Halloween is creeping up early on The Poisoned Pen. This weekend, the indie book store in Scottsdale will host a costume party featuring five well-known horror, sci-fi, and fantasy authors, and plans to roll out the smoke machine and hand out prizes for the best costumes. Even if you’re not…
Phoenix is a city with many unsung virtues, one of which happens to be its active poetry scene. With open mics scattered across the Valley happening almost every night, there are plenty of opportunities to hear and speak the written word. And over the next two weeks, a few additional…
Authors Reyna Grande, Alberto Rios, Evelyn Cruz and Terry Greene Sterling each know their share about border issues and immigration. On Thursday, October 21, the four will meet to read from their books and lead an open discussion about the border and immigration — an issue with which each has…
Jane Joyce just published her fifth book in as many years, and bookworms can get all over the new tome starting today. With Portrait of the Artist — available online (and in about a month in physical form) at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and www.buybooksontheweb.com — the local writer, musician,…
Courtesy of Amy Stewart.Gotta love that cover art.Any book titled Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities is sure to grab some interest.And if you end up grabbing a copy by author Amy Stewart, you won’t be disappointed. Since we snagged ours, we’ve thumbed through…
Changing Hands Bookstore announced last week that David Sedaris — National Public Radio contributor and author of Me Talk Pretty One Day and When You Are Engulfed in Flames — will read from his latest collection Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, at the Tempe bookstore at 6 p.m. Wednesday, December…
From now through early next year, the Volunteer Non-Profit Service Association, which puts on the yearly VNSA Used Book Sale, is accepting your no-longer-needed hardcovers and paperbacks. The book-buying potpourri — the largest book sale west of the Mississippi River that will be entering its 55th year — is scheduled…
Get up from the computer, walk to your 2011 calendar, and write “Desert Nights, Rising Stars” on the following dates: March 3, 4, 5, and 6. Then come back here. Good. You’ve just penned your first words for Arizona State University’s annual “Desert Nights, Rising Stars” writers conference, scheduled to…
Stephenie Meyer is probably the most well-known “Mormon author” of our times, and much has been made of her Twilight book series about young, seductive vampires. But if anybody in the Mormon Church finds Meyer’s books a little too racy, they’d absolutely crap themselves if they ever read Mormon Underwear…
Looks like there’s a new arts rag in town. Restless is an East Valley arts anthology (we nabbed ours at POOL, in Mesa, and have been told you can also grab a copy at Evermore Nevermore) that just released its first issue. Inside you can expect to find creative writing,…
When Hurricane Katrina hit, Cynthia Hogue knew she had to respond. Hogue is a poet. When the hurricane hit in 2005 she was living in metro Phoenix, but she’d lived in New Orleans a decade before Katrina and taught in the University of New Orleans’ MFA program. Hogue admits it was a place she disliked…
Neal Pollack will admit he had no intention of practicing yoga or exercising at all for that matter. But after writing his second book and realizing the fate of his punk rock band, Neal Pollack Invasion, he knew it was time for change. Little did he know he’d find change…
Writer Hal Ackerman will visit The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale tomorrow night to sign his “soft-boiled murder mystery” novel Stein, Stoned (Tyrus Books). After reading the book this weekend, we’d like to thank Ackerman for penning such a funny and engaging tale, and also to respectfully recommend he get a…
The Tempe Starving Artist is on the hunt for your stuff. Albeit poetry, short fiction, features on local bands, or cartoons, the D.I.Y. ‘zine is looking for contributions for its twelfth issue. Past contributors include photographer Joi Carey, graf artist MAD One, and creative cat extraordinaire DumperfooTo check out what…
Sorry Oprah, we’re just not digging the book. Actually, it’s not even the book that’s making us queasy (though disliking anything written by Elizabeth Gilbert has long been a tried-and-true friendship test for some of us here at Jackalope Ranch), it’s the tchotchke-filled campaigns, quintessential girls’ nights and the creepy…
Terry Greene Sterling’s Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone begins in the Mexican towns near the Arizona border: Nogales, Cananea, Altar, Arivaca, Agua Prieta. These are the places from which migrants press their luck to undertake dangerous crossings through the desert landscape. Describing one such border-crosser, Sterling…
Already whipped through your summer reading materials? No worries. All week, Jackalope Ranch contributors will review candidates for your nightstand. Have a suggestion for us? Leave it in the comment section. Today: “Will Grayson, Will Grayson” by John Green and David Levithan. Hooray for gay young adult fiction!I’m a big…
Already whipped through your summer reading materials? No worries. All week, Jackalope Ranch contributors will review candidates for your nightstand (click here for links to previous reviews this week). Have a suggestion for us? Leave it in the comment section. When English poet Alexander Pope said “Brevity is the soul…
I’m one of those rare individuals that when someone recommends something to me, I actually pick it up. I like to know what the people around me are into, so when a friend of mine mentioned Laraine Herring’s “Ghost Swamp Blues”, I sought it out post-haste. Part of my haste…
Already whipped through your summer reading materials? No worries. All week, Jackalope Ranch contributors will review candidates for your nightstand. Have a suggestion for us? Leave it in the comment section. Today: Mickey Rapkin’s Theater Geek. For a supposed meritocracy, America is filled with all sorts of secret societies. Even…
Already whipped through your summer reading materials? No worries. All week, Jackalope Ranch contributors will review candidates for your nightstand. Have a suggestion for us? Leave it in the comment section. First up this week: “Party” by Tom Leveen. We all have our guilty little reading pleasures — you know,…
This past Tuesday night, The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale was crawling with literary enthusiasts, eager to hear five authors talk about their books. People who weren’t sitting in the circle of chairs around authors Dianne Emley, Mary Anna Evans, Larry Karp, Peter Steiner, and Simon Wood were squeezing through…
