“I don’t think Gossip Girl happens to any teenager I know,” Mariko Tamaki laughs as we talk about the way a lot of young adult works don’t exactly mirror reality. “I think the idea is to stay within a visible realm of experience.” Mariko Tamaki is coming down for the…
Brian Turner’s My Life as a Foreign Country is not your typical war memoir. As the title implies, there is something radically displaced about this soldier’s story. In one moment, Turner imagines himself as a drone aircraft, “plying the darkness above my body, flying over my wife as she sleeps…
The voice of Buika is a melodious blend of Africa, Spain, and the Mediterranean, with an amazing quaver more powerful than the Plava Laguna from the excellent action flick The Fifth Element. Hailing from the island of Majorca, near Ibiza, she now calls Miami Beach home. And she has a…
Alfred J. López’s new book, José Martí: A Revolutionary Life from University of Texas Press, is the first biography written about the polarizing Cuban revolutionary in over half a century and the first ever in English. For as academic a subject as Martí could be in the hands of a…
Anjanette Delgado trails her right hand along the spines of books lining a shelf at Books & Books in Coral Gables, vigorously grabbing another paperback to add to the existing pile balanced in her left arm. She makes her way to a small corner table in the bookstore’s café and…
Florida’s weirdness is hardly a secret. From Fark.com’s Florida section to the popularity of “Why is Florida so weird?” as a Google query, the world is on to our state’s many oddities. But there’s more to the Sunshine State’s quirky character than dudes with half a head and alligator whisperers…
There’s a universe behind our eyes, says prize-winning short story writer Morowa Yejidé. Her debut novel, Time of the Locust, observes the life and family of Sephiri, a young autistic boy whose mother struggles to support and understand him in the wake of losing her husband to the unforgiving confines…
In addition to the Mad Max, post-apocalyptic kind, death matches come in many flavors, including the bookish variety. And this year, the Miami Book Fair International’s The Swamp lounge is hosting a Florida-themed Literary Death Match, featuring writers (and one judge) who hail from the Sunshine State. So what is…
Longtime Seinfeld writer and producer Peter Mehlman aims higher than laughter with his debut novel, as he examines racism, religion, tragedy — and feet. A reflective social commentary, It Won’t Always Be This Great is both comic and poignant. From beginning to end, the novel artfully cultivates a philosophy opposed…
John Updike described the career of Joyce Carol Oates better than anyone when he said, “. . . if the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, she would be . . . entitled to it.” She’s written novels, short story collections, nonfiction, novellas, plays, poetry, collections, children’s and young adult books,…
A great book is like a great song, once it gets in your head, it’s in there for the rest of your life. Just ask Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and George Clinton, two of America’s greatest living recording artists, and now authors. Their albums and shows have pushed the creative boundaries…
“Maria and I didn’t start out an interfaith couple. We became one 15 years into our marriage. Up until then, my wife was a lapsed Catholic and I was a bad Jew. We shared a New Age spirituality and read mystical books to each other as we carpooled to work…
What’s the most important invention of the 20th Century? Is it the telephone? The assembly line? The airplane? Nope — it’s the birth control pill. That’s according to author and journalist Jonathan Eig, whose book, The Birth of The Pill, traces the pill’s origins and the risk-taking innovators who pushed…
A few years before HBO turned Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency into a show, casting Jill Scott as the female Sherlock Holmes of Botswana, I read the first in this very, very long series of novels. You can be as cynical as you want, the story…
Whether you’re a science nerd, a fantasy geek, a comic book dork, or any one of a dozen types of dweebs, the Miami Book Fair International always has your back. Year after year, MBFI caters not only to high-minded literati snobs, but also to all manner of geek. Did you…
When John Waters arrives in Miami for this year’s book fair, it might just feel like home. Waters, who directed Pink Flamingos and about a dozen other twisted cult films, is known as the Pope of Trash and the Prince of Puke; he’s most comfortable at the intersection of gross,…
For the last 14 years, the Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) has strengthened the bonds between science and art as a means of creating awareness and insuring the survival of the Everglades — a unique and delicate ecosystem that is unique and should be of utmost concern for all…
Forget Ultra or Art Basel — the best week of the year is here: Miami Book Fair International! This litany of literary wonders is taking over downtown Miami for the next two weeks, and all kinds of awesome events (many of them free) are lined up. This is your chance…
The Sweat Broadside project has been going strong since “a sweltering evening in 2009, a group of visual artists and writers met at Sweat Records in Miami to share their work and talk about ways they might work together.” Showing the tangibility of modern poetics, writers and visual artists have…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year for book nerds: Christmas, Mardi Gras, and New Year’s Eve rolled into one glorious week to charm and delight South Florida’s bibliophiles. The Miami Book Fair International has almost arrived. But with a massively long schedule of awesome events and only one…
What Bram Stoker was to the 18th century, Anne Rice is to the 20th and 21st. Though the latter has dabbled in various themes throughout her writing career and is known for writing about both demons and gods, Rice’s legacy all started with a vampire. He can be hailed as…
It was Shakespeare who once said “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” That pronunciation also implies that it boasts both triumphs and tragedies. Bree-Anna Obst can relate to philosophy as well as to the bard that implied it in the first place. Obst,…
