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Volume I, Issue 18
October 6 - October 13, 1997
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Yayayayayaya 
Author Rebecca Wells is in town in Knoxville, Tennessee to read from her popular novel, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and Tracy Jones discovers how it inspired a local cult of fans. [2]
Tracy Jones
Hard Times. Fragile Lives 
Katherine L. Hester's Eggs for Young America is an impressive debut from a new writer for the New South. [3]
Leonard Gill
Once Upon a Midnight Dreary... 
October Fool's Day? [4]
John Paul Brophy
History for the Rest of Us 
Book review. [5]
Blake de Pastino
No Fear Of Flying 
Henry Kisor has written a beautiful first-person account of a deaf man learning to fly. [6]
Gregory McNamee
F-Stop Shopping 
Connections between the art and fashion worlds are explored in a thoroughly pictorial manner in Fashion Photography of the Nineties. [7]
James DiGiovanna
Live and In Person! 
A roundup of recent author booksigning and appearances in Central Texas, including Worldcon, Texas Folklife Resources, Katherine Hester, and others. [8]
Adrienne Martini, Claiborne K.H. Smith, Jeremy Reed, Monica L. Piņon, and Sarah Hepola
Speed Reader 
The Chile Chronicles; I Am the Most Interesting Book of All; When Work Disappears; Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man. [9]
Benny Villalobos, Blake de Pastino, Tracy L. Cooley and Jessica English
The House That Jan Built 
Count 'em...56 masterpieces of Western painting in an enchanted cottage that pops up out of a cool new book. [10]
James DiGiovanna
Now What? 
Love to read? Need some clever ideas? Our library of resources and staff picks are guaranteed to turn on plenty of mental light bulbs via your electrified eye sockets. [11]
Build your own custom paper. To find out more
about this feature, click here.
Talk Back 
Our online BBS is just like the Algonquin Round Table, only electronic,
sober, and without all the famous people.

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ayayayayayaya! Yayayayayayayaya! Know what I mean? No? Well then
you obviously haven't read The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya
Sisterhood, the best excuse ever devised for drinking Bloody
Marys while yodeling with girlfriends. In this article the author,
Rebecca Wells, discusses how her writing grew out of an acting background -- which, in some twisted way, explains the
"Yaya" thing. But you'll have to read the book to understand
why legions of female fans shout "Yayayaya!" in Wells's
honor whenever they see her.
This one looks a tad more depressing. Eggs for Young Americans,
by Katherine L. Hester, documents the lives of a variety of fictional
Southern characters who have no sense of tradition, the vaguest
sense of connection with others, and a deep, unexplored rift between
their dreams and their realities. You can tell Hester isn't the
bubblegum type; I don't expect we'll be hearing any "yaya"s
out of her anytime soon, either.
Now here's an oddity: a merging of Edgar Allen Poe's playful
poem The Raven with a homeowner's drowsy torment at the
hands of some neighborhood pranksters. It's not exactly what I'd
call an "article," but I had to include it anyway, because
I love Poe.
And speaking of writers with distinctive voices, this review
of Studs Terkel's My American Century looks promising.
The travelling interviewer, a champion of oral history who explored
the "real America" with his own particular sensibility,
has collected 50 of his best interviews into one broadly appealing
chunk o' cultural anthropology.
What else, what else? Let's see... Got a fear of flying? Flight of the Gin Fizz just might help you get over that one. If author Henry Kisor can face down his male menopause by learning to fly despite his deafness, surely you can tolerate a little turbulence...
And fans of fashion photography and strung-out junkies alike will
want to flip through Fashion: Photography of the Nineties,
which contrasts postmodern "classic" shutterbugging with the
grunge aesthetic championed by Larry Clark.
Also check out reviews of Jan Pienowski's Pop-Up, a writer's
"deflowring" at a sci-fi convention, and a vast array
of books in our regular "Speed Reader" column. Good
stuff. And don't forget: Yayayayayayayaya!
The New MeX-Files 
Bigfoots, UFOs and Chupacabras. Oh, my! [08-11-97]
Devin D. O'Leary
Speed Reader 
Reviews of Few and Far Between, Exile, Drown, and Ripening. [07-21-97]
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