PATV Channel 18 » literature

Live From Prairie Lights – Gold Goy Emerald Girl

admin — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:00:23 +0000

Gold Boy Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li. “In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, PEN/Hemmingway Award-winner and acclaimed author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, give us exquisite fiction, filled with suspense, depth, and beauty, in which history, politics, and folklore magnificently intertwine with the human condition.

In the title story “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” a professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student’s true affections. In “A Man Like Him,” a lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man who is wrongly accused of an indiscretion. In “The Proprietress,” a reporter from Shanghai travels to a small town to write an article about the local prison, only to discover a far more intriguing story involving a shopkeeper who offers refuge to the wives and children of inmates. In “House Fire,” a young man who suspects his father of sleeping with the young man’s wife seeks the help of a detective agency run by a group of feisty old women.

Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl reveals worlds strange and familiar, and cultures both traditional and contemporary, to create a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.”

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Live From Prairie Lights – Community Stories Writing Workshop

admin — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 20:29:31 +0000

Rossina Liu, Thomas W. Case, Meg Jacobs, Patti Silvia, Joel Njus present the Iowa City Community Stories Writing Workshop. In this special event, writers from the Community Stories Writing Workshop at The Iowa City Shelter House will read from a collection of their work. The reading will celebrate the Shelter House Community Stories Writers’ Workshop portfolio, published by the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. Please join us to hear The Shelter House Community Writers share their remarkable stories.

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Iowa City Book Festival: Dancing with Gravity reading

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:11:13 +0000

Anene Tressler reads from her debut novel, Dancing with Gravity, at the Iowa City Book Festival 2011. “Father Whiting is asleep in his own life. As a St. Louis priest and the head of Pastoral Care at a local teaching hospital, he’s already on edge wondering if he’s up to the job and wondering how far his predecessor’s–and now his–secretary will go to sabotage him. He is fatigued by his mother’s increasingly erratic behavior, fears he is incapable of ministering to an old friend and fellow priest stricken with cancer, and secretly longs to share everything about his confused, mixed-up life with the very attractive Sarah James, the hospital’s head of public relations. When he overhears a heated argument between the Chairman of the Board and the Abbess who runs the hospital, he fears his job will soon be history. Instead, he finds himself tapped to minister to a small Central American circus bequeathed to an order of aging nuns in St. Louis. Through his deepening relationship with Nikolai, the enigmatic trapeze artist, Whiting wakes to his loneliness, realizes he has been living a half-life, and finally finds the courage to be the man he was meant to be. In Dancing with Gravity, Anene Tressler, an Emmy Award-winning writer, paints an unforgettable portrait of the grand and petty motivations of the human heart. Her poignant exploration of lost, unrecognized and courageous love will prompt you to consider your own journey toward purpose and fulfillment.” For more information, contact the author at AneneWrites.Wordpress.com

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Live From Prairie Lights – The Last Dickens

admin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 20:09:13 +0000

The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl – “With The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl reopens one of literary history’s greatest mysteries in his most enthralling novel yet, a tale filled with the dazzling twists and turns, the unerring period details, and the meticulous research that thrilled readers of bestsellers The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow.”

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Live From Prairie Lights – The Iowa Review

admin — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 15:25:30 +0000

The Iowa Review with editor, Russell Valentino – “The Iowa Review is an American literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. Founded in 1970, this magazine is issued three times a year, during the months of April, August, and December. Originally, it was released on a quarterly basis. This frequency of publication lasted until its fourteenth year. It is published at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. According to former editor David Hamilton, The Iowa Review has a circulation of about 3,000, of which 1,000-1,500 are distributed to major bookstore chains. The reading period for unsolicited submissions occurs between September and November, whereas contest submissions for the Iowa Review Awards are read in January. In addition to space dedicated in the December issue to the Iowa Review Awards winners, the magazine has recently featured work from the University of Iowa’s biannual, NonfictioNow conference and from writers in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Past issues have also been dedicated to topics such as fiction from Israel and Palestine, contemporary women writers, and an homage to Ezra Pound. According to the magazine’s website, “We select most of our content from the several thousand unsolicited manuscripts that arrive each year from throughout the country and abroad.” Several of these pieces are selected each year for awards and anthologies: recent selections include Susan Perabo’s short story “Shelter” for The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses, 2011 edition, Eula Biss’s essay “Time and Distance Overcome” and Carolyne Wright’s poem “This dream the world is having about itself…” for The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses, 2010 edition; Patricia Hampl’s essay “The Dark Art of Description”, selected by Mary Oliver for The Best American Essays 2009; and Stephen Dunn’s “Where He Found Himself”, in Best American Poetry 2007.”

