Issue of July 29, 2012

Take a dip into our buffet of columns this week to discover the surprising need that personal memoirs will hold for our collective future, for a review of two excellent short story collections, and for one answer to the ongoing question about reviews’ impact on books.

The consumer market for memoirs can be an iffy one, but the need for them, especially as personal letters and other intimate correspondence gives way to e-mail, is acute. Guest columnist Janet Reid ponders the growing importance of memoirs as written records of how we live in the editor’s letter: Memories, Lighting the Corners of Minds.

Do book reviews spoil reading? Though she frames the question differently, Nicki Leone explores that question in What Does It Take to Spoil a Book? by noting that a worthy review is “harder than you’d think, being absolutely honest in your opinion of a book, and completely thorough in your assessment even to the point of ‘spoiling’ it when necessary.”

Delving further into a genre she has avoided in the past, short stories, Katherine Hauswirth finds two collections where the authors “imbue something deeper into turns of events that we can imagine, but for which we might very well miss the point had they unfolded before us” in Mystic Shorthand.

Issue of July 22, 2012

In this week’s issue, we have some hot reading to match your weather that will only, we promise, heat up your excitement. So with a recommended tall and frosted glass of iced tea in hand, we encourage you to check out what you will find on BiblioBuffet this week.

The world of the fantastical, that is, sword-and-sorcery literature, comes alive in wonderful ways in a new anthology that, according to Gillian Polack in Introducing Sword and Sorcery, “lets the stories shine (for it is a good selection) on their own merits” and “that it plays with extreme emotions and adjectives and toys with the absolute.”

What makes an authority in the world of biography? Carl Rollyson, in The Historian is His Own Authority, Part 2, continues his discussion of what he feels makes a “true biographer” who “brings to the telling of history a deeply imaginative sensibility that relies on and yet transcends the very ‘authorities’ on which his narrative is based.”

This week, Dan Crawford, the author of a popular blog about a book fair, shares his ongoing adventures with the backside of the fair as it progresses to opening day. Lauren Roberts turns her editor’s letter over to him so you can read all about it in Behind the Scenes . . .

Though the weather these days does not call for warm wool clothing the textile is nevertheless a prominent one in the world of clothing. Lauren Roberts searched the skeins of history to explore the wonderful world of wool in Wool Marks.

Issue of July 15, 2012

It’s hot! I don’t mean just temperature wise, though it is certainly that, but at BiblioBuffet too. Check out our newest issue for some of the hottest literary writing around. We promise it won’t make you uncomfortable.

Elizabeth Creith, our resident biblio-humorist, takes on the world of abridgements and their less-than-whole contributions to her life in a wonderfully funny way in Burn that Abridgment When We Come To It.

Aren’t there times when even the most urban dweller wants to “notice more about, those things that man cannot make, the many elements of nature that live beside us, so often unnoticed”? Katherine Hauswirth shares her thoughts on two books whose authors did just that in Long Live the Watchers.

Inspiration hits authors in many different ways, and Lev Raphael describes how a writers’ conference prompted him to make a leap into a genre in which he had never imagined writing in Bitten.

Richard III comes into Nicki Leone’s life in a particularly unsettling way but she finds that the depth of character and the use of language—Shakespeare’s specialty—throws far more into the story than she could have anticipated in Bent Dick.

Losing a parent is the natural order of things but it is still a devastating loss. Lauren Roberts shares her feelings on her father’s recent death in The Light Has Gone Out.

Issue of July 8, 2012

Is it hot where you live? The odds are the answer is yes. So what could be better on a hot day than a cool reading spot under a large tree? Check out what we are talking about to find just the right book for just that day.

Technology is changing the face of publishing at a dramatic pace. Today anyone can publish anything. But many readers still demand quality. How, in this new publishing landscape, can new high-quality publishers be found? Gillian Polack shares her enthusiasm for one in New Words from a New Press.

Who is the authority of a biography? The biographer? Carl Rollyson uses the experiences of Harper Lee’s biographer as well as his own to explore  how each biographer “brings to the telling of history a deeply imaginative sensibility that relies on and yet transcends the very ‘authorities’ on which his narrative is based” in The Biographer is His Own Story, Part 1.

What is Lauren Roberts reading? Beginning this week, she plans to tell all in On the Reading Road, and in doing so to share the books that don’t always make it into review but that do make themselves part of her life.

Issue of July 1, 2012

It’s summer with the holiday just a few days away. And since July 4 falls in the middle of the week, this year may be one where fewer people than usual take long trips and more will stay close to home. In which case, of course, it’s a perfect day for lazing about under a tree, book in hand. Which one will it be for you?

Its sole purpose in life is to hold things together, a rather important task when one thinks about it. Laine Farley explores what turns out to be an extensive history of some of the gorgeous bookmarks from competing manufacturers who advertised their threads along with their complex rivalries on these bits of paper in Threads.

Fzzt! Is that a sound, one made when water meets electricity, one ever really wants to hear? Elizabeth Creith ponders the “advances” made in money and books for humans who haven’t made any equal advances in how they handle them in Who Thinks of This Stuff?

Watching your children choose books can often bring back memories of one’s own childhood favorites. This week, Katherine Hauswirth recalls the one book with “a genuine good feeling imbued by the story that survives the wider perspective that a century brings” in Katherine’s Little (Vintage) Indulgence.

Food is the one common language that every culture in every country in the world understands. Regardless of how we eat and what we eat the fact is we all eat. Nicki Leone, who understands this probably better than anyone, shares her delight with a new southern cookbook with a twist in The World Outside My Skillet.

Sometimes truths come to us in the form of great books, great tragedies, great encounters. Other times they appear in forms and in places where one would never expect to find them. Lauren Roberts found a few of her own in an expected book in Small Joys, Big Truths.