In The Saddest Music Ever Written (Pegasus\, $26.95)\, the first book to explore Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings\, music and literary critic
(and UNM School of Music alum) Thomas Larson tells the story of the prodigal composer and his seminal masterpiece\: from its composition in 1936\, when Barber was just twenty-six\, to its orchestral premiere two years later\, led by the great Arturo Toscanini\, and its fascinating history as America's secular hymn for grieving our dead. Older Americans know the Adagio from the funerals and memorials for Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy\, Albert Einstein\, and Grace Kelly. Younger Americans recall the work as the antiwar theme of the movie Platoon and its basis for the popular DJ Tiesto remix.
In 2004\, the radio program BBC Today\, began a competition to find the saddest music in the world. After receiving more than four hundred nominations\, they listed the top five on a website for voting. Barber's Adagio won the voting with more than half the total vote\, and doubled the votes of the second place nominee\, Henry Purcell's Dido's Lament. Larson further compares the piece's sadness to such songs as Joni Mitchell's "\;River"\; and Tom Waits' "\;Georgia Lee."\;
Larson places this iconic work in a biographical context\, and traces it through our cultural history and its evolution in our changing media.
"\;The Saddest Music Ever Written is about much more than a single piece of music. It is an exploration of a fascinating 20th-century composer\, a
case study in the cultural appropriation of works of art\, and an often very personal meditation on the power of music."\; -Kevin Bazzana\, author
of Lost Genius and Wondrous Strange\: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould
Thomas Larson is the author of The Memoir and the Memoirist\: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative which evaluates the dramatic rise of the
memoir in the last twenty years and explores the craft and purpose of contemporary memoir writing. For twelve years\, Larson has been a
contributing writer for the weekly San Diego Reader where he specializes in investigative journalism\, narrative nonfiction\, and profiles. He is a
regular book reviewer for Contrary Magazineonline and writes reviews for other magazines and journals as well. His personal memoir pieces
have appeared in Potomac Review\, Chicago Reader\, Cimarron Review\, Hawaii Review\, San Diego Reader\, and The Cream City Review\, where he won the
Editor's Award for Nonfiction. Critical essays on memoir and autobiography have appeared in Boulevard\, The San Diego Union-Tribune\,
AWP Chronicle\, El Paso Review\, and other periodicals. "\;Skull and Roses-Reflections on Enshrining Georgia O'Keeffe"\; came out in Southwest
Review\, and a critical re-reading of the recently published\, unexpurgated "\;definitive edition"\; of Anne Frank's diary appeared in
Antioch Review. Larson teaches classes\, leads workshops\, and lectures on memoir and the music of Samuel Barber throughout the United States. He
is the father of two sons\, Jeremy and Blake. He and his partner\, Suzanna Neal\, live in San Diego and\, every spring\, in Santa Fe\, New Mexico.
Cynthia Hogue has published seven collections of poetry\, most recently The Incognito Body (2006)\, Or Consequence (2010)\, both with Red Hen Press\, and When the Water Came\: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (University of New Orleans Press\, 2010). Among her honors are a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship to Iceland and an NEA for poetry. Hogue received a Wurlitzer Foundation Residency Fellowship in 2009\, and a Witter Bynner Translation Residency Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2010. She is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry in English at Arizona State University.
When the Water Came\: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina features interviewpoems and photographs of Hurricane Katrina evacuees who passed through\, evacuated\, or relocated to Arizona. Poet Cynthia Hogue created poems from interviews with evacuees\, using only the interviewees’ words\, re-ordered and shaped formally and visually to communicate the depth of these individual experiences\, and to highlight the poetry of their language. Through black-and-white\, medium format photographs\, co-author
Rebecca Ross examined evacuees’ recreated present and retraced their steps to relate a poignant sense of journey and beginning again. Responding to the itinerant nature of the evacuees who participated in this project\, the artists document individual lives profoundly touched by Katrina\, in order to tell a universal story of broken lives and the courage to begin anew.
Devreaux Baker has published three collections of poetry\, most recently Red Willow People (Wild Ocean Press\, 2010). Among her honors are a MacDowell Colony Fellowship\, a Hawthornden Castle International Fellowship\, three California Arts Council Grants\, and in 2009\, a Helene M. Wurlitzer Foundation Writing Fellowship. She lives in Mendocino County\, CA.
