Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory: The Complete Story of Willy Wonka, the Golden Ticket, and Roald Dahl’s Most Famous Creation by Lucy Mangan. Foreword by Sophie Dahl. Puffin Books, 2014.
Looking for a nice way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Roald Dahl’s classic, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Inside Charlies’s Chocolate Factory provides a in-depth look at the life of this classic. From its publishing history to the history of its illustrators to the movie adaptations to the overall impact the book has had on our culture the book will surely add a sprinkle to Dahl cannon. Who knew that the book was originally published in America and not the UK or that Maurice Sendak was supposed to be the original illustrator but was too busy working on a book called Where The Wild Things Are or that rumors where abound that the NAACP would picket the movie theaters showing the 1971 film version because they were troubled by the title of the book for, at that time, ‘chocolate’ was a derogatory term for black people and that ‘Charlie’ was hipster slang for white people.
First Edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
1971 film version: Watch | Buy
2005 film version: Watch | Buy
Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World Edited by Frank Stewart and Trevor Carolan. University of Hawaii Press, 2013. Forget borders and man-made boundaries Cascadia is a bioregion stretching from southeast Alaska to Cape Mendocino in California and all points in between. In this compilation “writers, artists, and activists describe the complexity and richness of the region: from the ancient songs of the aboriginal people, to the old-growth forests a thousand years old, to the life cycles of salmon.” Contributors include Robert Bringhurst, Emily Carr, Wade Davis, Chief Dan George, Maxine Hong Kingston, Barry Lopez, Bill Porter/Red Pine and Gary Snyder among others. I am delighted to be a resident of Cascadia.
chasers of the light: poems from the typewriter series by Tyler Knott Gregson. A Perigee Book, 2014.
Tyler Knott Gregson fell in love with a typewriter. He punched out his first poem right there at the store he before he even got the typewriter home. chasers of the light brings together a sampling of the almost thousand of poems that have followed. The poems that make up his Typewriter Series and are all either typed out on found scraps of paper or are erasure poems devised from magazines and newspaper papers. Ironically, his Typewriter Series he has garnered a large following on various social media outlets that his publisher calls him “truly a poet of the digital age.”
Virility Rituals of North American Teenage Boys: Stories by Matt Briggs. Publication Studios, 2014.
The latest book of stories from American Book Award winner Matt Briggs “tells stories set at the boundary between real men and boys in man drag” in which “the characters in the fourteen stories live in the shadow of a failed macho culture.” Well-written, northwest infused with surreal twists at every turn these stories tend to stay with you for a bit after reading.