BY ALEX BEHR May 18th, 2020 on The Rumpus.net That Little Bit of Magic: A Conversation with Ramiza Shamoun Koya The Royal Abduls, Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel (Forest Avenue Press, December 2019), drops us into a Muslim American family twisted by generational expectations and self-doubt. It’s told in shifting views by Amina Abdul, an …
Portland author Ellen Notbohm interviewed Ashley Sweeney about her second novel, Answer Creek, available in stores May 19, 2020. Readers paying close attention to this blog might recognize the pairing from the May 2018 Conversations post where Ashley interviewed Ellen upon the publication of Ellen’s debut novel, The River by Starlight. EN: Ada’s feelings about …
Five Books About Coming of Age in the West Chelsea Bieker, Portland author, has recommendations for you at Literary Hub! Her novel, Godshot, has been described as a “fiercely written and endlessly readable” novel of a teenage girl in thrall to a magnetic–and terrifying–preacher who promises to save her dying town is “a godsend” …
Ramiza Shamoun Koya has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in publications such as Columbia Review, Lumina, Washington Square Review, and Mutha Magazine. She has been a fellow at both MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center. Her father was born in Fiji, her mother in Texas, and she was …
This short story collection does what Yuknavitch does best—asks you to trade your life for a book that is just strange and beautiful enough for you to make the deal. I floated through these stories the same way I’ve floated through her other work, almost unaware of time passing. Her endangered characters make terrible and …
A Delicious Indie Assortment: Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle Imagine a set of cartoon characters who appear to be alien beings but who experience many of the same daily joys and frustrations that we do. Then imagine that these beings are somehow naive and curious AND wise, with complex vocabularies and gentle senses of …
Literary Arts has announced the finalists for the 2020 Oregon Book Awards. The Oregon Book Award winners will be announced live at the 33rd annual Oregon Book Awards Ceremony on Monday, April 27 at Portland Center Stage at The Armory. Omar El Akkad and Elena Passarello will host the ceremony. Tickets are available for this …
In November 2019, Publishers Weekly published an article titled Is Chuck Palahniuk Too Big to Fail? An excerpt from that article: “Palahniuk is best known for the second book he wrote, which was the first he published: Fight Club. Released in 1996, the novel earned him an advance of $7,000. Far from an instant bestseller, …
Like many children who suffer from an abundance of imagination and a shortfall of social skills, I was always on the lookout for a door into a more magical world. Narnia, Middle Earth, Starfleet, Sherwood Forest– I wasn’t picky. Anywhere with spaceships, swordfights, or telepathic dragons would do. Reality stubbornly refused to provide me with …
The winners for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association 2020 Pacific Northwest Book Awards have been announced. The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) is a non-profit association of independent bookstores from five Northwest states, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. The Association produces educational and promotional events and materials for its members and offers literacy, free …
