity through mythology, language, politics, art, and food.
The Great Recession not only shook Americans’ economic faith but also prompted powerful critiques of economic institutions. This timely book explores three movements that gathered force after 2008: the rise of the benefit corporation, which requires social responsibility and eschews share price as the best metric for success; the emergence of a new group, Slow Money, that fosters peer-to-peer investing; and the 2011 Wisconsin protests against a bill restricting the union rights of state workers.
Emily Baxter, Founder and Executive Director of We Are All Criminals, and Corey Saffold, Madison Police Officer, discuss the state of the American criminal justice system.
This entertaining and enlightening graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. With masterful storytelling and color illustrations, Heretics! offers a unique introduction to the birth of modern thought in comics form—smart, charming, and often funny.
These contentious and controversial philosophers—from Galileo and Descartes to Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton—fundamentally changed the way we look at the world, society, and ourselves, overturning everything from the idea that the Earth is the center of the cosmos to the notion that kings have a divine right to rule. More devoted to reason than to faith, these thinkers defended scandalous new views of nature, religion, politics, knowledge, and the human mind.
Wisconsin People & Ideas, the Wisconsin Academy’s magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture, presents a reading featuring the winners of our 2017 Fiction and Poetry Contest. Fiction readers include Bob Wake (Cambridge), Jeff Esterholm (Superior), and Anne Zindler (Waukesha). Poets include Nicholas Gulig (Ft. Atkinson), Hansa Kerman Pistotnik (Madison), and Georgia Ressmeyer (Sheboygan).
Free and open to the public, this reading is hosted by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, with support from Wisconsin Public Radio, the Wisconsin Book Festival, and Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts. Learn more about how to submit your work to our annual fiction and poetry contests here.
The Pox Lover is a personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by Anne-Christine d’Adesky, a pioneering American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. In an account that is by turns searing, hectic, and funny, d’Adesky remembers “the poxed generation” of AIDS — their lives, their battles, and their determination to find love and make art in the heartbreaking years before lifesaving protease drugs arrived.
Ada Calhoun doesn’t give wedding toasts in real life. Instead, as she tells us in the introduction to her sharp, funny, and extremely insightful book Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, she likes to sit back with a glass of champagne and enjoy other people’s efforts. Luckily for us, her silence at her friends’ ceremonies doesn’t mean she has nothing on her mind. On the contrary, Calhoun is full of wisdom and experience, which she imparts to us with candor and grace in Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give, inspired by her enormously popular New York Times “Modern Love” essay, “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give.” Weaving intimate moments from her own married life with frank insight from experts, clergy, and friends, Calhoun presents a realistic portrait of what marriage is really like, while offering advice on how to get through the not-so-idyllic aspects of lifelong commitment.
From Natasha Pulley comes a story of a great friendship and a treacherous quest in the magical landscape of nineteenth-century Peru. In 1859, ex-East India Company opium smuggler Merrick Tremayne is nursing an injury that almost cost him his leg, trapped at his crumbling family estate in Cornwall. In the sprawling grounds of the old house, something is wrong; a statue moves, his grandfather’s pines explode, and his brother accuses him of madness. So when the India Office asks Merrick to smuggle cuttings from cinchona trees—the source of quinine, essential for the treatment of malaria—from deep within Peru, he knows it’s a terrible idea. The terrain is treacherous and a gang of criminals runs the quinine supply, and nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who’s made the attempt has died. Merrick can barely walk. But against his better judgment, he joins the expedition to the last outpost before the quinine woods: a tiny mission colony on the edge of the Amazon where a salt line on the ground separates town from forest. Anyone who crosses is killed by something that watches from the trees, but somewhere beyond the salt are cinchona, and the way around is blocked.
Two of the nation's leading hip hop scholars put forward thoughtful and innovative approaches to transforming education.
About Breakbeat Pedagogy:
Breakbeat Pedagogy provides a groundbreaking framework for the inclusion of Hip Hop culture in schools. Working from the perspective of a classroom teacher, Mooney reflects on the story of Word Up!, a Hip Hop and spoken word poetry event that began with students in a New Jersey high school, making the case for a pedagogy with the potential to transform urban schools and the way we think about them. This is essential reading for any teacher committed to social justice and culturally responsive education.
