This super cool bookshelf called “Maintain The Balance of Your Knowledge!” by designer Denis Oh shifts and swings from side to side according to the placement of your books. A simple adjustment of the placing of your books results in a dynamic change in the look of the shelf. The shelf is weighted with hanging counter-balancers that can be used to balance the shelf by moving the weights horizontally. Trendhunter
Grace Kelly, Joan Didion, and Sylvia Plath were all guests. For some women, it was a launch pad. For others, it was a trap.
As her new book No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute is released, Lauren Elkin discusses how we can reconnect with the community to be found in city life
One of NPR's Best Books of the Year \"Straight's memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the women's stories . . . The aftereffect of all these disparate stories juxtaposed in a single epic is remarkable. Its resonance lingers for days after reading.\" --San Francisco Chronicle In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight--and eventually her three daughters--heard for decades the stories of Dwayne's female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight's mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan's family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward--from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California. A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan--those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, \"The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.\" \"Certain books give off the sense that you won't want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight's new memoir, In the Country of Women . . . Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned-together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb . . . Straight gives us permission to remember what went before with passion and attachment.\" --Los Angeles Times Author: Susan Straight Publisher: Catapult Published: 08/06/2019 Pages: 384 Binding Type: Hardcover Weight: 1.60lbs Size: 9.10h x 6.40w x 1.50d ISBN: 9781948226226 Review Citation(s): Publishers Weekly 05/06/2019 Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2019 pg. 82 Booklist 06/01/2019 pg. 24 About the Author SUSAN STRAIGHT has published eight novels, including Highwire Moon, Between Heaven and Here, and A Million Nightingales. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Magazine Award. She is the recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Granta, McSweeney's, Black Clock, Harper's, and other journals. Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, and Russian. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, where she lives with her family.
“I come up with a form and then find a way to ‘translate’ my thoughts into the form. It wasn’t always like that, but that’s the way it is now. I used to think in lines.” —Elisa Gabbert, author of The Word Pretty
Stress is a useful biological mechanism, because if we didn’t get stressed out, we would just be like, “F-it, who needs a job? Or love? Or emotional and financial success? NOT ME!” I don’t even know what would happen — I guess maybe we would just…
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Since I launched the 2013 summer reading guide, I've had lots of requests for the archived 2012 edition. I don't want to flood your inboxes, but I also
Explore Joe Kral's 5579 photos on Flickr!
As Content Marketing intern, Melissa is our resident authority on UTM links, Instagram and post-apocalyptic click-worthy questions. Based in Berlin, she is
Joan Didion's writing could be intensely personal or completely detached. But it always resonated deeply.
I first fell in love with nonfiction in college when I took a feminist-focused creative nonfiction writing class. The stories we were required to read, which is what they really were at their core — stories — read like fiction. They kept me hooked…
