Olivia Drake(more…)
Government major Jourdan Khalid Hussein '11 has published an article based on his thesis at Wesleyan. The article "Not Secular Enough? Variation in Electoral Success of Post-Islamist Parties in Turkey and Indonesia" has been published in the journal STUDIA ISLAMIKA. Hussein currently works in the Indonesian "White House," as the assistant to the head, Indonesian President's Delivery Unit for Development Monitoring and Oversight." STUDIA ISLAMIKA is a journal published by the Center for the Study of Islam and Society. It specializes in Indonesian Islamic studies in particular, and South-east Asian Islamic Studies in general, and is intended to communicate original researches and…
David LowKate Colby ’96 is the author of two new poetry collections. The first, Beauport (Litmus Press), gets its inspiration from the life of a whimsical decorator and designer Henry Davis Sleeper, the author’s memoires of her New England upbringing, and lithographs by Currier & Ives of the Victorian-era leisure class. Beauport was a seaside mansion, now called the Sleeper-McCann House, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, created about a century ago by Sleeper. In a review of the book on New Pages.com, Angela Veronica Wong writes: “These are poems of quiet beauty, wielding power through lovely simplicity. They wander through ideas and memories,…
Johnny Temple ’88, owner and publisher of Akashic Books, has published Adam Mansbach’s Go the F—k to Sleep, a children’s book parody for parents which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best seller list for advice books on June 19. The book has nursery rhyme style text with illustrations by Ricardo Cortes. According to an article in Hollywood Reporter, after Temple acquired the title, he first sent a PDF of the book to independent bookstores in February, and the PDF “went viral, passed from knowing parent to knowing parent, and propelling the book to No. 1 on…
Several Wesleyan graduates are involved in Armchair/Shotgun, a new literary magazine based in Brooklyn, N.Y. that publishes new fiction, poetry, visual art work and author profiles. The publication was co-founded by writers John Cusick ’07 and Evan Simko-Bednarski ’07 is run by an editorial and business staff that includes the co-founders and Laura McMillan ’05, Aaron Reuben ’07, Adam Read-Brown ’07 and W. Gavin Robb ’07. The staff celebrated the release of its second issue on March 18 at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. This issue features a profile by Kevin Dugan of novelist Jesse Ball, author of Samedi the Deafness…
In her Encyclopedia of the Exquisite (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), Jessica Kerwin Jenkins ’93 is inspired by exotic 16th-century encyclopedias, which celebrated mysterious artifacts, with emphasis on the elegant, the rare, the commonplace and the delightful. Jenkins’s modern-day version combines whimsy and practicality, as it showcases the fine arts and the worlds of fashion, food, travel, home, garden and beauty. In the spirit of renewing old sources of beauty, and using an anecdotal approach, each entry shares engaging stories. Among them: the explosive history of champagne, the art of lounging on a divan, and the thrill of dining alfresco. The book…
Ellen Forney ’89 was recently profiled by Tirdad Derakhshani in the Philadelphia Inquirer, who noted the artist’s “65 illustrations, doodlings, comic panels, and assorted visual asides” that play an important and integral part in the National Book Award-winning novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little Brown) by Sherman Alexie. Over a three-year period, Forney worked closely with Alexie who “gave her freedom to explore and contribute” based on her own inspiration. Forney’s illustrations had to reflect the imagination of the book’s main character, Junior, “who is growing up on a reservation in Washington state, … an aspiring…
Historian Marc Stein is the author of the new study Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). The U.S. Supreme Court of the 1960s and 1970s is typically celebrated by liberals and condemned by conservatives for its rulings on abortion, birth control, and other sexual matters. Stein demonstrates convincingly that both sides have it wrong. Focusing on six major Supreme Court cases, Stein examines more liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage, and obscenity alongside a profoundly conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. In the same era in which the Court recognized…
Work by writers Steve Almond ’88 and Wells Tower ’96 have been selected for the recently published The Best American Short Stories 2010 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), edited by fiction writer Richard Russo. Almond’s story in the collection, “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched,” about a psychoanalyst who plays poker, was published originally in Tin House. The story will appear in his next story collection God Bless America. Almond is the author of two previous story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B. B. Chow, the best-selling Candyfreak, and most recently, the nonfiction book Rock and Roll Will Save…
Susan Lehman ’81, a communications executive, editor and lawyer, is the new publisher and editor-in-chief of Twelve, a small and respected imprint of Grand Central Publishing. She has worked over the years as media strategist, writer and editor in the realms of magazines, law, television and newspapers. She served as as an editor at Riverhead Books from 2003–2004. Twelve has published 39 titles, 19 of which have made The New York Times best-seller list, including God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and War by Sebastian Junger ’84. In a recent article in The New York Times, Lehman said she…
Best-selling author Robin Cook '62 has just released a new novel, Cure (Putnam), which deals with the problematic intersection of big business and medicine, the cut-throat world of medical patents, and stem cell technology. Cook recently talked to Reuters about writing and his latest thriller, which is set in Japan and New York: “I have been interested in stem cell issues from the beginning because it is so important. I became more interested when I saw it was going to get caught up in politics and it put us back about 10 years or so. In 2006 when I saw…
Three acclaimed books by Wesleyan alumni were on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best seller list in August. They include: Packing for Mars by Mary Roach ’81, a detailed, often funny examination of space travel; War by Sebastian Junger '84, a powerful look at the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan; and Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson ’03, a witty account of the making of the classic film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.