O, Miami Aims to Inspire Verse, From Symphonies to Barstools

Travel across the Magic City from Little Havana to Lemon City, Hialeah to Homestead, or South Beach to Surfside and you’ll be serenaded by a sonorous canto of contrasting voices. For interdisciplinary artists Juana Meneses and Leila Leder Kremer, that multicultural heart is the inspiration for “Home: Beyond Geography,” their…

Send in Your Miami Stories for the Big Read Tumblr Project

When it comes to bibliophilia, these aren’t the glory days of Reading Rainbow (we miss you, Levar!). With attention spans shortening, libraries closing, and book publishers going broke, any chance to promote tomes lengthier than 140 characters is a step in the right direction. Enter the Big Read, a National…

The Minimalists: Five Ways to Be Happy With Less Stuff

Stuff. So much of our lives are spent wanting it, buying it, trying to keep it. We work 60-hour workweeks so we can fill our drawers and purses and closets and storage units and attics with stuff. We take pictures of our stuff to post on Instagram, spend weekends picking…

Miami Book Fair 2013’s Best Authors

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…

Evelyn McDonnell on Writing the Story of the Runaways

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…

Cristina García Dethrones Castro in King of Cuba with Farts and Impotence

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 Totally Predicted the NSA Spying Scandal

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…