Art / Literature
Reading History
Monterey County Free Libraries celebrates 100 years of service
One hundred years ago, the RMS Titanic set off on its first and last voyage; the African National Congress, which today governs South Africa, was founded; Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures started operations; and European ...
Epics, Artists and Revolutionaries
Touring 10 of the best books of 2011.
They sweep from graphic novels to frontier foodie-ism, from timeless talents reexamined to new breakout authors, from spooky religious investigations to spookier studies of why good looks mean great salaries. You may not be able ...
The Man Who Changed Music
The Peninsula’s Robert Greenfield, a preeminent chronicler of rock ‘n’ roll, turns his pen on late recording legend Ahmet Ertegun.
Ahmet Ertegun signed and/or recorded Ray Charles, Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Sonny and Cher, Eric Clapton, Cream, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills Nash & Young, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Bette Midler, Kid Rock, and many ...
Beyond Steinbeck
The Last Otter Hunter tells the story Cannery Row’s definitive historian always wanted to.
When Michael Kenneth Hemp moved to Monterey in 1979, it is tempting to imagine that Doc Ricketts and John Steinbeck breathed a sigh of relief from on high. Over the next decade, the author established ...
Front Burner
Burning Man strives for relevance beyond the desert playa.
When Burning Man sold out July 25 (a record 51,454 tickets at up to $360), a friend posted on Facebook: “You could pay $800 for a BM ticket, or come over, I’ll throw glitter at ...
Space Case
Local author Dan Linehan’s new book explores the galaxy of private space travel.
In the near future, people other than astronauts will travel regularly into space. Not long after that, some will live on settlements among the stars. And it looks like these developments won’t come from NASA ...
Sports Crazy
ESPN’s Rick Reilly talks Sports From Hell in Pacific Grove.
He braved temperatures at the Sauna World Championships that gave one competitor pus-filled sacs “the size of a $3 pancake.” He chronicled inmates trying to snatch a $500 poker chip from between a 2,000-pound bull’s ...
Large Medium
Belle Yang’s debut graphic novel, Forget Sorrow, is a big breakthrough.
Author and artist Belle Yang’s storybooks are drawn in a Chinese folk art style that’s expressionistic and deceptively childlike. Her latest work uses that foundation as a springboard to reach higher and plumb deeper than ...
Something Old Something New
Pearl K. McCullough, first time author at age 87, recalls tales of her childhood in the Appalachian mountains.
Among the chatter and the hubub of commerce at Sand City's Borders bookstore on Saturday, March 20, about two dozen people sat rapt to hear stories from Pearl K. McCullough, a first-time author, at age ...
Power Trip
Carmel Valley author debuts 'Cuba Rising' with a talk in Monterey.
Carmel Valley resident Jonathan Showe has been to Cuba close to 80 times. He understands the most populated island in the Caribbean, how it has resisted the tides of change – vintage American cars with ...
Rare Prize
CSUMB scores Pulitzer-winning Junot Díaz for its President’s Speaker Series.
In 1996, Junot Díaz burst onto the literary scene with Drown, a short story collection set in his native Dominican Republic and New Jersey. It included “Ysrael,” a tale about brothers who form a plan ...
Just Stories
CSUMB staffers unleash social-justice book 'Fire and Ink'.
A burly San Quentin inmate falls into a pit of rage upon news of his grandmother’s death. A Vietnamese social worker appeals to soldiers to save 11,000 civilians. A Japanese mother breaks her silence about ...
Punchy Stuff
A heavyweight lineup of literary happenings canvas the county this fall.
Maybe you’ve heard. Literature is on the ropes, out-hustled by the mighty Internet, hampered by a mediocre education system, cornered in the ring by mangled text messaging, and pummeled by electronic media and movies. But ...
Fantasy and Reality
Christopher Paolini mixes legend with fact at Steinbeck Festival talk.
Once upon a time, there was a young man with a magical gift. Even though he had grown up in a verdant valley, which was surrounded by a mountain range that rose above the land ...
Novel Graphics
Asian-Americans redefine graphic novels at Salinas Library.
The story of comic book superheroes is the story of American immigration. Start with the first classic superhero: Superman. A literal “alien” who leaves his homeland, which is consumed by catastrophe, arrives in America and ...
Legends of the Fall
Carmel author’s new book is a tale of the rise and demise of two British dreamers.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a band called the Rolling Stones. Not the geezers who’ve been making worldwide tours with Mick Jagger’s leering face staring down from a JumboTron ...
Seaside Stories
A new book on an unusually diverse, and accepting, community.
“Seaside is the most important city in the region,” says Stanford historian and director of the Seaside History Project, Dr. Carol Lynn McKibben, “in terms of how it fits into the literature of urban America ...
Flying Frogs
Carmel artist/writer Belle Yang moves with ease from children’s books to graphic novels.