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Bad Driving: Crime, Wrecks, Drugs and Sex

admin — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:25:45 +0000

Craig’s Corner hosted by Craig Dahlen presenting Bad Driving: Crime, Wrecks, Drugs and Sex by David Hice. “This story is about wrecks and recklessness, about cars being abused and murdered, and people who shouldn’t reproduce. Welcome to David’s world as he wrecks his way from the East to West Coast, surviving over a dozen car accidents without a scratch and countless felonies under the radar. It’s a miracle he’s not dead, disabled, or in prison. Luckily, he was born a Teflon baby. Mr. Hice and his friends have burned, drowned, and relentlessly trashed their vehicles. His credentials include flying a car farther the the Wright Brother’s first plane flight. There were high-speed police pursuits and other legal issues. Although his license was suspended for years, he continued to drive naked in parts of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. There were multiple identities found in his briefcase when he was arrested in the Miami International Airport. Over the years he’s had to hire seven different attorneys. If you’ve ever been in a car accident, had sex or done drugs, Baby Boomer, Gen X, Text Gen, or just need a fix, then this is the book for you. Buckle up and hunker down for a laugh-a-minute ride of a lifetime. The action begins during a high-speed slide off the I-10 near Los Angeles, a real cliffhanger.”

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Live From Prairie Lights – Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling

admin — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:23:45 +0000

Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola – “How did the Depression-era folk-song collector Alan Lomax end up with a songwriting credit on Jay-Z’s song “Takeover”? Why doesn’t Clyde Stubblefield, the primary drummer on James Brown recordings from the late 1960s such as “Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat,” get paid for other musicians’ frequent use of the beats he performed on those songs? The music industry’s approach to digital sampling—the act of incorporating snippets of existing recordings into new ones—holds the answers. Exploring the complexities and contradictions in how samples are licensed, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola interviewed more than 100 musicians, managers, lawyers, industry professionals, journalists, and scholars. Based on those interviews, Creative License puts digital sampling into historical, cultural, and legal context. It describes hip-hop during its sample-heavy golden age in the 1980s and early 1990s, the lawsuits that shaped U.S. copyright law on sampling, and the labyrinthine licensing process that musicians must now navigate. The authors argue that the current system for licensing samples is inefficient and limits creativity. For instance, by estimating the present-day licensing fees for the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989) and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet (1990), two albums from hip-hop’s golden age, the authors show that neither album could be released commercially today. Observing that the same dynamics that create problems for remixers now reverberate throughout all culture industries, the authors conclude by examining ideas for reform.”

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Tyler Smith’s Tales From Beyond

admin — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:13:27 +0000

Hollywood actor and “the father of modern screenwriting”, Tyler Smith presents Tales From Beyond. A presentation of modern science fiction screenwriting short stories.

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Stop Signs

admin — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 23:48:49 +0000

STOP SIGNS: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay. Written by Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi.

“In North America, human beings have become enthralled by the automobile: A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for them; communities fight each other for the right to build more of them; our cities have been torn down, remade and planned with their needs as the overriding concern; wars are fought to keep their fuel tanks filled; songs are written to praise them; cathedrals are built to worship them. In Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay, authors Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi argue that the automobile’s ascendance is inextricably linked to capitalism and involved corporate malfeasance, political intrigue, backroom payoffs, media manipulation, racism, academic corruption, third world coups, secret armies, environmental destruction and war. When we challenge the domination of cars, we also challenge capitalism. An anti-car, road-trip story, Stop Signs is a unique must-read for all those who wish to escape the clutches of auto insanity.”

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Iowa Youth Writing Project

admin — Sat, 21 May 2011 18:45:55 +0000

In the “untamed” spirit of Walt Whitman, this workshop created an inspiring and supportive environment for teenagers to explore their thoughts, emotions, experiences, and observations through poetry. Poetry can be a way to express the seemingly inexpressible; using language in out-of-the-ordinary ways enabled participants to empower their own voices and selves, while being a part of an exciting creative community. Participants had the opportunity to experiment with lots of different poetic techniques and forms, taking inspiration from the poetry of the past and present. Each student had a poem included in a limited-edition chapbook printed and designed at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and received a copy of the published project, after participating in the bookbinding process. The workshop ended with a poetry reading and chapbook release party for family, friends, and the community on April 30.

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Live from Prairie Lights – Say So & Mule

admin — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:58:06 +0000

Say So by Dora Malech – “Poetry. The poems in SAY SO are at once rigorously formal and wildly experimental. Human utterance—be it prayer or plea or pun or turn of phrase or epithet—is one of SAY SO’s primary pistons; poetic tradition—rhyme, meter, form, rhetoric—is another; the beauty and betrayals of the body, or bodies—echoed in the beauty and betrayal of language itself—is a third. Together, these forces provide the pressure that makes SAY SO move and brings these poems to life.”

Mule by Shane McCrae – “Mule is actually a very personal, very autobiographical book. In it, the author addresses his at the time failing second marriage (which he is no longer in), his son’s autism, his own racial identity, and some of his beliefs about God.”

