When asked if I would review the new textbook on engraving, Design to Touch, written by Rose Gonnella and Erin Smith and published by the International Engraved Graphics Association (IEGA), I of course leapt at the chance. As someone enchanted by letterpress printing, I am equally fascinated by its sister art. Physically, the processes are […]
Category Archives: Nonfiction
March
03
What Stacy’s Reading Now: My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel
posted by Stacy
A footnote found early in My Age of Anxiety, Scott Stossel’s recent memoir/social history, notes something that I’ve always suspected: “…there are plausible evolutionary explanations for why both intelligence and imagination ten to be allied with anxiety” (18). I have always hypothesized that anxiety is a “smart person” problem, and now I have evidence to […]
January
29
Lettered Ladies Book Club: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair
posted by Lynne Nugent
Although I have yet to deliver an unqualified rave of a book in this blog (except for the occasional children’s book), I swear I’m not a book snob. To prove this, I will now make a confession that could forever destroy my credibility in certain circles: I enjoyed Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Though it’s been […]
January
13
Lettered Ladies Book Club: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair
posted by Laura
I still can’t believe that Nina Sankovitch did what she did. Reading a 250-300 page book every day — and then writing about it! — for an entire year seems frankly impossible to me. Truly it does. Lettered Lady Kate could totally do this. She sacrifices no comprehension at all for her enviable speed, which […]
January
01
What Stacy’s Reading Now: Bittersweet
posted by Stacy
Ahhh…Christmas Break. The time when all English professors take a break from grading and lesson plans and meetings and …. read. (Hmmm…maybe we need new hobbies?) At least for me, the kind of reading I do during the three weeks in between the end of our Fall semester and the start of my January session […]
December
23
Lettered Ladies Book Club: My take on Tolstoy, the Purple Chair, and the Act of Reading
posted by Kate Krueger
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch To read one book every day for a year: that is the kind of goal I can get behind. As a professor, I read for hours every day, but those hours are usually scattered upon student papers, historical and theoretical works, and […]
November
25
Lettered Ladies Book Club: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair
posted by Stacy
A few months ago – tanned and relaxed from our respective summers and giddy from the fun of our new blog – the Lettered Ladies decided to embark on an adventure together. Though the six of us now live in five different states and see each other only rarely, we knew that we could be […]
November
17
When Women Were Birds
posted by Laura
What seems like an age ago, I was in an environmental nonfiction class in which I was assigned Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams. A memoir chronicling the rising of Great Salt Lake alongside the disturbing deaths from cancer of several of the women in Williams’s family, including her mother, it is an interrogation, on one […]
September
06
Coming to the Table
posted by Ann
Our family table was once my grandmother’s. It is on the smallish side with a delicate finish. It has traveled with me my whole adult life. It is where my friend Rick and I ate BBQ pork and drank large cans of Bottington’s after a night class in Virginia. It is where my husband and […]
You Must Revise Your Life
posted by Laura
When I taught various sections of Interpretation of Literature in graduate school over the course of some years, my major texts would shift and change. Pride and Prejudice one semester. Frankenstein another. Love in the Time of Cholera one semester. Everything is Illuminated another. And drama? Never the same play twice. Swapping out texts was an opportunity […]
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