The Association for Mormon Letters has announced the winners of the 2008 Irreantum Fiction Contest and the new Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest. I’m pleased to note that AMV’s own Shawn P. Bailey was awarded third place in the fiction contest for his short story “Outside.” I had the pleasure of reading a [...]
When I first started taking Portuguese literature classes, I came across a literary form I wasn’t familiar with, the Crônica. A short short story meant for publication in newspapers, the Crônica may be the chief form of short fiction in Portuguese. Since these stories are almost always told in a chronological order, are based on [...]
Christian Vuissa’s film”The Errand of Angels” opens in theaters in Utah and Idaho today. My sister Katherine saw the film when it was screened at the LDS Film Festival (which Vuissa founded) back in January and posted a review for her personal blog. She has kindly agreed to let me republish it here at AMV. [...]
In November 2005, I discovered, in a review of the Wikipedia article on Mormon Fiction, that the authors of the article thought Mormon Fiction essentially didn’t exist before 1979. Since I knew this wasn’t true, I corrected the article, and many others have added their own corrections and improvements. (I drew my information principally from [...]
In July, I was visiting with a Navajo Mormon neighbor on another matter when she asked if I thought my eleven-year-old daughter might like to perform in the local Mormon pageant, The Voices of San Juan. I had never seen the pageant but said I thought that she would like very much to take [...]
If you haven’t yet read my post on the three genres of Christian music, please do so now. You’ll need that context for this brief post to make sense.
Although it’s clear that Jay Howard is biased towards the transformational genre of Christian music, I think that what he has to say about why he prefers [...]
I’m finally getting around to processing my notes on Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture by Daniel Radosh. One of the most interesting sections deals with the Christian music industry and various opinions over what is and isn’t acceptable in the industry. Radosh interviews Jay Howard co-author of Apostles of [...]
When I asked Theric Jepson to write a bit about Mormon graphic novels, I didn’t expect that he would launch a full on bibliographic project. But he did — and even though the results make for a very long post, it’s very much worth a read. Indeed, it’s quite the amazing project and must have [...]
From what I recall (I consume way too much without proper digestion), James Wood is a meanie of a literary critic who is erudite to a flaw and a bit fusty. I probably read some of his reviews back when I was reading The New Yorker (grandparents had a subscription — is anything better than [...]
The LDS Booksellers Association’s annual convention starts today.
For those who don’t know about this convention, it is the principal trade show for LDS products. Most of the association’s 200 producers and distributors display their wares for the 200 member bookstores, who attend hoping to learn what new products are available. Its the LDS equivalent of [...]
Last week I got back from a three week trip to South Africa, Mozambique and (briefly) Swaziland. I bought books (of course), and tried to get a sense for these countries and cultures. As you might expect, crossing the border from South Africa into Mozambique we saw quite a stark economic contrast. Where South Africa [...]