About For White Folks Who Teach In The Hood...And The Rest of Y'all Too:
Your steps make a difference! Join Literacy Network supporters along the Lakeshore Path for the 25th year and help end the cycle of illiteracy. Funds raised from the run will benefit Dane County adults that are committed to improving their reading, writing and speaking skills to be better equipped to succeed in the workplace, understand health issues, and provide supportive environments for the education of their children. The Literacy Network provides free classes and with the help of more than 500 volunteer tutors over 1,200 adults are helped each year. It's your choice how far you go: 5K Run, 5K Walk, 10K Run or 1 Mile Kids Run! Every step makes a difference is ending illiteracy for adults in Dane County.
Wisconsin People & Ideas publishes fiction and poetry from Wisconsin writers, highlights new works from Wisconsin visual artists and photographers, and covers science and environmental issues that affect Wisconsin’s people, lands, and waters. The magazine also hosts annual fiction and poetry contests that award cash prizes, publication in the magazine, a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival, and more. Since 1954, the independent Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine has been a trusted resource for people who care about the issues and ideas that shape life in Wisconsin. Featured poets include 2016 poetry contest winners Karen Loeb (Eau Claire), Janet Leahy (New Berlin), and Nancy Bauer-King (Racine). Writers Allison Slavick (Cable), Richard Borovsky (Madison), and Lange Allen (Green Bay) will read their prize-winning stories from the 2016 fiction contest as well.
Undone by motherhood, judged by her husband, thirty-two-year-old Rachel Clayborne flees with her baby in the middle of the night for the one place on earth that’s been her refuge: her grandmother’s lakehouse in northern Wisconsin. Hoping to reconnect with a former, healthier self, she instead faces a confused and dying grandmother, her ever-present nurse who seems bent on thwarting each of Rachel’s desires, and a changed ex-boyfriend—her first and most passionate love. As a constant rain threatens the nearby dam, Rachel struggles to discern what’s happened to the past, who she’s become, and what kind of a life she will make for herself now—one that clings to ghosts or opens bravely to a wild new geography.
From the acclaimed author of Nina: Adolescence and The Priest’s Madonna comes a gripping new novel that depicts the transformative power of motherhood with honesty, wit, and compassion.
In Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, his first book of nonfiction, Benjamin Percy challenges the notion that literary and genre fiction are somehow mutually exclusive. In fifteen essays on the craft of fiction, Percy looks to sources such as Jaws, Blood Meridian, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to discover how contemporary writers engage issues of plot, suspense, momentum, speculation, character, setting, and dialogue. The title essay is an ode to science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, horror, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Anne Rice, Ursula K. Le Guin to Stephen King—the books that make many love fiction in the first place. An urgent and entertaining missive on craft, Thrill Me brims with Percy’s distinctive blend of anecdotes, advice, and close reading, all in the service of one dictum: Thrill the reader.
In his first collection in seven years, James Galvin expands upon his signature spare and gnomic lyric as he engages restrained astonishment, desire, and loss in a confessional voice. Whether considering masterpieces of painting or describing the austere landscape of his native Wyoming ranchlands, Galvin turns to highly imagistic yet intimate narratives to rain down compassion within isolation.
Only a year ago Isabel Moore was married, was the object of adoration for her ten-year-old daughter, and thought she knew everything about her best friend, Josie. But in one short year Isabel’s husband moved out; her daughter grew into a moody insomniac; and Josie—impulsive, funny, secretive Josie—was killed behind the wheel in a single-car accident that’s left a mess of unanswered questions in its wake.
Suddenly, the relationships that have always defined Isabel—wife, mother, best friend—are changing before her eyes. As Isabel struggles to understand who she really is, Lauren Fox brings us a daring book that explores marriage, motherhood, and the often surprising shape of new love.
