Among the notable observations I have made during recent trips to Orlando, Florida, were the highway signs pointing to Celebration. Thinking this was some strange slang Floridians use for Disney World, I later learned Celebration is a community designed by Walt Disney Company as a model city of the future. This whole idea of creating a utopian community both disturbs [...]
Colin Sokolowski author of The Accidental Adult should teach a course in how to deal with surly book bloggers. Seriously. The email he sent to me about his book should be forwarded from author to author and publicist to publicist as the textbook way to get your book noticed. It was short (nice), funny (super nice), and it showed that [...]
University of Minnesota Duluth professor Linda LeGarde Grover’s The Dance Boots is an interconnected short story collection about indigenous families from the fictional Mozhay Point Indian Reservation set in northern Minnesota. Spanning several decades in the twentieth century, the stories of the families in The Dance Boots show the disturbing reality many indigenous families deal with on a regular basis: [...]
You are about to experience a great moment in MN Reads’ history. Yes, we’re making history here today. How exciting is that? I’m pretty pleased that Kurtis Scaletta now holds the unique honor of being the first person to appear twice in MN Reads’ 6 questions feature (read his first set of answers). That bodes well for both of us. [...]
Being the only non-Minnesotan in my family, I had to take a history course in college to learn about the state I moved to some sixteen years ago. So in 2004, my second course at Augsburg College was Bill Green’s Minnesota History. Green, who recently stepped down after four years serving as Minneapolis’ public school superintendent, used a textbook by [...]
Laurie Lindeen (who answered MN Reads 6 questions last year) sets us up for a solid rock-n-roll road-trip in Petal Pusher: A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story. With its sassy pink cover, this memoir will do its best to surprise you with brutal honesty and boundless energy. Lindeen and her band, Zuzu’s Petals, may not have it easy, but they [...]
You know how sometimes you sit down with a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints with the intent of only having a few (and who knows why your brought the whole sleeve with you, but you did) and then a few hours later you seem to wake from a mint-cookie induced reverie to discover you’ve eaten the whole sleeve? That’s [...]
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of talking to me about genre fiction or sex in literature you know that I like to start a lot of sentences with “Well, in my sex writing class. . . ” Then I spout off something I learned in my sex writing class or that I’m trying to pretend like I learned there. [...]
This isn’t the most eloquent thing I’ve ever said about a book, but holy schmoly The House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni is just so freakin’ cool. Little orphan Sebastian lives with his Grandma, a Bucky Fuller groupie, in a geodesic dome in Iowa — a House of Tomorrow slash tourist destination complete with a gift shop and a sales [...]
Before I get to the bio information that I blatantly stole from her website, I have to tell you two things. One, Gayla’s answers sent me a Googling like a madwoman. I’ve learned a lot, which is awesome. Second, I think our own Ben will add about half of the books Gayla talks about to his “To Read” list. Now [...]