One enters Devreaux Baker’s haunting new collection\, The Red Willow People\, as one would sacred terrain. These poems are spare\, tactile and textured\, but they hover between worlds\: “I do not know why the ghost of the woman from the pueblo // visits me\,” one speaker confesses. This visitation is a gift\, but it carries with it the task of journeying to that “core place // where bone meets spirit\,” “the other side of air\,” through time and “beyond knowing.” The Red Willow People is a book of visionary medicine\, for though Baker walks through “the thin field/ of grief\,” she does so to instruct and heal\, walking in a rare beauty and in magic to write these gorgeously wise poems.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120524T020231Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101014T010000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101014T030000Z UID:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/eddie-chuculate-cheyenne-madonna URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/eddie-chuculate-cheyenne-madonna SUMMARY:Eddie Chuculate - Cheyenne Madonna DESCRIPTION:One stormy night in 1826\, just north of Galveston Bay\, Old Bull\, a Cheyenne Indian who had just seen the ocean for the first time\, found himself trying to outrace a hurricane. Lifted from his horse\, spun around\, and thrown down in the bayou\, Old Bull rode the current into a small canyon\, and survived. He was the only one of his party to return from the expedition\, arriving home nearly naked\, nearly hallucinating\, riding a horse.
Such is the auspicious beginning to the life of Jordan Coolwater\, a distant relation to Old Bull\, whom we meet as a boy in the 1970s\, shooting turtles on a summer day\, and being raised by his grandparents on Creek Indian land in the house of his great-great-grandfather\, a survivor of the "\;Trail of Tears."\; Bearing the burden of his ancestry\, Jordan Coolwater — from bored young boy\, to thoughtful teenager\, struggling artist\, escaped convict\, and finally\, father—is the subject of Eddie Chuculate's prize-winning collection of linked short stories. The first story in the collection\, "\;Galveston Bay\, 1826\,"\; won an O'Henry Prize in 2007\, and the second\, "\;Yo Yo\,"\; received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention.
Reminiscent of Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son\, Chuculate's gritty\, deceptively simple stories also recall Junot Dias and Sherman Alexie. This is not only a portrait of a young Native American artist struggling with the two constants in his life\, alcohol and art\, but also a portrait of America\, of its dispossessed\, its
outlaws\, and its visionaries.
From the Reviews
"\;Chuculate presents a profound disconnect between the mythology of Indian art and the present-day reality of Indian artists\, who rarely get to be artists without the cultural qualifier. He also lays bare the effects of wide-spread multi-generational addiction without making excuses for the way his characters treat each other. There are no saints in here\, and no demons\, either. Cheyenne Madonna is a fantastic debut."\;
—Jennifer Levin at The Santa Fe New Mexican
"\;Chuculate writes forthright prose in a somber key\, examining without judgment the lives of Native American characters like Old Bull\, a Cheyenne who\, in 'Galveston Bay\, 1826\,' the collection's one stand-alone story\, ventures out to see the ocean for the first time\, only to get savaged by a hurricane. Memory and will converge here to powerful effect."\;
— Publishers Weekly
"\;Every sentence is unexpected\, yet infallible…. The calm\, beautiful\, unexplaining accuracy of description carries us right through the madness of the final adventure."\;
— Ursula K. Le Guin\, author of The Left Hand of Darkness
"\;This is a book you'll rave about."\;
— Julie Shigekuni\, author of A Bridge Between Us
Eddie Chuculate is Creek and Cherokee Indian from Muskogee\, Oklahoma. He has a degree in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the second Native American to have held the Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford. He lives in Oklahoma.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120524T020231Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101015T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101015T020000Z UID:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/muse-times-two-poetry-series-lisa-chavez-joanne-dwyer URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/muse-times-two-poetry-series-lisa-chavez-joanne-dwyer SUMMARY:Muse Times Two Poetry Series\: Lisa Chavez & Joanne Dwyer DESCRIPTION:Muse Times Two Poetry Series continues with Lisa Chavez &\; Joanne Dwyer
\;
Joanne D. Dwyer has lived in New Mexico since 1980. She attended the College of Santa Fe\, studying with Dana Levin\, Greg Glazner\, Mark Behr and Matt Donovan. She earned a degree there in Creative Writing in 2005. In 2009 Dwyer completed an MFA with the Warren Wilson Program for writers. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers\, she has been published in The American Poetry Review\, Conduit\, FIELD\, The Massachusetts Review\, The New England Review\, Tri-Quarterly and elsewhere.
