Author: ALU Editor
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Off/Kilter: Interview with Madeline Sonik
This month Off/Kilter sits down with Madeline Sonik to chat about her newest short story collection Fontainebleau (Anvil Press). Set in the mythical city of the same name, Fontainebleau is a place where something dark lurks – from poison in the soil all the way up to something menacing in the sky. In our interview,…
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In Review: The Week of August 17th
This week includes author interviews, books recommendations for all kinds of summer moods, book picks for armchair travel in the time of quarantine, and more!
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5 Quarantine-Approved Books for When You Miss Travelling
Fulfill your wanderlust as you armchair travel across time and space to unfamiliar places with these five quarantine-approved books.
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On Beauty: An Interview with Bahar Orang
In her hybrid book of lyric essay and prose poetry, Where Things Touch (Book*hug Press), poet and physician-in-training Bahar Orang considers the meanings and possibilities of beauty, reimagining what it really is and how we define it. A thoughtful, meditative book that explores intimacy, care, queerness, and love, this a debut that goes on a search for beauty beyond…
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ALU Summer Book Club: Interview with Ursula Pflug
One of the highlights of book club is going straight to the source: this week we electronically sat down with the inimitable Ursula Pflug, author of Seeds and Other Stories (Inanna Publications), to chat about dreams, alternate realities, surrealist influences, and more. Plus, we share a clip of Ursula reading from her collection, below.
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5 Books for 5 Summer Reading Moods
We’ve got a roundup of five books for all kinds of summer reading tastes—from a page-turning action-adventure to the “Fast Car” of novels to a queer slice-of-life drama, our book recommendations will fit all of your summer reading moods.
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In Review: The Week of August 10th
This week we bookclubbed, completed another Read Harder Challenge, chatted with authors, and more!
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On compositional improvisation and Music at the Heart of Thinking: An interview with Fred Wah
Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking (Talonbooks) is is a lifelong poem project that responds to readings in contemporary writing, art, and ideas from the past forty years. It works through language as a practice of thought and improvisation as the tool that listens to and notates thinking. Below, poet James Lindsay (Double Self-Portrait, Wolsak & Wynn) talks…
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Writer’s Block: John Gould
Giller-Prize-finalist John Gould who has just published his new book The End of Me (Freehand Books)—a collection of flash fiction about death—joins us to talk about his influences (from Ernest Becker to Basho), how the phrase “We and the beasts are kin” set him on a path to writing, and more.Photo credit Sandy Mayzel
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ALU Summer Book Club: Seeds and Other Stories Discussion
Not even quarantine life or Zoom hiccups could stop us from serving up our annual summer book club with a discussion of Ursula Pflug’s fantastical and magical collection of short stories Seeds and Other Stories (Inanna Publications). Read on for the spoiler-filled highlights from our staff chat and a reading guide for your own book club discussion!
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Read Harder Challenge 11 & 12
Throughout 2020, All Lit Up-er Tan Light is participating in BookRiot’s Read Harder Challenge—a reading task designed to expand readerly boundaries—and doing so with an indie twist. Each entry in this series will highlight one or two completed challenges along with a list of books from All Lit Up to have you reading harder, too! This month’s…
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In Review: The Week of August 3rd
This week includes August book club, a baseball essay, sickness poetry, horror as a tool for anti-racism, and more.
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Writer’s Block: Uma Menon
At the age of 15, Uma Menon wrote what would become Hands for Language (Mawenzi House), a collection of poetry that sees the world through the eyes of a young girl of colour living in America. In this edition of Writer’s Block, Uma shares about how her love of writing began in elementary school, one…
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Poetry in Motion: Lauren Turner
In her debut collection The Only Card in a Deck of Knives (Wolsak & Wynn) Lauren Turner considers societal impulses to reject sick women: these fierce poems told from the perspective of a twentysomething female speaker with a terminal disease juxtapose the violence of a gendered illness with the violence women and non-binary people experience. We…
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ALU Book Club: Intro to Seeds and Other Stories
All Lit Up’s Summer Book Club continues this month with another brand new read! Throughout August, we’re taking on Ursula Pflug’s otherworldly collection Seeds and Other Stories. To kick things off, we chatted with Inanna Publications Editor-in-Chief, Luciana Ricciutelli, for more about how the press helped bring the collection to life.