Bill welcomes novelist, essayist, and teacher Aimee Liu to the show. Aimee is the author of numerous bestselling novels as well as nonfiction books on medical and psychological topics. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms., and many other publications. She is on the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA. Aimee earned her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. She worked as a flight attendant, edited business and trade publications, and was an associate producer for NBC’s TODAY show before turning to writing full-time. Her latest novel is Glorious Boy. Don’t miss it!
News & Review Type: News
Author2Author with Aimee Liu
The Booklist Reader: Glorious Boy
Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures—and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents—Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing power of indigenous plants, and American Claire, a would-be anthropologist without an official degree—arrive in 1936 in the remote Andaman Islands in India’s Bay of Bengal. Ty is born into their near-idyllic paradise, colonial as it is, and is beloved by all, but his closest attachment is to the servants’ daughter Naila, who is eight years older. By 1942, looming war demands all expats to evacuate the islands. Hours before departure, Ty and Naila disappear. Having frantically thrust Claire onto the final rescue ship bound for Calcutta, Shep is left to search. Reunion is the only goal that keeps Claire alive. Best-selling Liu’s latest is a fascinating, irresistible marvel.
Drinks With Tony: Episode #87 Deborah A. Lott
Deborah A. Lott is the author of Don’t Go Crazy Without Me: A Tragicomic Memoir. She’s also the author of In Session: The Bond Between Women and Their Therapists.
Summer of the Cicadas: Local author Chelsea Catherine on the importance of queer literature
There’s nothing quite like witness the emergence of cicadas from their 17-year slumber. Of course it’s rather the noise you won’t soon forget. My senior year of high school cicadas emerged in CT and their cacophonous buzzing felt like a fitting farewell ahead of my move to Florida. A new novel from St. Petersburg resident Chelsea Catherine will bring the elusive insects to shelves in the Sunshine City, and across the country.
Check out the full feature on ilovetheburg now!
Read Wilderness Excerpt: Subduction Chapter Seven
The pacific frothed at the shore, its distant gray spreading into white foam and retreating, flattened by its own mass against the long curve of the horizon. The sea has neither mercy nor pity, she thought, not recognizing her plagiarism for a full minute. Chekhov. Check off the boxes on your formal education and file it away; it does so little good out here in the world.
LARB: En la Brega: An Interview with Kristen Millares Young
IN APRIL 2020, Red Hen Press published Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel, Subduction. Described by the novelist Shawn Wong as “a lyrical forest of storytelling rooted in indigenous voices,” Young’s book centers upon the field work of Latina anthropologist Claudia Ranks in Neah Bay, a Native American whaling village on the westernmost edge of the contiguous United States. Struggling through her own damage, Claudia tries to lose herself in her research but instead starts a relationship with her informant’s son, who returns home to the Makah Indian Reservation to uncover answers about his father’s murder. Subduction portrays the complex experience of racial grief that results from being severed from our cultural identities. It is messy to find human connection as a cultural outsider marred by the complexities of betrayal. With Subduction, veteran investigative journalist Young takes on the ethics of storytelling across racial identities.
The Daily: Kristen Millares Young on her debut novel ‘Subduction,’ her time at UW, and publishing a book during a pandemic
Before I ended my conversation with Kristen Millares Young — journalist, essayist, and author of her debut novel “Subduction,” which was released in April — she wanted to tell me about the tardigrade, a microscopic animal whose picture she keeps on her desk.
“This creature has survived all five of our planetary extinctions; it can survive space, it can be dehydrated for 10 years, come back, and live,” Young said. “It is truly one of the most confounding and resilient little creatures on this planet.”
The Seattle Time: Here’s what Seattle-based journalist, novelist and Hugo House writer-in-residence Kristen Millares Young is reading this month
This month: Seattle-based author and journalist Kristen Millares Young, whose excellent debut novel, “Subduction,” set in Neah Bay, is a staff pick at The Paris Review. Young earned her master’s degree in creative writing in 2012 from the University of Washington, was a fellow at Seattle’s Jack Straw Writers Program, and is now a prose writer-in-residence at Hugo House, where she performs, teaches and mentors other writers. Young reported for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for five years and has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post and beyond.
PIGS by Johanna Stoberock featured on TODAY Show with Hoda and Jenna
June Read With Jenna Book Club author Megha Majumdar recommends PIGS by Johanna Stoberock as one of five books to read next!
See the full segment here!
KATU2: Don’t Go Crazy Without Me interview
Don’t Go Crazy Without Me tells the tragicomic coming of age story of a girl who grew up under the seductive sway of her outrageously eccentric father. He taught her how to have fun; he also taught her to fear food poisoning, other children’s infectious diseases, and the contaminating propensities of the world at large. Alienated from her emotionally distant mother, the girl bonded closely with her father and his worldview. When he plunged from neurotic to full-blown psychotic, she nearly followed him. Sanity is not always a choice, but for the sixteen-year-old, decisions had to be made and lines drawn between reality and what her mother called her “overactive imagination.” She would have to give up beliefs carried by the infectious agent of her father’s love.
Media: Maurya Simon reads at UA Poetry
Maurya Simon reads poems from The Wilderness: New & Selected Poems 1980-2016 (2018). This reading was originally given with Peggy Shumaker as the inaugural reading in the Tom Sanders Memorial Reading Series.
South Sydney Herald: Toward Antarctica – an insider’s love letter to one of the world’s wild places
I doubt I will ever go to the Antarctic but this book makes me feel I’ve (almost) encountered it. Bradfield recommends listening to the “unearthly” underwater vocalisations of Weddell seals, and making changes at home to prevent plastic pollution and carbon emissions that can make a difference in Antarctica – a place she has worked in since 2004 as a naturalist on ecotourism expedition ships and been obsessed with since discovering Alfred Lansing’s Endurance at a used book store in 1997.
IPPY-Winning Poets Speak Out
This year’s IPPY Awards had 148 entries into our two categories: Poetry– General and Poetry–Specialty. We awarded a total of 11 medals to poetry books; two each of gold, silver, and bronze medals in the general category (the most medals awarded in any category); four medals in the specialty category; and one book of poetry received our special Outstanding Book of the Year Award for “Outstanding Voice.” Here’s what some of our winning poets have to say:
Kim Dower’s fourth poetry collection, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, tied for a gold medal in the Poetry – Standard category of the IPPYs this year. Dower finds inspiration for her poetry in everyday life: “On any given day, something mundane is bound to inspire me. This morning I noticed a single, shiny black bird feather on the ground right outside my front door. Inspiration.”
Rattlecast: William Trowbridge
Episode #39 welcomes former Missouri Poet Laureate William Trowbridge and has new book, Oldguy: Superhero—poems from which have been featured regularly in Rattle for years.
The Imagination Is Free: And So Is this Lecture
David Mason gives a hypothetical “last lecture”!