Lisa D. Chavez is a poet and memoirist. She has published two books of poetry\: Destruction Bay and In an Angry Season\, and has been included in such anthologies as Floricanto Si! A Collection of Latina Poetry\, The Floating Borderlands\: 25 Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature\, and American Poetry\: The Next Generation. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Fourth Genre\, The Clackamas Literary Review and other places. She lives in the mountains in New Mexico with her husband and three dogs.
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END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120524T020231Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101016T000000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101016T020000Z UID:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/jo-ann-mapson-solomons-oak URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/jo-ann-mapson-solomons-oak SUMMARY:Jo Ann Mapson - Solomon's Oak DESCRIPTION:Jo-Ann Mapson\, the author of the beloved Hank &\; Chloe\, discusses and signs her new novel\, Solomon's Oak (Bloomsbury\, $25.00)\, the story of three people who have suffered losses that changed their lives forever\:
Glory Solomon\, a young widow\, holds tight to her memories while she struggles to hold on to her Central California farm. She makes ends meet by hosting weddings in the chapel her husband had built under their two-hundred-year-old white oak tree\, known locally as Solomon's Oak. Fourteen-year-old Juniper McGuire is the lone survivor of a family decimated by her sister's disappearance. She arrives on Glory's doorstep\, pierced\, tattooed\, angry\, and homeless. When Glory's husband Dan was alive\, they took in foster children\, but Juniper may be more than she can handle alone. Joseph Vigil is a former Albuquerque police officer and crime lab photographer who was shot during a meth lab bust that took the life of his best friend. Now disabled and in constant pain\, he arrives in California to fulfill his dream of photographing the state's giant trees\, including Solomon's Oak.
Jo-Ann Mapson is the author of nine previous novels\, including Hank &\; Chloe\, Blue Rodeo (CBS TV movie)\, and the Los Angeles Times bestsellers The Wilder Sisters and Bad Girl Creek\, a book club favorite. She lives in Santa Fe\, New Mexico\, with her husband and their five dogs. Whether writing about the stark beauty of a California canyon or the poverty of an Arizona reservation\, Mapson's landscapes are imbued with life. Setting her fiction in the Southwest\, she writes about a region that she knows well\; after growing up in California and living for a time in Arizona and New Mexico\, she also attributes her focus on setting to the influence of Wallace Stegner.
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120524T020231Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101020T010000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101020T030000Z UID:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/clare-cooper-marcus-iona-dreaming-healing-power-place URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/clare-cooper-marcus-iona-dreaming-healing-power-place SUMMARY:Clare Cooper Marcus - Iona Dreaming\: The Healing Power of Place DESCRIPTION:A journey of healing takes Clare Cooper Marcus on a 6-month long solitary retreat to the remote Scottish Island of Iona. Here she experiences a mirroring of her soul and reflects and reviews the life that brought her here to this magical place. Her compelling memoir Iona Dreaming is an inspirational account of personal survival and hope in which Clare shares her recovery from a life-threatening illness\, which deepens into a contemplation of the events in her life and her physical\, emotional and spiritual healing.
Clare Cooper Marcus brings both a personal and academic life-long interface with place\, environment and people. Her five previous books about human response to architecture and environment were popular with the public and well-received by the press. Iona Dreaming will reach out to a broad audience\: people entering retirement\, dealing with serious illnesses\, gardeners\, lovers of nature\, architects and landscape architects\, people who are becoming more heath conscious\, women who have shared the social and cultural shifts she lived through--especially those coming of age in the
60's--and all those who seek a more authentic life.
