You have found the Starving Artist blog, about books, writing, and both indie and conventional publishing. Please follow the drop down menus to navigate around the page or just scroll down to read the blog. And why the moniker? See the first two blog posts from 2012. For Flaherty’s books, please visit devontrevarrowflahertybooks.wordpress.com. Enjoy!
And yet another book that I have been meaning to read for ages: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I never understood what on earth a lauded and supposedly literary type like Truman Capote was doing with a true crime book topping his very short list. I mean, where did this author fit in my…
For all the amazing-ness of All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr made some nontraditional choices: he went with present tense (mostly?), chopped his behemoth up into hundreds of few-page chapters (often even one page), told the story from two different perspectives (which was doubled in strangeness by being omniscient while being, as I…
This hardly counts as a book review, but if you are anything like me, you will thrill at the revelation that The Antiquarian Sticker Book exists. Actually, these books, but we’ll get to that in a second. I was wandering a bookstore, actually looking for a souvenir. In this interesting area near the journals, I…
I mean, when you’re going to write a book about books and book people, you’re asking for trouble. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the majority of book people aren’t that discerning, and writing a book about book people is an obvious sell. Well, I’m a book person, and I approached Book Lovers by Emily Henry with…
I read it in a day, partly because my son had broken his arm and I had to take him to the urgent care and then bring him home and receive visitors and get him all straightened out (and let him watch movies instead of do school for the day). I also read it in…
Put out by Dover Thrift Editions and edited by Bob Blaisdell in 2014, this is a slim volume of fourteen short stories. Too slim, probably, considering what it is trying to accomplish: an introduction to “contemporary” (till 2014) Native American (or indigenous) literature (as opposed to mythology. Boy, are there a lot of books on…
So the reading plan for the end of home school co-op English 1 was a choose-your-own scenario. However, despite knowing all along how many weeks I had, my plan failed me and we did not have time for that whole thing. Instead, I chose for them a short book that would work well with the…
I first read this Christian book by the former Franciscan priest Brennan Manning in college. It was written in 1990 and I caught wind of it like ten years later. His life trajectory went something like: Depression-era-New Yorker; soldier; priest; uncloistered missionary to the poor; alcoholic; writer. The book came highly recommended to me (by…
Another month, another book that I am reviewing because I taught it to my ninth grade(ish) co-op students. I can’t remember how I found this poetry anthology last summer, but I am sure glad that I did. Rather than have to pull poems from the whole world of poetry or require the students to purchase…
When I was in high school (maybe on my way to college) I received one of those memorable gifts. I have received many memorable gifts. (Gifts is one of my love languages after all (along with service and then, I suppose, quality time.) For me, a memorable gift is often more than you expected and…
I chose Little Worlds by Peter Guthrie and Mary Page over the summer to use in my English 1 classroom (early high school/late middle school) during our winter short story unit. I ended up adding a little: some Latin-American literature, Native American contemporary literature (see future review on Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American…
I read this play by Edmond Rostand at this moment in time (after having to read it way back in high school) because the movie was coming out and it looked so good. Unfortunately, the movie has come out and Amazon wants $20 for me to rent it. Ah, well. It will come down some…
I read this book last month because it was the first book on the Valentine’s Day List. It was also a book I already owned, so… free. It is also a book that I have already read, though judging from the Border’s receipt inside, I read it in 2002, some time before I began writing…
I recently needed to assign my students a brief bit of nonfiction in order to write a summary paper. While choosing Rachel Carson’s “The Marginal World” is a little unorthodox for this assignment, I wanted something they could both enjoy (more than other options, at least) and learn from. “The Marginal World” is an oft-forced-upon-students…
Holy Toledo! We have just finished covering short stories in my home school co-op English 1 class. This week I slid into a brief bit of short nonfiction and assigned my students March, Book 1 and Martin Luther King Jr.s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The letter was one of three suggestions of short nonfiction that…
I think that A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin took me so long to read because it is a book of short stories. In a way, there are no cliffhangers to keep the pages turning between the stories. But how about that title? I love it. Is it a manual for cleaning women…
I heard some advice at the writing conference I went to last spring, and I keep hearing it. Or at least I keep repeating it and other authors nod their heads like they are familiar with it. If you haven’t already guessed from the title of this blog entry, the advice is for writers to…
I am a fan of Keri Smith’s books. They’re not novels, they’re journals or activity books of sorts. I think they get called “anti-journaling”? Among her most famous titles are: Wreck This Journal This Is Not a Book Finish This Book Mess Guerilla Art Kit How to Be an Explorer of the World Tear Up…
This list doesn’t have to be huge, for me. I was really looking for classic detective fiction after teaching Victorian Gothic to my students and Poe twice. I’m also a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories and covered The Hound of the Baskervilles. Then with a new Agatha Christie movie just around the corner, I…
Some days (okay, many days) I just enjoy listing. It’s enjoyable, for me, to list. Maybe I should make it into a visual artform. I noticed recently that I didn’t have a book set on my TBR for Valentine’s Day. Not that Valentine’s Day is the biggest deal, but the truth is I like to…
the starving artist 