Month: January 2004

  • Anchee Min, Empress Orchid

    You’ve heard of China’s last emperor, the boy king toppled from the throne by the rise of Mao. Now, meet his mother, the last empress. Becoming Madame Mao and Red Azalea author Min returns with another wonderfully descriptive work, the first in an eventual trilogy about Tzu Hsi, China’s longest-reigning female ruler. Min aims to…

  • Susan Vreeland

    After chronicling the life of Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi in her last book, Susan Vreeland continues her welcome biographical specialty in underappreciated women artists in her new novel, Forest Lover. This time around, her subject is turn-of-the-century painter Emily Carr, who defied her strict Victorian family to live among the Indians of then-isolated Vancouver Island.…

  • Neil Gaiman

    Katherine Lanpher has moved on from MPR, but before she left she helped broaden the vistas of the Talking Volumes radio book club by getting Neil Gaiman, who perhaps may not draw the same crowd as Anna Quindlen. Gaiman, who will discuss his recent kid-lit creeper Coraline, is best known for creating the nineties graphic-novel…

  • Haven Kimmel

    North Carolina writer Kimmel’s third book, Something Rising (Light and Swift), isn’t quite strong enough to justify that optimistic title. But there’s merit in the story of Cassie Claiborne, an emotionally wounded girl from poor rural Indiana whose preternatural talent for shooting pool might be her ticket out of town, or at least toward reconciliation…

  • Wine, wine, wine! Wild Horses on Bended Knee

    The saints of February are a rum lot. The larger their reputation, the less can be said for certain about their lives and activities—and vice versa. The blameless virgin Saint Scholastica, twin sister of Saint Benedict, is relatively well documented—for someone who lived fifteen hundred years ago. But she is remembered only for the name…

  • For Those About To Get Off The Rock…

    It wasn’t love, but it was enough to risk his life for. It was the first morning of 1992 at five a.m. on Madeline Island and the bar had emptied out when Tommy Nelson, the ponytailed owner of Tommy’s Burned Down Café, spun out onto Lake Superior in his 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood and was surprised…