Books

Penn Pens A Valentine To ... Politics

by | Mar 11, 2016 4:49 pm | Comments (1)

Failedcritics.com

Rhodeen (below) reveals the backstory to Northern Ireland’s historic ceasefire in his new book Peacerunner.

Paul Bass Photo

Penn Rhodeen has grown fond of uttering a dirty word. At a time of brutal, seemingly intractable tribal warfare around the globe, he believes it offers hope for peace.

Rhodeen’s dirty word: politics.”

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Star Teacher Adjusts To New Reality

by | Feb 26, 2016 3:02 pm | Comments (13)

Aliyya Swaby Photo

Joyner and Anderson: Turned on to literature.

Zelenski, subject of a new book, has felt hampered by Hillhouse changes.

Jessica Zelenski asked her Hillhouse High students to write a paper in defense of Mayella Ewell, a notorious character in To Kill A Mockingbird who falsely accuses a black farmhand of rape.

I’m asking for some compassion for the girl; I didn’t say you had to like her,” she said when students protested.

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OMG! Talia Aikens-Nunez Does It Again

by | Feb 23, 2016 3:25 pm | Comments (0)

Elissa Sanci photo

Talia Aikens-Nunez with her new book.

Talia Aikens-Nunez wrote her first book as an elementary schooler. A story about her cat Mickey, it was written on computer paper with staples serving as a binding.

As an adult, Aikens-Nunez has published three books for children. Her latest children’s novel, OMG…I Did It Again?!, the second in a series about a young girl who discovers she has witch powers, will be released on May 1.

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Wobbling Roof Revue Takes Over Never Ending Books

by | Feb 16, 2016 2:39 pm | Comments (1)

Kira Baum Photo

Belbusti and Guillorn.

Musicians Paul Belbusti (a.k.a. Mercy Choir) and Lys Guillorn have split a lot of bills together. They even did an EP in 2013 called Trouble, in which Belbusti wrote the music and Guillorn wrote the words for the first song; then, for the second song, they switched roles. So in November, when Belbusti asked Guillorn if she wanted to collaborate in putting together a month-long Friday-night residency at Never Ending Books on State Street — a variety show,” according to Belbusti — she agreed.

The result is the Wobbling Roof Revue, which features 28 acts performing 20-minute sets each across four Fridays in March, in a lineup that ranges from musicians and storytellers to a tarot reader, a comedian, and a trivia meister.

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Love Letters Endure

by | Feb 15, 2016 1:03 pm | Comments (0)

Paul Bass Photo

Jill Snyder at WNHH.

Jill Marie Snyder knew that her parents had written love letters to each other that dated back from the mid-1937 until they were married in 1941. She didn’t find them — and understand their significance — until her mother, who always wanted them published, died.

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Listen Here Gets Surprise Visit From Author

by | Dec 16, 2015 7:22 am | Comments (0)

Lucy Gellman Photo

Lovett-Graff, Dymond, actors Deena Nicol-Blifford and Scarpa.

One celebrated, countryside wedding in a French chateau. Two slightly awkward American guests sleeping in the old servants’ quarters. From another era, three rotating armies, French, German and American. Four courses, and then some. Five times to admit faux pas and embarrassment as out-of-town guests, working sloppily through the language. Six doves, leading a white flock released after the wedding. Seven fireworks to begin the end of the night. 

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“Doubles?” Sparked A Craft-Art Career

by | Dec 8, 2015 5:19 pm | Comments (1)

David Sepulveda Photo

Before his choice to leave the New York gallery scene for timid one in New Haven, before he purchased the Frame Shop in 2002 to turn it into The Frame Shop & Westville Gallery, and certainly before he was informally crowned the unofficial mayor of Westville,” Gabriel Da Silva was a 17 year-old Uruguayan immigrant working odd jobs in New Haven to make ends meet” as he, his parents and three siblings sought to put a life under rotating military dictatorships in Montevideo behind them.

He was homesick, and working hard, and not entirely sure what the future would hold.

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Damascus To New Haven, Bite By Bite

by | Nov 13, 2015 1:41 pm | Comments (0)

Lucy Gellman Photo

The last time artist Mohamad Hafez was in Damascus, waiting on a visa application that ultimately took a month and a half, it was 2011. The city was still standing strong, and he had a kind of trick. When time stopped each afternoon — the result of a long, large midday meal that ended in a city-wide siesta — he would walk the old city, taking in its Roman arches and the Great Mosque of the Umayyads, listening to birdsong and breath fuse with the daily call to prayer, and sitting in coffee shops with his new iPhone flat on the table, recording conversations quirky and banal alike. Born in Syria, raised in Saudi Arabia, and educated largely in the United States, the self-described Midwesterner” cherished these snippets of speech, conversations between neighbors, friends and family in a language for which he had been deeply homesick.

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Local Author Mines The Darkness

by | Oct 29, 2015 12:14 pm | Comments (0)

The Lavin Agency

Perhaps best known for his book Bad Paper and work in the New Yorker, including a recent in-depth profile of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, East Rock author Jake Halpern wears another hat: Young Adult (YA) novelist with friend and colleague Peter Kujawinski, a U.S. diplomat during the day and fiction writer by night. Their most recent novel, Nightfall, debuts across the country this month, and will enjoy a local homecoming Thursday night at Worthington Hooker Middle School on Whitney Avenue. 

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