Literary Lotus

NBCC Award Finalists

2012-01-29T04:00:00.000-10:00

The 2011 NBCC Awards Finalists are:

Fiction

Teju Cole, Open City (Random House)

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Knopf)

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)

Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)

Nonfiction

Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American
Civil War (Random House)

James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon)

Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion,
1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War
(Knopf)

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

Autobiography

Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the
Language of Healing (W.W. Norton)

Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (Free Press)

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black
America (Little, Brown)

Luis J. Rodríguez, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction,
Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone)

Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the
War (Henry Holt)

Biography

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the
Revolution (Little, Brown)

John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press)

Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost,
1934-1961 (Knopf)

Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking)

Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Belknap Press:
Harvard University Press)

Criticism

David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of
Everything (Faber & Faber)

Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and
Reviews (Graywolf)

Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday)

Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture (Open Letter)

Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University
of Minnesota Press)

Poetry

Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions)

Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions)

Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press)

Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

Book Signing for DON'T LOOK BACK

2012-01-26T11:16:00.001-10:00

This Saturday I'll be at Barnes & Noble Kahala signing copies of DON'T LOOK BACK: Hawaiian Myths Made New along with four contributors. I'd love it if you could stop by and say hello (maybe even have a book signed!) and support us and one of the island's remaining book stores. Hope to see you there!

Who: Hawai‘i writers Christine Thomas, J. Freen, Victoria Kneubuhl, Marion Lyman-Mersereau and J. Arthur Rath III

What: The authors will appear at a book signing for the new anthology Don’t Look Back: Hawaiian Myths Made New, edited by Christine Thomas, featuring their work and that of 12 other Hawai‘i writers.

Where: Barnes & Noble Kahala Mall

When: Saturday, January 28, 11AM – Noon

In Don’t Look Back: Hawaiian Myths Made New, just released by Watermark Publishing, editor Christine Thomas has collected 17 tales of old Hawai‘i—lovingly re-imagined and retold for the 21st century. Old meets new in this one-of-a-kind anthology, as Hawai‘i’s best writers—Maxine Hong Kingston, W.S. Merwin, Victoria Kneubuhl, Alan Brennert, the late Ian MacMillan and a dozen others including Thomas herself—present favorite myths and legends in surprising contemporary settings. Here, the reader finds Pele in therapy, Maui as a superhero, the cannibal king O‘ahu Nui in a world of shady deals and political corruption, the star-crossed naupaka lovers as Honolulu high-school sweethearts and other updated versions of Island legends.

Book Review: Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior

2012-01-24T04:00:00.000-10:00

Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the Cellular Level. 263 pages. $24.95

The title alone made me want to read this book by Chinese-American activist and baritone sax player Fred Ho, known for his prowess (he can play up to six-octaves) and Afro-Asian jazz inspired compositions.

In this raw yet approachable diary, Ho candidly unearths his brutal war against colorectal cancer, coupled with his struggle to continue playing and composing as the “New Fred Ho.” I was especially intrigued by his ambitious positioning of the body as the ultimate site for resisting the world’s commoditization, and fusing fighting disease, which he has been doing since 2006, with battling toxic capitalism.

Ho may just convince you, too, to never think about cancer in the same way again—or at least to attend his Honolulu book launch this March with University of Hawai‘i writers and choreographers with whom he has collaborated.

--Christine Thomas for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, On My Shelf