A daylong celebration of kids’ graphic novels in West Acton
The Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton is hosting its inaugural Kids Graphic Novel Festival this coming Saturday, April 22, bringing a number of authors and illustrators together for a daylong series of talks, workshops, and drawing demonstrations. Sophie Escabasse (author of the “Witches of Brooklyn” series), Shauna J. Grant (author of the “Mimi” series), and Ivy Noelle Weir (author of “The Secret Garden of 81st Street” and “Anne of West Philly”) will talk about world building, and Gale Galligan (“Freestyle”), Jamar Nicholas (“Leon the Extraordinary”), and Chad Sell (“Cardboard Kingdom” series) will discuss “doing it all.” Throughout the day, Jarrett Lerner (“Hunger Heroes” series), Raúl the Third (“Vamos!” series), Michelle Mee Nutter (“Allergic”), Drew Brockington (“CatStronauts” series), Maddie Frost (“Wombats! Go Camping”), Maria Scrivan (“Nat” series) will give drawing demos, showing attendees how to create vital, memorable characters and scenes. Cameron Chittock will launch “Mapmakers and the Enchanted Mountain”; Sara Farizan (“My Buddy, Killer Croc”) and Scott Magoon (“Rescue and Jessica”) will lead a session of kids’ graphic novel trivia; and John Patrick Green (“Investigators” series) will give the keynote address. The festival takes place Saturday, April 22, from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. at Silver Unicorn Bookstore, 12 Spruce St., in West Acton. For more information and to register, visit silverunicornbooks.com.
South Shore author focuses on the drama of small-town events in new short story collection
“Time, if fate allows, lets us become poets of the doomed action, the unrequited love, the hard struggle — and find humor in the human,” writes David Daniel in his new collection of short stories, “Beach Town,” out this month from the Amesbury-based Loom Press, and such is exactly what fate has allowed him. Daniel, who grew up on the South Shore, sets many of these stories in a fictional South Shore town called Weybridge, and focuses on smalltown events — the opening of a new car wash, the arrival of a stranger in a leopard-print bikini, a skateboarder busting his two front teeth, borrowing an Oldsmobile, the “night air cool and secret in the low spots, salt-scented, and I’d let out the words.” The stories have the feel of reveries, remembrances, rich with nostalgia for the scent of the sea on a summer wind. “The only thing on fire these days, she thinks, is time, blazing away all around her.” The regular moments of the regular days turn out to be the most beautiful, meaningful, and humorous — haunting and human.
UMass Press awards annual Juniper Prize for Fiction
Jesse Kohn’s new novel, “the book of webs,” won this year’s Juniper Prize for Fiction from UMass Press. The prize, which has been given annually since 2004, honors a work of outstanding literary fiction with publication and $1,000. Kohn’s strange and ambitious book dances in the space between dream and nightmare, following a group of renegades and weirdos at odds with a repressive regime. Their stories — memories, secrets, speculations, gossip, errors, oneiric wanderings — collect to combat the gone-wrong order of things. “He explained that since it had been in his dream that he read the pamphlet, wouldn’t it be safe to say that he was its author? And since I didn’t have enough time to answer this question adequately — had he actually read my book through to its conclusion I wouldn’t have had to — I merely nodded and then added, ‘But wait, dream? I thought you said what you were telling me wasn’t a dream,’ and he said, ‘Right.’” There’s a trickstery story-about-a-story-about-a-story out into infinity about this book, and it asks, somewhere in its swirl, what is it to imagine a different world?
Coming out
“The Double Life of Benson Yu” by Kevin Chong (Atria) “The Weeds” by Katy Simpson Smith (FSG)
“The Haunting of Alejandra: A Novel” by V. Castro (Del Rey)
Pick of the week
Evie Bauer at Papercuts Bookshop in Jamaica Plain recommends “Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics” by Selah Saterstrom (Essay): “A series of essays on the intersection of divination and writing, at once esoteric and foundational. For fans of CAConrad’s (Soma)tic poetry, this is a fantastic collection.”