Carmel writer Belle Yang is an author and illustrator of lyrical books like Chili-Chili-Chin-Chin and Hannah Is My Name. But she also talks of reading economist John Kenneth Galbraith and The Decline and Fall of ...
Row Crop
Real Life on Cannery Row harvests information on the real folks that inspired Steinbeck’s classic.
Looking down the touristy thoroughfare of Monterey’s Cannery Row, beneath a snowstorm of seagulls, it takes a mighty imagination to picture the area that inspired John Steinbeck to write his classic Cannery Row. Using vast ...
Well Versed
Poet Donald Hall’s work is non-confessional, but moving and carefully wrought.
Imagine knowing what you will do with your life before knowing how to drive. Impressive – but not nearly as remarkable as actually doing it. “At 14, I decided to spend my life writing poetry, ...
Directions Known and Unknown
An American exile shares his adventures abroad.
“The tools of a traveler are compass and map,’’ author-photographer Michael Katakis writes at the beginning of Traveller – Observations from an American in Exile (Burton & Park Publishers) about his expatriate experiences. “They calculate ...
Throw in the “Towel Head”
Measuring true lies, media profiling and false stereotypes.
Jack G. Shaheen is the leading scourge of anti-Arab media bias. A professor emeritus of mass communications at Southern Illinois University, he has for many years conducted what might be called a crusade against odious ...
Novel Concepts
Salinas’ Kelly Parra follows well-received Graffiti Girl with quirky Invisible Touch.
Budding local author Kelly Parra creates characters with a challenge ahead of them. “I like to write about girls who are strong at heart,” she says. “They have their faults, but they have a journey ...
Ilk and Cookies
A brief and wondrous interview with Junot Díaz.
Junot Díaz is the “It Kid” in literature today. The author of the 1996 short story collection Drown, he was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life ...
Storybook Success
An East of Eden Writers Conference attendee returns to speak as a blossoming novelist.
At the East of Eden Writers Conference in 2004, Terri Thayer recalls looking with awe at the “real” writers populating the Steinbeck Center that weekend. A quilter for more than 20 years, Thayer had put ...
Fiery Lit
The Return of Ping Pong
Jonathan Ames’ short fiction story “Book Tour Diary” would have pleased Henry Miller. It reads like a little black book of sexual escapades, but with a strange revelation that drops the reader into messy human ...
Mad Dope Mag
New local literary journal Cadillac Cicatrix quietly gathers quality content with plenty of edges.
When a new magazine appears on local news shelves, its cover typically features a sultry woman emerging from a pool or a picturesque sunset along the coast or, equally predicatable, a heavily shadowed lone cypress. ...
Higher Plane
Local writer scores big with a debut about a revolutionary spacecraft.
Monterey scribe Dan Linehan’s name may not be familiar to many, even on a local level, but maybe it should. His just-released first book, SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History, is the only book published on the ...
Taking Stock
A grandfather of local theater looks back with a self-published book.
With 85 years behind him– and his brother’s passing leaving him the last of his family– Morgan Stock decided it was a good time to write his memoir. The longtime local theater pillar and the ...
The Right Snuff
Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel uses dark humor to examine filthy porn and death.
Chuck Palahniuk has a penchant for writing stories that induce nausea and laughter simultaneously. “Guts,” his short story that appeared in Playboy in 2004, replays three true tales of masturbation gone horribly wrong. His 2002 ...
Things Fall Apart: 50 Years Later
For many, Chinua Achebe’s classic novel serves as an introduction to Africa, but the continent depicted is now hard to recognize.
Several years ago, while I was living in Arusha, Tanzania, teaching English at a local secondary school, one of my jobs was to teach literature. This was not as easy as it sounds. Our syllabus ...
Table Talk
The Author’s Table revives the lost art of the literary salon.
LITERATURE The Steinbeck Center’s director of marketing and communications, Amanda Holder, recounts a memorable evening of years past: “I went to a dinner party attended by Thomas Steinbeck [son of John Steinbeck]. He wrote Down ...
Bay Laureate
Renowned poet Robert Hass, who grew up on comics and Beats, reads at MPC.
>>LITIn the Bay Area of the 1940s, there lived a boy who played and grew up like many boys did in that time and place: He explored his region’s natural terrain, read comic books, went ...
Oh, Henry
Ping•Pong magazine returns with new character and a big party.
>>LITERATURE“The world is so rich,” wrote Henry Miller, “simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” Ping•Pong, the original literary magazine published by the Henry Miller Library 11 years ago, would ...
The Way Home
Big Read culminates in maps show at Steinbeck.
A few years ago, Mihir Patel, an Indian student living in Kenya, made a bet with his father—if he scored 85 percent or higher on a big upcoming test, he could choose anywhere in the ...
Here Comes the Son
Neal Pollack tries to be the ultimate indie dad.
In his new memoir Neal Pollack tackles a question of great consequence for his generation: Can I be a father and still retain my indie cred?At once witty, charming and tedious, Alternadad takes a familiar ...