With the advent of industrialism and its widespread application to our food supply – factory farms\, genetic engineering\, and agricultural chemicals – the struggle between human freedom and authority has reached a critical juncture. In spite of the rapid growth of an alternative food system – local and sustainable food production\, farmers’ markets\, the public’s rising food consciousness – we become more dependent everyday on industrial agriculture whose representatives insist that it is the only way to feed a hungry world. In the face of such assertions\, we must ask if our dependence on such a system threatens to supplant individual self-reliance. Will personal freedom succumb finally and forever to the dominant voice of authority? Are we at risk of sacrificing our democratic voice to self-appointed governing elites? These are no longer speculative questions suitable only for philosophers\, but real-life concerns set squarely on the plate of every eater.
Mark Winne’s second book\, Food Rebels\, Guerrilla Gardeners\, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas\: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture takes on the universal struggle between human freedom and authority in its relationship to food. While drawing from great thinkers like Emerson and Dostoevsky to frame his arguments\, Winne moves quickly from philosophy to action with numerous stories about “local doers.” From urban gardening heroes in Cleveland\, to feisty farmers in New England\, to lower income mothers in Texas\, Winne shows how people are reclaiming their connection to their food\, health\, land\, and governments. Along the way he finds people of every stripe whose refusal to accept their fate harkens back to a classic form of American individualism\, one that has proven itself able to fight back against systems that not only want to conquer our wallets\, but also hope to control our minds.
Food Rebels\, Guerrilla Gardeners\, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas challenges us to go beyond eating local food to become part of a larger solution that demands a system that sustains not just our bodies\, but also our souls.
Mark Winne has worked for 40 years as a community food activist\, writer\, and trainer. From organizing breakfast programs for low-income children in Maine to developing innovative national food policies in Washington\, DC\, Winne has dedicated his professional life and writing to enabling people to find solutions to their own food problems as well as those that face their communities and the world. Of his first book\, Closing the Food Gap\, Dr. Jane Goodall said\, “It is heartening to find a book that successfully blends a passion for sustainable living with compassion for the poor.”
END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120524T020231Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101026T010000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101026T010000Z UID:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/forest-fenn-conversation-michael-mcgarrity-thrill-chase-memoir URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/forest-fenn-conversation-michael-mcgarrity-thrill-chase-memoir SUMMARY:Forrest Fenn in conversation with Michael McGarrity -- \\"The Thrill of the Chase - A Memoir\\" DESCRIPTION:n/a END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120524T020231Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101030T010000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101030T010000Z UID:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/david-abram-becoming-animal-earthly-cosmology URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/david-abram-becoming-animal-earthly-cosmology SUMMARY:David Abram - Becoming Animal\: An Earthly Cosmology DESCRIPTION:n/a END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20120524T020231Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101031T010000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20101031T010000Z UID:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/nick-jake-world-premiere-performance URL;VALUE=URI:http://www.collectedworksbookstore.com/event/nick-jake-world-premiere-performance SUMMARY:Nick & Jake - World Premiere Performance!!! DESCRIPTION:Starring Alan Arkin\, Ali MacGraw &\; Jonathan Richards
Alan Arkin and Ali MacGraw will join authors Jonathan and Tad Richards at 6 PM on Saturday October 30th for a reading of excerpts from the Richards brothers' new novel Nick &\; Jake. The reading will also feature Allison Roper.
Nick &\; Jake is an epistolary novel\, set in 1953 against a backdrop of the McCarthy-driven Red Scare in the US and CIA-driven coups abroad. Nick Carraway and Jake Barnes\, refugees from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises\, strike up a correspondence. Nick is now a State Department functionary\, Jake is the editor of the Paris Herald Tribune. Surrounded by characters recruited from the headlines of the day and the classic fiction of the first half of the 20th century\, Nick and Jake do their best to save their country from itself and to learn their own lessons about life and love.
The Nick and Jake audiobook boasts a star-studded cast headed by Arkin\, MacGraw\, Oscar nominee and Tony Award-winning British actor Tom Conti (Shirley Valentine\, The Tempest)\, Natasha Warner\, Joe Wilson\, and Valerie Plame Wilson\, with original theme music composed by Oscar and Grammy winner Dave Grusin. Both the book and the CD set will be available at the event.
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