Authors Electric

Zadie Smith: Intimations on culture and COVID COVID-19 has rearranged our metaphors, especially for those of my advanced years, and co-morbidities that require lying low. Hunter-gatherer/adventure-hero idioms have taken a back seat to quieter images of fishing (online) and burrowing, surviving on deliveries from FedEx, Instacart, and Amazon. No longer able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, I am a hermit crab in a conch shell, a trapdoor spider awaiting victuals via Grubhub. I thought about how the pandemic affects me creatively beyond material circumstances while reading Intimations , a powerful collection of six, "shape-shifting," intimate essays about the COVID-related experiences of Zadie Smith . In this slim volume, the British born, NYU literary professor, essayist, and novelist crosses the Atlantic on the high wire of writing with grace and insight about unfolding tragedy whose conclusion remains uncertain. The brilliance with which she succeeds flas...

Well, it’s been a bit since I last posted about my ongoing countdown of the best self - published books I’ve found. So lets get right to it. Rooted - Idabell Allen Pick your own cover! Personally, I like them both, though the punk rock cow really speaks to me.. I have to admit that when I first read this book, I had no idea that it was self-published. I met Idabell Allen at a conference in New Orleans in September of last year. She was presenting a paper on the podcast S-Town (and if you haven’t heard that podcast, do yourself a favor and start downloading it now) and mentioned in passing her own novel about a misfit in a small Southern town, which she described as “Sid Vicious stuck in rural Tennessee.” Being a huge Sex Pistols fan from all the way back in high school, and being a Southern lit scholar since grad school, obviously this was an idea I found all too intriguing. Total punk and rule-breaker right there. During the luncheon, she and I found ours...