I’m not sure how the Mt. Airy Kids’ Lit Fest started six years ago. I suspect that some exceptionally bright five year old—reading at a tenth grade level, of course—stomped his feet and held his breath until some beleaguered staff person broke down and said, “Alright already, Kid! Cool your jets! We’ll get all of our favorite children’s authors and illustrators together for a weekend of free readings, signings, and crafts! There will be music classes and puppet shows! There will be door prizes and giveaways! There will be food! Did I mention that all of this will be FREE?” And then, that genius kid, whoever he was, dried his crocodile tears and popped the snot bubble that had crusted over his left nostril and walked off into the sunset. And lo, a festival was born.
Stop Snoring, Bernard! by Zachariah OHora (Henry Holt, $16.99)
Seriously Just Go to Sleep by Adam Mansbach. Illustrated by Ricardo Cortes (Akashic, $15.95)
Sasquatch’s Big Hairy Drawing Book by Chris McDonnell (Chronicle, $12.95)
Little Dog Lost: The True Story of a Brave Dog Named Baltic by Monica Carnesi (Penguin, $15.99)
What is it with houses? You kill someone in one of them and they’re just like elephants—they never forget. They go on about their business providing shelter and whatnot, but they’re irrevocably imbued with some kind of evil. What’s the deal, houses? Can’t we all just get along? Here are five novels starring real estate you definitely don’t want to own.
I am a big, fat cheater. Maybe you’d already figured that out. I’ve already confessed to snooping through people’s personal effects and reading the last lines of a book first, so this really shouldn’t surprise you. This month I’ve figured out a way to cheat this staff pick list. I’ve had someone else do the work for me, some poor unsuspecting volunteers at Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York. I snowed ‘em with the old, “I’m looking for a book. I don’t remember what it’s called or who wrote it but I think the cover was yellow and it might be about dogs’ butts?” Works every time. Give it up for evil genius, folks. Henceforth you may call me Madame Dastardly.
Ooooooh, kids! This month some of my favorite authors are droppin’ mad science! I will clarify. Usually, when I say “mad science” I am being very literal. I am talking Victor Frankenstein and Christopher Lloyd’s bats@*t crazy Doc Brown from Back to the Future. But in this instance I am being idiomatic, using the Urban Dictionary definition of “droppin’ science” which is “to rhyme, or say or do something original or unique, especially when rapping or in music.” So this October happens to be when several of my go-to authors release new work. They will continue, as is their wont, to do something original or unique, and consequently blind me with SCIENCE!
Don’t let the trashy covers put you off. It’s a design thing that all the publishing kids are doing these days: slapping a scantily clad white chick with tattoos and/or ridiculous weapons on the front cover of urban fantasy novels. It usually sends my eyes rolling far into the back of my head because it’s, like, way off-putting. I mean, I know that urban fantasy is a genre like any other, and like any other it has its clichés, and that the clichés can get hecka annoying, like when the first person female narrator prior to meeting her smokin’-hot-sexy-pants vampire/were/fae/angel/demon mate says stuff like “I’m 5’ 10”, 125 lbs with honey-blond hair, but with some eye-liner on I can pass for exotic,” but these fulsome covers make it impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. But, take heart, dear reader, I have done the dirty work for you. I have slogged through these mass market UF series with their tawdry covers and selected the roses among thorns. Yeah, somebody had to do it.
What with all the jibber jabber about Paris in the pages of recent indie bestsellers, I got to thinking about Philly and how it rarely gets top billing as the star of those kind of Eat, Pray, Love type books—as the romantic city so steeped in literary history and gastronomic inspiration that it can shake a life to its foundations and EFFECT GREAT CHANGE. It more often has a supporting role as the backdrop of a gritty crime drama. But here are five books where Philly and its neighborhoods get the star treatment, where like the New York City of Sex and the City, it gets to play the all important “fifth lady” in a stellar ensemble cast.
I’ll be honest, maps make me anxious. In order to read them they require two very important things: 1) that you know where you are and, 2) that you know where you’re going. This is a surefire way to send me into an existential crisis. I am that girl who hears the Mahogany theme song every time she steps out the door: Do you know where you’re going to?/ Do you like the things that life is showing you?/ Where are you going to?/ Do you know? So, here are several map collections, real and imagined, guaranteed to point me, I mean you, in the right direction.
It’s cold, folks, and I am like a bear. I want to sleep and eat—not necessarily in that order—and there’s nothing quite like a good bedtime story to kick off my annual winter hibernation. I also like a nice glass of warm milk (preferably 80 or 100 proof) before I hunker down in my cave. But be warned, kiddies, this list, like many a trendy Philadelphia restaurant, is strictly BYOB.
This year marks the 16th anniversary of the release of the movie Pulp Fiction. I give Pulp Fiction the dubious honor of being THE MOVIE THAT STOLE MY CHILDHOOD. Before seeing it, I had only vague, shadowy imaginings of the concepts of drug overdose and male rape. Pulp Fiction exposed me to both amidst trenchant mirth and gleeful mayhem in harsh, glaring Technicolor. Here are five books that did something similar. Yeah, I’m a big girl now, but I don’t have to like it.