Comedian, activist, and hugely popular culture blogger at AwesomelyLuvvie.com, Luvvie Ajayi, serves up necessary advice for the masses in this hilarious book of essays. With over 500,000 readers a month at her enormously popular blog, AwesomelyLuvvie.com, Luvvie Ajayi is a go-to source for smart takes on pop culture. I'm Judging You is her debut book of humorous essays that dissects our cultural obsessions and calls out bad behavior in our increasingly digital, connected lives―from the importance of the newest Shonda Rhimes television drama to serious discussions of race and media representation to what to do about your fool cousin sharing casket pictures from Grandma's wake on Facebook.
With a lighthearted, razor sharp wit and a unique perspective, I'm Judging You is the handbook the world needs, doling out the hard truths and a road map for bringing some "act right" into our lives, social media, and popular culture. It is the Do-Better Manual.
A Room of One's Own and the Wisconsin Book Festival welcome author Wendy Holden and special guests Dr. Mark Olsky and Larry Koskiek for a reading and discussion of her important biography Born Survivors. The Nazis murdered their husbands but concentration camp prisoners Priska, Rachel, and Anka would not let evil take their unborn children too—a remarkable true story that will appeal to readers of The Lost and The Nazi Officer’s Wife, Born Survivors celebrates three mothers who defied death to give their children life.
In 50 self-searching, witty, and moving essays, letters, and poems, readers hear from those who often receive little airtime in popular culture: The partners & spouses of transgender people. In this first-of-its kind collection, we catch glimpses of love, strife, and growth from those who witness and support gender transition, even as they themselves are going through their own transition in seeing gender, labels, and their own selves anew.
This Angel on My Chest is a collection of unconventionally linked stories, each about a different young woman whose husband dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Ranging from traditional stories to lists, a quiz, a YouTube link, and even a lecture about creative writing, the stories grasp to put into words the ways in which we all cope with unspeakable loss.
Based on the author’s own experience of losing her husband at age thirty-seven, this book explores the resulting grief, fury, and bewilderment, mirroring the obsessive nature of grieving. The stories examine the universal issues we face at a time of loss, as well as the specific concerns of a young widow: support groups, in-laws, insurance money, dating, and remarriage. This Angel on My Chest ultimately asks, how is it possible to move forward with life while “till death do you part” rings in your ears—and, how is it possible not to?
Jack Felter, a history teacher, returns home to bucolic Franklin Mills, Ohio, to care for his father, a retired pilot who suffers from dementia and is quickly losing his memory. Jack would love to forget about Franklin Mills, and about Sam, the girl he fell in love with, who ran off with his best friend, Tony. Except Tony has gone missing. Soon Jack is pulled into the search for Tony, but the only one who seems to know anything is Tony's last patient, a paranoid boy named Cole. Jack must team up with Cole to follow Tony's trail-and maybe save the world. Their journey will lead them to Manhattan and secret facilities buried under the Catskills, and eventually to a forgotten island in the Pacific-the final destination of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. When Jack learns the details about the program known as the Great Forgetting, he's faced with the timeless question: Is it better to forget our greatest mistake or to remember, so it's never repeated?
Each year for the past 50 years, the Council for Wisconsin Writers has been honoring the best work published by writers from Wisconsin. This years winners are being honored with prestigious prizes outside of our state as well, including a Pushcart winner and an Independent Book of the Year Award. They represent a variety of literary genres including poetry, memoir, and young adult fiction. These talented authors display the vitality and breadth of writing happening in Wisconsin.
The reading will feature: the winner of the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award, Sean Bishop ; the winner of the Tofte/Wright Children’s Literature Award, Bridget Birdsall ; the winner of the Kay W. Levin Award for Short Nonfiction, Catherine Jagoe; and the winner of the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award Cathryn Cofell.
Three freshmen must join forces to survive at a troubled, working-class Catholic high school with a student body full of bullies and zealots, and a faculty that's even worse, in Anthony Breznican's Brutal Youth.
With a plunging reputation and enrollment rate, Saint Michael's has become a crumbling dumping ground for expelled delinquents and a haven for the stridently religious when incoming freshman Peter Davidek signs up. On his first day, tensions are clearly on the rise as a picked-upon upperclassmen finally snaps, unleashing a violent attack on both the students who tormented him for so long, and the corrupt, petty faculty that let it happen. But within this desperate place, Peter befriends fellow freshmen Noah Stein, a volatile classmate whose face bears the scars of a hard-fighting past, and the beautiful but lonely Lorelei Paskal, who is so eager to become popular, she makes only enemies.
