In NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names — a finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize — teenager Darling moves from Zimbabwe to Michigan, where she is struck by a rather large difference between Americans and the people back home. In Zimbabwe, Darling thinks, fatness “did not interfere…
George Packer knows how to write. He’s won accolades for his powerful pieces in The New Yorker, inked several novels, and penned a prize-winning analysis of America’s invasion of Iraq. If anyone needed more proof of his talents it came on Wednesday, when Packer was awarded a National Book Award…
If you live in South Florida, it’s hard not to have a mega literary crush on Karen Russell. The Miami native is just 32 years old, has three bad-ass books to her name, and is a MacArthur-certified genius. More important, perhaps, is that she’s hilarious and didn’t hang up on…
Growing up on Key Biscayne, author Soman Chainani was surrounded by lots of good children and lots of evil children. He was able to combine his observations on their behaviors with his imagination to write the New York Times bestselling young adult novel, The School for Good and Evil. This…
Daniel Alarcón had been driving for days along one of the most dangerous routes in the world — a serpentine service road recently carved into the dense Peruvian countryside — when he suddenly sensed that he wasn’t alone. “You look around you and think, OK, up in the hills somebody…
Drugs — the illegal kind — really get a bad rap. They ruin lives, we’re told. Devastate communities. Drive people mad. In some cases that’s true. What we’re not told, however, is that the overwhelming majority of those who use drugs, even regularly, including hard drugs, emerge from their merrymaking…
If we didn’t know better, we’d think the organizers of the Miami Book Fair had consulted a psychic before planning this year’s week-long festival of author appearances. The fair, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, got a pretty sweet gift from the National Book Foundation this week: a pair…
D.T. Max almost approached David Foster Wallace at a book release party, but ended up getting cold feet. It was only after writing an entire book about the famed recluse that Max could be sure he made the right choice in holding back. Two things became abundantly clear during his…
How many books could you read in 30 years? Five hundred? Three thousand? Could you break into the six figures? No matter your estimate, Miami Book Fair International likely has you beat. In its three-decade run, MBFI has featured about 7,500 authors promoting countless books — and that’s just in…
Tim Maxeiner”I really feel like I did some of my best work while at the Miami Herald,” Evelyn McDonnell admits. The writer spent eight years there as the pop music critic. But she was familiar with Miami even before moving here. She’d attended years of Winter Music Conference (which she…
March: Book One isn’t just a graphic novel. It’s an autobiography, a coming-of-age story, and a call to action all rolled up into one. The book’s co-author, Georgia Congressman John Lewis, uses the graphic novel to reflect on how his childhood experiences set him on the path of non-violence and…
Like most poets, Jonathan Galassi is also the president of one of the world’s most renowned publishing houses and is the foremost translator of Nobel Prize-winning Italian poet Eugenio Montale. He probably also has a cat. Galassi runs Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which has Montale and 21 other Nobel laureates…
The first appearance of El Comandante, the ersatz Fidel Castro in Cristina García’s King of Cuba, finds the enfeebled dictator confined to lead his revolution from his bed. “The tyrant shifted onto his left arm, aiming his scrawny buttocks at the Straits of Florida, and released a sputtering, malodorous stream…
Dan Brown can see the future. Check it out: Back before he was the bagillionaire writer of The Da Vinci Code, luring legions of fans to events like the Miami Book Fair International, which he opens this Sunday, Brown was an English teacher at a tony New England prep school…
The books are back, y’all. The Miami Book Fair International kicks off its 30th anniversary edition this Sunday, bringing the literary arts’ biggest names to Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus for a full week of readings, conversations, and the kind of shopping splurges that’ll have you browsing the aisles at…
As Art Basel and the Miami Book Fair are poised to return, here’s some news that bridges the gap between modern art and literature: In February, artist Tim Youd embarked on a five-year project in which he plans to retype 100 novels in locations related to the novel and author…
There are a lot of things Miami does wrong — particularly when it comes to our lack of cultural substance. But this city is also capable of utterly awesome and unique endeavors, an example of which is O, Miami, a cool, classy tribute to the written word. This festival originally…
Karen Russell writes some of the scariest, most haunting stories around. The 32-year-old also happens to be from Miami, of course. So we thought we’d take a moment on Halloween — the most terrifying day of the year — to ask her how local ghosts and ghouls shaped her literary…
Dave Barry is a very funny man. South Floridians have spent years reading and laughing through his columns and published books. And through local appearances and charity events, Barry has earned a ton of goodwill in the Miami community. In fact, he’s probably the only man in the state of…
Representative Allen West. Governor Rick Scott. Real Housewives skin assemblage Elsa Patton. Florida has long had a rough go of things when it comes to being represented to the world. But we’ve always had a fairly rich literary tradition — even if much of it has been tattooed across our…
Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses being published in England. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence on Rushdie as punishment for the supposed blasmphemy in the novel, leading Rushdie and his family going into hiding for nearly a decade, constantly accompanied by an armed…
Salman Rushdie’s life story would make for a cracking read even if he, a man knighted for his services to literature, hadn’t been the one to pen it. This is a life that has included writing some of the English language’s finest novels, dating models, and being sentenced to death…