Already you’re looking at me funny and I didn’t even do anything. I just said "steampunk" and you were all: huh? And I was all: you know, it’s kind of like a futuristic vision of the world based on a distinctly Victorian version of the future peopled with fantastical steam-powered machines, dirigibles called airships, people who fly them called aeronauts, bustles, monocles, goggles and other coggy, clockwork goodness inspired by the writings of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and authors of that ilk. You’re all: dude, you’re blowing my mind. Let’s go get an Orange Julius.
Oh, you know you’ve done it. You open a book and flip right to the end. You read the last line first, you impatient, spoiler-loving son of a gun! I do it because I like an author who knows how to close. If you can nail the end, then at least I know you’re good for a beginning and a middle.
I confess: I’m a snoop. I will go through the text messages on your cell phone. I will read your email and sift through your private papers. If you have a deep, dark secret, do not keep it in a shoebox in your closet. I will find it. Luckily, there is a literary genre that allows me to indulge my need to snoop: the epistolary novel. I can read other people’s fake letters and nobody gets hurt.
Back in the day when I was just a young lass we didn’t take kindly to upstart whippersnappers inserting zombies or denizens of the underworld into our literary classics. Here are five books you’ll like if Pride and Prejudice and Zombies holds little or no appeal for you. The Wide
It’s no Jane Slayre, but why should it be? Where is it written that in order to re-imagine the great gothic masterpiece that is Jane Eyre we have to add the undead? I’ve got plenty of problems with Jane Eyre (you mean there’s a madwoman in the attic who burns Thornfield Hall to the ground leaving Rochester blind and minus one hand? you mean that even though Rochester is blind, minus one hand and has kept his first wife locked in the attic for years Jane still marries him?) but zombies aren’t the answer. Jean Rhys understands that. In this prequel of sorts, she crawls inside of the gothic trappings of the original novel and with prose that is lush, effective and evocative fleshes out the life of that madwoman in the attic from her childhood in the West Indies, through her marriage to
Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin (Vintage, $13.95).
Mary Reilly is a servant in the household of one Doctor Henry Jekyll and I’m going to flat out tell you that I don’t envy her. The guy keeps totally weird hours. He’s supposedly brilliant but then he turns up at dawn all rumpled and bleary-eyed as if this learned man of science has spent the night tripping the light fantastic instead of holed up in his laboratory. Then there’s his new “assistant” Mr. Hyde, a feral creature with “cold eyes” and a face “charged with anger.” There is a darkness about these two men which both draws and repels Mary, requiring her to confront the demons of her own troubled childhood. Valerie Martin gives us the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from Mary’s perspective and it becomes a deeply human exploration of Good and Evil, as well as a tale of those who slip through Evil’s fingers and live to tell. No Zombies need apply.
The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall (Mariner Books, $12.95).
I confess: I hate Scarlett O’Hara. It’s hard to admit because I love an epic. I love a feisty heroine. I love a sweeping family saga that spans generations, but the politics of Gone with the Wind have always made me queasy. Alice Randall had a similar love-hate relationship with the novel, which prompted her to write The Wind Done Gone. Presented as the diary of a mulatto slave woman named Cynara, Scarlett’s half-sister and contemporary, this slim novel takes place alongside the original in a world where Scarlett is referred to as Other, Rhett Butler as R., and Tara as simply Cotton Farm. These iconic characters through their naming have been reduced to truncated versions of themselves or even (gasp!) stereotypes, not unlike the slave characters in Gone with the Wind. Randall’s novel is more than a mere reversal of perspective however; it’s a thoughtful meditation on racial politics and a spare, lyrically told story to boot. Well, fiddle-dee-dee!
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (Penguin, $13.95).
Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Well, not Angela Carter and certainly none of the heroines she’s created in her collection of re-imagined fairy tales. With a keen eye for the symbolism already present in the classic Brothers Grimm oeuvre, Carter transforms familiar stories into lush, sensual tales that reexamine women’s roles and sexual agency in a way that is both bold and intelligent. Gone are the typical damsels in distress on the lookout for Prince Charming. Instead, Carter’s heroines are more likely to laugh in the face of the wolf despite those huge, lupine eyes, and sharp, pointy teeth. They carry knives beneath their red riding hoods and they aren’t afraid to use them.
Fool by Christopher Moore (Harper Collins, $26.99).
Never one to back down from a challenge, Christopher Moore goes balls out and pretty much has his way with King Lear. Fool is witty, vulgar, sublime and profane, and I wholeheartedly applaud him for sticking it to the Bard. People tend to treat Shakespeare with kid gloves and I’m not sure why. I mean, he’s pretty venerable. The man’s survived over 400 years in print, I think he can stand up to a little ruddy manhandling from an American author with undaunted pluck. Told from the point of view of Pocket, Lear’s clever fool, this novel is a rollicking romp in five acts through the treacherous minefield of Lear family relationships. It’s up to Pocket to help long-suffering Cordelia regain her father’s esteem, and he’ll use every joke, pun and ditty in his arsenal to achieve that end.