Wisconsin People & Ideas publishes fiction and poetry from Wisconsin writers, highlights new works from Wisconsin visual artists and photographers, and covers science and environmental issues that affect Wisconsin’s people, lands, and waters. The magazine also hosts annual fiction and poetry contests that award cash prizes up to $500, publication in the magazine, a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival, and more. Since 1954, the independent Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine has been a trusted resource for people who care about the issues and ideas that shape life in Wisconsin.
Featured poets include 2015 poetry contest winners Lisa Vihos (Sheboygan), Sean Avery (Madison), and Kathleen Dale (Milwaukee). Writers Nikki Kallio (Hortonville), Erica Kanesaka Kalnay (Madison), and Kathryn Gahl (Appleton) will read their prize-winning stories from the 2015 fiction contest as well.
Dean Bakopoulos, whose work New York Times bestselling author Lorrie Moore has praised as “full of insight and inspiration and the best kind of divine comedy,” returns with the keenly funny and honest Summerlong. Mixing the light-hearted with the literary, this third novel from the acclaimed writer deftly tackles the subjects of midlife crises and extramarital longing with characteristic humor and aplomb. “Summerlong is Dean Bakopoulos at his finest,” says Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs. “Daringly funny, heartbreakingly sad, and forever on the watch for redemption. This is a book for any season, any reader, anywhere—it shimmers with magic, lust, and love.”
Marian Palaia's gorgeous new novel has earned praise from the likes of Lorrie Moore, Karen Joy Fowler, Jonis Agee, Suzanne Rindell, and more. Spanning twenty-five years of cultural upheaval, moving from Montana to San Francisco to Saigon, The Given World is a major debut from a stunningly talented writer about the effects of war on those left at home.
Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine annually hosts statewide fiction and poetry contests, which award cash awards of up to $500 for works by the best Wisconsin writers as well as other prizes, including a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival. Featuring articles by and about the best scientists, artists, writers, and community leaders our state has to offer, Wisconsin People & Ideas is your guide to contemporary Wisconsin culture at the intersection of the sciences, arts and letters.
Featured poets for 2014 include Dion Kempthorne (Richland Center), Jeanie Tomasko (Madison), and Judith Harway (Shorewood). Karen Loeb (Eau Claire), Jennifer Sauer (Madison), and Marilyn Shapiro Leys (Prairie du Chien) will read their prize-winning stories from the 2014 contest as well.
A collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge--of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world--this offering from Trinidadian poet Lauren Alleyne grapples with personal experience. The poems form a lyric memoir of the author's life, chronicling a journey that includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. The central poem, "Eighteen," which narrates the aftermath of sexual assault, and another, "Thirty," which addresses the virtues of self-reliance, are representative of several poems of age that both chronicle and disrupt time, looking at the speaker's past as a way to understand the present. These poems are a movement through fracture--both necessary and unwarranted--toward wholeness and transformation. This debut collection introduces a striking new voice in poetry.
Fifteen-year-old Alyx Atlas was raised as a boy, yet she knows something others don’t. She’s a girl. And after her dad dies, it becomes painfully obvious that she must prove it now—to herself and to the world. Born with ambiguous genitalia, Alyx has always felt a little different. But it’s after she sustains a terrible beating behind a 7-Eleven that she and her mother pack up their belongings and move from California to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to start a new life—and Alyx begins over again, this time as a girl.
Our scenic route down State Street and through the UW-Madison campus is sure to please both avid runners and strolling supporters alike! Choose your distance with the 10K run, 5K run, or 5k walk, or bring the kids to our 10am Fun Run down State Street! Money raised will support Literacy Network’s programs and help keep classes and tutors free for low-literate adults in Dane County. Better literacy can lead to better jobs, better graduation rates for their children, and better health for their families! For more information visit us online at http://raceroster.com/events/2014/2650/run-for-literacy.
