Mary Odden’s Blog
Date: June 4, 2020
https://www.maryodden.com/neighborsblog
Date: June 4, 2020
https://www.maryodden.com/neighborsblog
Date: June 3, 2020
My new novel Glorious Boy began with a dream. On a tropical island during an emergency evacuation, a young girl was hiding in a dense rainforest with a small, mute white boy […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Aimee Liu talks about GLORIOUS BOY, the excruciating process of writing, creating a memorable silent character, her shapeshifter dad, and so much more.
Date: June 3, 2020
Some 30 years ago, an established nonfiction writer and a screenwriter decided to write their first novels. They met in a fiction writing class, and have been friends ever since, […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Featured mentioning of Percival Everett’s Colonel Hap Thompson!
Date: June 3, 2020
Presented in five poetic sequences, the poems in Hold Me Tight by gay poet Jason Schneiderman focuses the reader’s attention on the subjects of anger, real and metaphorical wolves, the work of the late […]
Date: June 3, 2020
At 15, Plum Valentine is banished from her Brooklyn home and sent back to Jamaica by parents nervous about the pernicious effects of the American lifestyle. Once there, her trust […]
Date: June 3, 2020
In the bedroom of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, there’s a mural depicting a well-dressed crowd at a cocktail party pasted to the wall. Spencer’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester, points to […]
Date: June 3, 2020
Family relations can be fraught in the best of times, even when people care deeply for one another. So what happens when you throw those family members into a situation […]
Date: June 3, 2020
It’s Detroit, 1968. Sisters Rosa and Esther march against the war in Vietnam with their best friend, Maggie. As they reached the rally site, double rows of blank-faced National Guard […]
Date: September 24, 2009
Erinn Batykefer’s award-winning debut collection given a 4 1/2 star review on Library Thing: “The mark of excellent poetry is that it leads you to places you could never find […]
Date: September 9, 2009
Ching-In Chen’s debut collection of poems is a sprawling and ambitious work …. I found myself admiring the book for being so satisfyingly messy, for allowing itself to sprawl and […]
Date: July 4, 2009
A lot of the most exciting prose published in the last couple years is enlivened by the introduction of non-English elements. The Times Book Review made note of the way […]
Date: June 22, 2009
6 + 1: Interview with Timothy Green I introduce a new feature, the "6 + 1" interview. I ask my guests six questions, and they get to ask me one […]
Date: June 22, 2009
Memory provides the raw material for the stories we tell about ourselves. Or maybe memories are fictions themselves, vague impressions of feelings combined with fleeting shards of images woven together […]
Date: June 22, 2009
Language can be an intriguing subject, and author Orlando White explores the language we speak every day, English. "Bone Light" is his discussion through verse of the subject, exploring the […]
Date: June 17, 2009
The stories in Greg Sanders's debut collection are difficult to categorize. They owe a debt to Franz Kafka and fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges but seem just as strongly to […]
Date: June 3, 2009
AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW, Vol. 30, No. 4, May/June 2009"Author of the prize-winning novel The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts (2001), editor of several literary anthologies and numerous essays and stories […]
Date: June 2, 2009
DeWitt Henry, mon sembable, mon frere, was two years behind me at Amherst, but way ahead of me in life. While the rest of us were yearning for graduate school, […]
Date: May 18, 2009
The work of the poet is one of reassessment: it's a continual look at the intricacies and minutiae of a world outfitted with a voluminous gadgetry of words. Poems, at […]