Lorraine M. López teaches at Vanderbilt University. She has won the Paterson Prize for Fiction, the International Latino Book Award for Short Stories, and the inaugural Miguel Marmol Prize for Fiction (selected by Sandra Cisneros and awarded by Curbstone Press, for a first book-length work of fiction of a Latino/a writer). Her new book, Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories (BkMk P...
ForeWord Book Club
Each week, members of the ForeWord staff choose a book to read and discuss. An excerpt from each book is available only during the week that book is featured. We encourage you to read the current book or past selections, and post your comments. Click a title to read about the book. Let's talk about books!
11/27/2009 - 13:27
Dave Reidy's introduction to "Look and Feel:"
"'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.' This quotation has been attributed to Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Elvis Costello, Steve Martin, Pete Townsend and others. So far as I can tell, no one knows who said it first. It’s a memorable line, though, and its point is clear: music operates on planes above and below written...
"'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.' This quotation has been attributed to Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Elvis Costello, Steve Martin, Pete Townsend and others. So far as I can tell, no one knows who said it first. It’s a memorable line, though, and its point is clear: music operates on planes above and below written...
11/17/2009 - 16:49
Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award, and the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College. The winner of the Dzanc Prize, Laura’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us...
11/11/2009 - 09:11
W.D. Wetherell has written travel and essay pieces for the New York Times and the Boston Review. His work has also won three O. Henry Awards, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and the National Magazine Award. Introducing “That Old Montana Pure,” from his new collection, Hills Like White Hills (Southern Methodist University Press) Wetherell writes:
A writer shouldn't fall in love with his c...
10/28/2009 - 11:02
Brian Evenson introduces his short story, "Girls in Tents":
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to build blanket tents. My sister and I would take as many blankets as we could find, rearrange the furniture in the living room, and then start spreading blankets from piano to couch, couch to chair and chair to banister, holding everything precariously in place with volume...
10/21/2009 - 10:26
"Every book collection corresponds to two needs that are often also obsessions: the need to hang on to things (books), and the need to keep them in some order."
Born in Paris in 1936 to Polish-Jewish immigrants; his father was killed at the front in 1940 and his mother died either on the way or in Auschwitz. Georges Perec himself was in the south of France, in a...
10/14/2009 - 11:07
A life reflected in the homeliness of an electric bun-warmer.
Jeffrey and his wife Grazyna live in a “tchotchke-filled postwar ranch house in an old by safe suburb” of Detroit. Says Jeffrey, “I read somewhere that we are all secretly enamored of the decade in which we are born. That is certainly the case with me.”
Then Jeffrey’s mom dies. Aft...
10/07/2009 - 09:37
Meet the Knight brothers. There’s Roger, who weighs over three hundred pounds (he’s happy to admit that). And there’s his brother Phil, a normal-sized private detective. Now meet the Olympian Aunt Lucerne who insists, even while facing the facts, that “No one in our family is fat.” And there’s some heft in the mystery she presents to her nephews; a mystery in...
09/30/2009 - 08:34
Author Mitch Weiland’s introduces “Beware the Pale Horse Comes Riding,” the first chapter of his new novel told in short stories, God’s Dogs (Southern Methodist University Press, 978-0-87074-553-9).
“Beware the Pale Horse Comes Riding” came initially out of my intense, visceral response to the harsh landscape of Idaho. I’d neve...
09/23/2009 - 16:04
Chris Holbrook introduces the short story “New-Used” from his collection, Upheaval (University Press of Kentucky, 978-0-8131-9244-4).
Many of the details and some of the incidents of “New-Used” are autobiographical, probably more so than in any other story I’ve written. My mother has been a seamstress most of her life. My father did work a lot of labo...