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Live From Prairie Lights – Grant Wood: A Life

admin — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 01:33:11 +0000

Author, R. Tripp Evans reads from his latest book, Grant Wood: A Life. In this powerful new biography of the man behind America’s best-known painting, American Gothic (1930), art historian Tripp Evans challenges the all-American persona Grant Wood so carefully cultivated — revealing, instead, the complex figure the public never saw: a man deeply ambivalent about his region who labored mightily to conceal his homosexuality. Evans presents an artist of extraordinary gifts, haunted by hidden longing and unorthodox relationships with family members — including the powerful mother who shared Wood’s studio and bedroom for more than thirty years, and the wife who disastrously replaced her. Grant Wood: A Life is a fully dimensional portrait of the man who became a national symbol, while secretly embodying much of what conservative America vilified.

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Live From Prairie Lights – The Mentor

admin — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 01:21:52 +0000

Author, Tom Grimes reads from his latest book, The Mentor. “Grimes’ candid and finely wrought memoir is at once a self-portrait of the writer as an anxious MFA student and homage to his guiding light, Frank Conroy, the legendary director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Writing with the qualities Conroy tirelessly championed–”meaning, sense, clarity”

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Live From Prairie Lights – Glory River

admin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:46:22 +0000

In Glory River, David Huddle’s poems pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live in a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening. Huddle opens with a sequence of exceptional tales about an imaginary hamlet in the mountains of Virginia. The residents of Glory River are rough, crude, and full of fight, but eager to tell their stories, “to explain how / in that place they had become the people / they were.” Huddle also includes a series of poems exploring modern life, touching upon subjects as diverse as memory, family, art, politics, and pain. Accessible and often humorous, the poems in Glory River range from the strange and extraordinary happenings in the fantastical Virginia town to the painful, hopeful, and no less magical situations that can occur in real lives.

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Tolstoy & Chekhov

admin — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 02:07:58 +0000

Celebration of Russian writers, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov at the University of Iowa. Readers: Tim Budd, Katherine Moyers, John Raeburn, and Joan Kjaer. Chekhov’s birth was 150 years ago, Tolstoy’s death was 100 years ago, The University of Iowa’s Russian program began 50 years ago.

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Live From Prairie Lights – Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead

admin — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:48:20 +0000

Frank Meeink reads from his book, Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead from Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa. The author is described as the inspiration for the main character, Derek Vinyard (portrayed by Edward Norton) in the movie, American History X.

From the author’s website: Frank’s raw telling of his descent into America’s Nazi underground and his ultimate triumph over hatred and addiction. The story of Frank’s downfall and redemption has the power to open hearts and change lives.

Live From Prairie Lights – The Sandbox

admin — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 01:33:04 +0000

Author, David Zimmerman reads from his book, “The Sandbox” on Live From Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa.

Operating Base Cornucopia. A three-hundred-year-old fortress in the remote Iraqi desert where a few dozen soldiers wait for their next assignment, among them Private Toby Durrant, a self-described “broke nobody.” Then a deadly ambush touches off events that put Durrant in the middle of a far-reaching conspiracy. Insurgents massing in the nearby hills, a secretive member of military intelligence, an abandoned toy factory and a mysterious, half-feral child—Durrant must figure out the links between them if he’s to survive. A classic story of a decent man trying to do right under impossible circumstances, this blistering look at military life in “the sandbox” of Iraq marks the debut of a major new talent.

Iowa City Writers

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:10:54 +0000

Little Village Magazine presents poets from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. Legendary Iowa City musician, Justin Cox interviews Dora Malech and Shane McCrae.

Live From Prairie Lights – The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:04:23 +0000

Aimee Bender reads from her book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake at Prairie Lights Bookstore in the UNESCO City of Literature, Iowa City, Iowa.

When Rose Edelstein’s mother makes her a lemon chocolate cake for her ninth birthday, she is excited to try it; after all, it’s one of her favorite desserts. But when she bites into it, she is filled with sensations she never expected – sadness, despair, depression. She quickly realizes that, somehow, she is experiencing her mother’s emotions through her baking.

To her horror, Rose finds out that this particular talent isn’t limited to her mother’s cooking – anything she eats, she can taste the feelings of the people who made it. Through this unasked-for curse – or is it a gift? – Rose begins to understand more about the secrets each member of her family holds.

Live From Prairie Lights – Black Sabbatical

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:49:38 +0000

Brett Eugene Ralph reads from his book “Black Sabbatical” at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa. A debut collection that sings with gutbucket colloquialisms, hallucinatory interludes, and Kentucky’s storytelling tradition.

Live From Prairie Lights -The Stormchasers

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:12:02 +0000

Jenna Blum reads from her book, The Stormchasers from Prairie Lights Bookstore in UNESCO City of Literature, Iowa City, Iowa.

How far would you go to protect a sibling—and at what cost to yourself? As teenagers, Karena Jorge had always been the one to look out for her brother Charles, who suffers from bipolar disorder. But as Charles begins to refuse medication and his manic tendencies worsen, Karena finds herself caught between her loyalty to her brother and her fear for his life. Always obsessed with severe weather, whose wild and magic energy seems to mirror his own impulses, Charles begins chasing storms, and his behavior grows increasingly erratic . . . until a terrifying chase with Karena ends with deadly consequences, tearing the twins apart and changing their lives forever.