I am an award-winning novelist, essayist, journalist and book critic. I write about travel, design, technology, books, music, movies, education, sports, humor, culture, the western U.S, and France.
Review: 'Chain Gang All Stars,' by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
With his 2018 debut story collection "Friday Black," Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah established himself as a formidable writer of literary speculative fiction, building fantastic premises out of hard looks at American reality cranked a degree more demented. With his first novel, "Chain-Gang All-Stars," Adjei-Brenyah has burnished this approach into a complex, brutal, beautiful, panoramic takedown of the prison-industrial complex, through the near-future story of a band of incarcerated neo-gladiator...
The shooting at my King Soopers also destroyed a haven of warmth and inclusion
What happened at the grocery store wounded a part of Boulder that feels as if it’s already dying.
Every time I close my eyes to try to sleep, I see the Table Mesa King Soopers, my neighborhood grocery store. I steer myself away from the terror that unfolded there on Monday and toward a contemplation of the store itself, how it represented a part of this community rarely mentioned in the best-places-to-live stories that so often feature our town. Boulder isn’t all gloss, money, ultramarathoner...
The incarcerated women battling wildfires
In 2016, a boulder struck and killed 22-year-old Shawna Jones while she battled the Mulholland Fire in Malibu, California. Jones was part of an inmate crew from Correctional Camp 13, making her the first incarcerated woman to die while fighting a fire since 1983, the year women first joined California’s inmate firefighting program, which started in 1946.
After Jones’ death, the Los Angeles Times published a bare-bones article about the incident. It revealed little about Jones, but it drew the...
Lucia Berlin: My Mentor in Being an Outsider
I met Lucia Berlin when I was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She was a generous teacher and a brilliant writer who, at sixty-one, had not yet received the acclaim she deserved. Her fiction workshop was held in the dilapidated English building in an obscure classroom whose door was hidden in a stairwell. I walked in and sat among a dozen or so other students at high school–style desks arranged in a circle. Lucia had long brown hair, bright blue...
Invisible Denver made indelible in a new documentary
Julian Rubinstein’s years-long connection with Denver community organizer Terrance Roberts lies at the heart of his new documentary, The Holly. The relationship began just as most of Roberts’ former supporters were turning away from him. In September 2013, on the day of a peace rally Roberts organized, he shot and wounded Blood gang member Hasan Jones. Rubinstein, who grew up in Denver, was working as a journalist in Brooklyn when he read about Roberts’ subsequent arrest for attempted murder. He couldn’t understand why a man who had built up so much goodwill as an organizer would shoot someone
Review: 'The Hero of This Book,' by Elizabeth McCracken
"Once somebody is dead, the world reveals all the things they might have enjoyed if they weren't," Elizabeth McCracken writes in her funny, perceptive novel "The Hero of This Book."
McCracken chronicles a trip the unnamed narrator took to London in 2019, the year after her mother died. The narrator, who has much in common with McCracken, visits tourist attractions and walks around the city. The narrator is frequently joined by a second narrative presence, who McCracken calls "the author," who...
A voice for the overlooked
MIDWAY THROUGH THE BOOK TOUR for his fifth novel, Lawn Boy, on a blustery April evening, California-born writer Jonathan Evison stops at the Tattered Cover in Denver. Seven people have braved a high-wind warning to come out. Evison wears his tour uniform: a black hat, Chuck Taylors and a plaid blazer with red, navy and yellow stripes. “This is the best tour jacket,” he says. “It hides all stains: mustard, beer, coffee.”
Although he looks road-weary, Evison treats the small gathering at the Co...
The promise of Alaska’s wilderness
As its nickname suggests, no part of the West remained unknown to non-Native Americans longer than the “Last Frontier.” Alaska is still the most sparsely populated state, its huge tracts of wild land offering both adventure and the chance for a fresh start. Two splendid new novels set in Alaska feature intrepid explorers: To the Bright Edge of the World, Eowyn Ivey’s historical tale modeled on Lt. Henry T. Allen’s 1885 journey into the state’s interior, and Dave Eggers’ Heroes of the Frontier...
The Sky Residences at W Aspen’s
Behind the Design
This Modern-Day Ski Chalet Brings Aspen Art Slopeside
Rising from the base of Aspen Mountain, peaked roofs evoke the classic silhouette and style of a European ski chalet but with an up-to-the-minute interpretation, constructed with environmentally sustainable materials and contemporary finishes.
The new property comprises a series of firsts: the first W Hotels ski escape in the United States, the first new hotel to open in Aspen in 25 years, and currently the town’s only pu...
Review: 'Mona at Sea,' by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
Mona Mireles, the unemployed young protagonist of Elizabeth Gonzalez James' hilarious debut novel, has plenty to moan about. She'd hate the pun in the previous sentence. Her own humor is incisive and biting, as when she observes of a pale man in Tucson, Ariz.: "No tan — practically a political statement in Arizona."
Mona used to be a contender, acing school and participating in a flurry of activities. Her trophies now gather dust inside the cave of defeat her childhood bedroom has become. She...
Review: 'Everything Inside: Stories,' by Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat has been laying waste to readers’ hearts with her gorgeous prose for 25 years. She published her first novel, “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” when she was 25, and Oprah selected it for her book club. Danticat managed the spotlight with grace and has only deepened her art, as evidenced by “Everything Inside,” her collection of eight soulful stories about Haitian immigrants in America and their descendants.
Love and its attendant vulnerability and loss is Danticat’s primary subject. Th...
Review: 'Perish,' by LaToya Watkins
LaToya Watkins' searing debut novel, "Perish," begins when a teenage Helen Jean discovers that the dose of turpentine she'd taken to end prior pregnancies resulting from her father raping her wasn't going to work this time. It's 1955 in Jerusalem, Texas, and Helen Jean, who is growing up impoverished and alone since her mother died, has few options but to marry Jessie B., a mysterious bachelor about a decade older than she is who tells her he noticed "you need some protecting."
Jessie B. keep...
I met a blind priest at the airport. Father Ted taught me to take a leap of faith.
A chance encounter changed one writer's life.
Father Theodore Hesburgh, who died Thursday at 97, was no longer Notre Dame’s president by the time I enrolled in 1994, yet he remained a campus legend, instantly recognizable in his crisp black shirt and clerical collar and with his shock of white hair. I knew he’d done important things — advised six presidents, chaired the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under Nixon until his policy disagreements got him demoted, and transformed Notre Dame into ...
Beyond theme parks: More kid-friendly adventure in Los Angeles
Have all the theme parks checked off your family’s Southern California adventure list? If you’re looking for more fun the whole family will enjoy, you are in luck. The L.A. area offers a plethora of kid-friendly fun—even beyond the theme parks.
Boone Children’s Gallery
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, families can visit the Boone Children’s Gallery—which is more of an active studio than a gallery. Kids can learn about brush painting from China and Korea, try it out themselves and catc...
Review: 'Tell Me How to Be,' by Neel Patel
"My mother always told me to be a good boy. I suspect she knew that I wasn't," Akash Amin explains as Neel Patel's novel "Tell Me How to Be" begins. This melancholy drama is structured as a first-person duet between narrators Renu and Akash Amin, a mother and son who have been singing past each other their whole lives. Fittingly, Renu and Akash don't address one another, but instead each speaks to a longed-for "you," a perpetual, beloved, missed connection, the particulars of which Patel grad...