With her evocative prose, Pastan matches the hothouse tension of Du Maurier’s story Rebecca while infusing her new novel, Alena, with its own hairpin twists and turns and devastating denouement. She draws upon her own experience to wonderful effect, giving readers entree into the alluring and sometimes disconcerting world of avant-garde art and artists. The result is a lyrical murder mystery that is just as tantalizing to those who have never read Rebecca as the many for whom it is a cherished classic. From a dazzling inside look at the Venice Biennale to the inner workings of a cutting-edge museum set on a moody and atmospheric Cape Cod, Pastan offers a window into a world of scintillating artistic, erotic, and emotional entanglements. Haunted and haunting, Alena is an inspired and provocative story that explores creative and romantic rivalry and the blurred borderline between art and artist.
Paul O'Rourke is a man made of contradictions: he loves the world, but doesn't know how to live in it. He's a Luddite addicted to his iPhone, a dentist with a nicotine habit, a rabid Red Sox fan devastated by their victories, and an atheist not quite willing to let go of God.
Then someone begins to impersonate Paul online, and he watches in horror as a website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account are created in his name. What begins as an outrageous violation of his privacy soon becomes something more soul-frightening: the possibility that the online "Paul" might be a better version of the real thing. As Paul's quest to learn why his identity has been stolen deepens, he is forced to confront his troubled past and his uncertain future in a life disturbingly split between the real and the virtual.
At once laugh-out-loud funny about the absurdities of the modern world, and indelibly profound about the eternal questions of the meaning of life, love and truth, TO RISE AGAIN AT A DECENT HOUR is a deeply moving and constantly surprising tour de force.
The Wisconsin Book Festival is excited to be partnering with A Room of One's Own Bookstore to welcome Stephan Pastis, creator of the popular Pearls Before Swine comic strip and Timmy Failure, a hilarious book for kids! Stephan will be giving a sidesplitting slideshow for his latest Pearls Before Swine collection, Pearls Falls Fast, for a reading and book signing.
Please keep your hooves, paws, and snouts inside the ride at all times--- the Pearls Before Swine gang is back! Pearls Falls Fast: A Pearls Before Swine Treasury continues the saga of lovable Pig, cynical Rat, and the whole crew with two years' worth of the award-winning, New York Times best-selling comic strip Pearls Before Swine. This treasury includes strips from the collections Unsportsmanlike Conduct and Rat's Wars, along with new commentary from cartoonist Stephan Pastis himself, showcasing even more of his cynical wit and humor than the papers can handle.
Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine annually hosts statewide fiction and poetry contests, which award cash awards of up to $500 for works by the best Wisconsin writers as well as other prizes, including a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival. Featuring articles by and about the best scientists, artists, writers, and community leaders our state has to offer, Wisconsin People & Ideas is your guide to contemporary Wisconsin culture at the intersection of the sciences, arts and letters.
Reading at this event are the winners of the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2013 Poetry Contest—Geoff Collins (Marshall), William Quist (River Falls) and C.E. Perry (Madison)—and the 2013 Fiction Contest—Amy Baker (Blue Mounds), Rudy Koshar (Madison) and Geoff Collins (Marshall).
2013-14 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Max Garland, will read a selection of his poetry. The Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, who selected Garland as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, praised his poetry for its richness of language, human understanding, and accessibility to broad audiences. As Wisconsin’s Poet Laureate, Garland hopes to “reach out to those who may feel alienated from the world of poetry (or art), and yet have deeply felt experiences to record and honor…. [P]oetry is still a means of expression open to everyone. It’s one of those things that’s just too important to be left to experts.” In particular, Garland is “interested in promoting the connection between poetry and place, and urging young, as well as young-at-heart writers, to write of the places they know and explore their relationships with those places in poetry.”
Join teachers, students and members of the Madison branch of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in a discussion of the 60th annual JANE ADDAMS award winning children's books. Learn how you can use the books in your classroom or living room to help children learn about and practice peace and justice in their everyday lives. This session will feature readings, book displays and a roundtable discussion of this year's winners: Each Kindness and We Have a Job.
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