Beyond the Smoke and Concrete: Michèle Forbes’s Ghost Moth

Bellevue Literary Press, April 2013 Reviewed by Courtney McDermott Ghost moths are pure-white, “the souls of the dead waiting to be caught,” explains Katherine to her daughter, Elsa. Katherine, the heroine of Michèle Forbes’ Ghost Moth, is a former stage actress and mother of four who is haunted by her memories. These ghosts are brought [...]

A Map at the Back of the Room: In Conversation with Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Aisha Sabatini Sloan wrote the book I wished I could have read back when I was an undergraduate film student at Rhode Island College, buried neck-high in a dense thicket of film theory. The essays in her debut, The Fluency of Light, reveal a series of confluences between the personal and the cultural, shifting between [...]

Welcome to Late Night Conversation. This week we feature Laurie Liss, Vice President and Partner at Sterling Lord Literistic. Paul and Laurie discuss the many hats she wears as a literary agent, her discovery of one of the best-selling novels of the twentieth century, Rachel Maddow’s work ethic, the importance of being good at your day [...]

Vignettes of Travel and Loss: Zubair Ahmed’s City of Rivers

Any poet would hope for the kind of praise that glows from the back cover of Zubair Ahmed’s debut poetry collection, City of Rivers. “Bracingly original…ushered into being by a prodigious new voice in America poetry.” Add to that the fact that Ahmed is only twenty-five, that his first book was published by McSweeney’s, and you [...]

Shara Lessley’s Two-Headed Nightingale

Welcome to Late Night Debut. This month we feature poet Shara Lessley’s debut collection, Two-Headed Nightingale. Shara’s collection has been described as a confluence between the natural world and the world of female performers, filled with things deviant, anatomical, and dark. “It’s a vision of the natural world that fuses the sensibilities of Audubon and Ernst [...]

I’ve Gone From Here to the Floorboards: A Conversation with Ivy Page

  Put your indelible mark here Slip inside the deep— Pull out the girl Let the ocular light shine Take the ember Tell her to burn  In five succinct lines, Ivy Page merely cracks open the visual and emotional vein to Any Other Branch. Intense, far from withdrawn, and fearless on the page, Ivy’s work [...]

Lysley Tenorio

Welcome to Late Night Conversation. This week Paul talks to Lysley Tenorio, whose debut story collection, Monstress, was published by Ecco in 2012. Late Night Library featured Monstress on Late Night Debut last July, and Lysley read at our In and Out of Town Reading Series with Leni Zumas in October. Ecco describes Monstress as a luminous collection [...]

Falling Through the Cracks: Dan Josefson’s That’s Not a Feeling

Soho Press, 2013 Reviewed by Courtney McDermott “That’s not a feeling,” is a common retort heard in Dan Josefson’s novel of the same name. Set in a therapeutic boarding school called Roaring Orchards in upstate New York, the troubled teen residents are constantly asked to define their feelings to a staff that is exhausted in [...]

Winner of the Read Like You Mean It Poster Contest

After much deliberation, Late Night Library is proud to present the winning design for our Read Like You Mean It poster contest! We received several unique entires, narrowed them down to four, and finally landed on the one which we began to fondly refer to as “Book Head:”   This awesome promo poster is the [...]

Simply Animal: Stephanie Pippin’s The Messenger

University of Iowa Press, April 2013 Reviewed by W.M. Lobko What is it about a bird of prey that communicates such grace and clarity of purpose? Stately, slow in the sky, in no particular rush, possibly hunting, independent of the earth and immune to danger, these birds seize through their silence the whole sum of [...]

T. Geronimo Johnson’s Hold It ‘Til It Hurts

Welcome to Late Night Debut! This month we feature T. Geronimo Johnson’s debut novel, Hold It ‘Til It Hurts, published in 2012 by Coffee House Press. Johnson’s narrative follows Achilles, a black Afghanistan veteran in search of his lost brother amid the chaos of Hurricane Katrina. ZYZZYVA Magazine called it an “odyssey through wartime America and an [...]

A Thrice Recorded Conversation with T. Geronimo Johnson

Months ago I was informed Late Night Library would be featuring T. Geronimo Johnson’s sprawling debut novel Hold It ‘Til It Hurts, and that this feature would be my first time interviewing an author. Thrilled by this news, I immediately entered into Johnson’s well-crafted world of Achilles Conroy. Achilles and his younger brother Troy return [...]