Curse words in book titles
Two books with curse words in their titles have muscled their way onto best-seller lists in recent weeks. And an award-winning children’s author and illustrator has been criticized for using the word...
View ArticleA chat with Salman Rushdie
Dave Hogan/Getty Images Salman Rushdie and, left to right, former wife Elizabeth West, son Milan Rushdie, and son Zafar Rushdie. LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE By Salman Rushdie. Random House, 218 pp., $25....
View ArticlePeter Carey: On democracy and unreliable characters
Although he has lived in New York for two decades, Peter Carey retains the broad, even-handed accent of his native Australia. Carey’s homeland — in all its boldness, insecurity and capacity for humor —...
View ArticleHouston is a hotbed for romance writers
Courtesy photo Romance writer Jessica Trapp. Jared’s eyes flashed in the sun like green agate as he turned toward her. He lifted one arm in greeting. A ripple of muscle danced. She touched her hair,...
View ArticleDavid Cassidy is back! Kinda!
Jill Connelly/AP David Cassidy, in a photo from 1998. I’m sleepin’, and right in the middle of a good dream, like all at once I wake up from something that keeps knocking at my brain. Before I go...
View ArticleThe 100 Best African American Poems (*but I cheated)
Nikki Giovanni. By Maggie Galehouse There’s no one thing that makes a poem African-American, says poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, “other than what makes a baby black is his mother or father.” But the...
View ArticleChitra Divakaruni: Art Imitates Life
Eric Kayne/for the Chronicle Chitra Divakaruni at her home in Sugar Land, TX. By Maggie Galehouse Lounging barefoot on her living room sofa, legs curled up on the cream-colored leather, Chitra...
View ArticleSt. Patrick’s Day: Limericks, what else?
There was a young lady named Harris, Whom nothing could ever embarrass, Till the bath salts one day In the tub where she lay Turned out to be plaster of Paris – Edward Lear Limericks take their name...
View ArticleQ&A with Michael Connelly: crime writer comes to Houston April 7
AFP/Getty Images Author Michael Connelly at the movie premiere of The Lincoln Lawyer. “Books are like cars,” quips Michael Connelly, a cop reporter turned crime writer. It’s a favorite metaphor he’s...
View ArticleThe Donner Party and poetry: a chat with Kay Ryan
Christina Koci Hernandez AUTHOR APPEARANCE Kay Ryan will appear 7:30 p.m. Monday (April 11) at the Alley Theatre, Hubbard Stage, 615 Texas; 713-521-2026. Tickets for this Inprint Brown Reading Series...
View Article5,000 species on the way to becoming a book
On December 31, I hung out with National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore at the Houston Zoo. Sartore spent several days there working on a massive photography project that aims to capture...
View ArticleGloria Steinem in town for The Women’s Resource of Greater Houston
Gloria Steinem – the activist, writer and lecturer whose name has been synonymous with feminism for the past 40 years — spoke today at a benefit for The Women’s Resource of Greater Houston. As...
View ArticleBehind the scenes of George W. Bush’s presidency
As chief White House photographer for President George W. Bush, Eric Draper chronicled the president’s role in 9/11 and the war on terror. But the images in his new book, “Front Row Seat: A...
View ArticleThe bathroom o’ wisdom, at novelist Katherine Center’s house!
The quotes and quips that novelist Katherine Center holds dear can be found in a downstairs half-bath off the kitchen of her Houston home. She calls it the “bathroom o’ wisdom.”
View ArticleTexas parents in a bittersweet, best-selling book
“All Joy and No Fun” is a bittersweet book about how it feels to be a parent right now, in America — from the hazy, no-sleep months of struggling with a newborn, up through to adolescence, when parents...
View ArticleWant words with that barbacoa? Chipotle’s prose project
We're about a month into Chipotle's grand experiment, conceived by New York writer Jonathan Safran Foer ("Everything Is Illuminated"). While dining in Chipotle and finding he had nothing to read (what,...
View ArticleManifest Destiny on I-10 with – who else? – Gertrude Stein
Stretching west along I-10, from Beaumont past Katy, nine billboards boast fragments from the work of Gertrude Stein, that cryptic but maddeningly alluring modernist writer best known for the poem that...
View ArticleHouston journalist messes with Gertrude Stein in 1935
In a story that ran in the Houston Post in 1935, journalist Hubert Roussel takes on the opacity of famous modernist poet, Gertrude Stein, who was staying at the Warwick with Alice B. Toklas.
View Article3 ways to tell a woman her slip is showing
Cool word stuff from the Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE.
View ArticleLauren Bacall on smoking, aging, politics and leading men
I interviewed Lauren Bacall -- friends called her Betty -- in 2009 when she was headed to Houston as part of the Brilliant Lecture Series. She was direct, honest, funny -- everything I hoped she'd be.
View Article
