What does it mean to be rooted, especially when the roots reach into soil that is toxic and unforgiving? That’s one of the fundamental questions explored by “Diana,” the latest graphic novel from Natural State native Nate Powell, set mostly in the din of the 1990s Arkansas punk scene.
Wesley Beal
Posted inFood & Culture
Stephanie Saunders’ debut novel maps Arkansas’s grassroots birth control movement
Set in the Ozark foothills in the late 1930s, where whispers about a budding birth control movement in Little Rock are getting louder, Arkansas writer and Lyon College professor Stephanie Saunders’s debut novel “Covered Buttons” is both historical and immersive.
Posted inRock Candy
‘Peace Is a Shy Thing’: Hendrix prof Alex Vernon’s biography of Tim O’Brien is pathbreaking
In the hands of Hendrix College English professor Alex Vernon, the life story of writer Tim O’Brien — best known for the 1990 short story cycle “The Things They Carried” — is riveting, personal and complex, with O’Brien carrying all the contradictions of his best characters.
Posted inRock Candy
Eli Cranor plays chicken with Arkansas’s dark secrets in latest novel ‘Broiler’
“Broiler,” the latest book by Pope County writer Eli Cranor, entangles two couples whose lives orbit a chicken plant in Northwest Arkansas. Combining elements of expose journalism with conventions of tension and suspense, the novel sets in motion a chain reaction plot that rapidly moves through ransom demands, thefts and hostage-taking.
Posted inRock Candy
‘The misery of really growing up’: A Q&A with writer Kiley Reid
“Come and Get It,” Kiley Reid’s new novel set at the University of Arkansas, offers a deft examination of how young people negotiate their first brushes with independence and responsibility. Reid is particularly attuned to how her characters navigate matters of money and consumption.
Posted inEntertainment
Heat and pandemic be damned, Phish offered a ‘temporary reprieve from gravity’ at the Walmart AMP last night
It was the band’s first ever date in Arkansas, which felt like a kind of personal validation somehow. And it was the band’s first public show since closing out a short run in Mexico in February of 2020. Expectations were running, ah, high among those I met in the queue at the gates and inside on the lawn.
Posted inEntertainment
Kevin Brockmeier’s ‘The Ghost Variations’ brings ghosts out of the ether and into the everyday
Brockmeier, the Little Rock-raised author of eight books that probe the fantastical, offers one hundred vignettes on a wide range of ghostly perspectives.
Posted inEntertainment
A review of the late John Churchill’s “The Problem with Rules”
Churchill’s book arrives a year and change after his death, in a dispiriting moment. The foreword, written by his youngest son Hugh and his brother Larry, notes that liberal arts deliberation is sorely lacking through the pandemic as we struggle to balance public health services and the needs of the economy.
Posted inEntertainment
Recommended reading: Ling Ma’s “Severance” is an uncanny novel for these times
Ma’s debut novel is a prescient look at life during a pandemic, but it’s also an uncanny meditation on work.
