Page 2 - Agnes Bushell News Today

Agnes Bushell’s latest novel blossoms into kaleidoscope But "The Oracle Pool" is anything but a classic mystery. The plot is non-linear, the living and dead commingle, and the characters are seekers of every stripe. By William David Barry Local review Cover courtesy of Littoral Books “His laugh carried. His voice carried. So early in the morning, and already he was assuming his back-of-the-bus role as Comedy Central Carian Correspondent (‘It’s Jack Swann here, reporting from ancient C...

increase font size Maine Literary Awards names winners, honors Carolyn Chute Blue Summer by Jim Nichols won for fiction, and Kerri Asenaults Mill Town for nonfiction. Share Maine writers and readers celebrated the year’s top books during an online Maine Literary Awards ceremony Thursday evening, hosted by Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. The annual competition is open to all Maine residents, and includes categories for published books, as well as drama, short works and student writing. Ne...

Letter to the editor: Column makes clear what one-click orders cost Maine businesses Share As a book publisher – I am co-owner of Littoral Books of Portland – I am grateful to Greg Kesich for “Living in a one-click world,” his May 2 Maine Sunday Telegram column on Alec MacGillis’ book about Amazon. Very often we are asked, by both our writers and our readers, why we don’t sell our books on Amazon. Some people get quite angry at us for depriving them of the convenience of buying with...

Ten poets from the collection Enough!  Poems of Resistance and Protest will join The Poets Corner to read on Sunday afternoon, April 11, from 4 - 5:30 p.m.: Claire Millikin, Donna Loring, Laura Bonazzoli, Katherine Hagopian Berry, Ellen Goldsmith, Lois Anne, Carol Bachofner, Meghan Sterling, Kathleen Ellis, and Myronn Hardy. Register for this Zoom event on the website www.thepoetscorner.org/events Enough! edited by Claire Millikin and Agnes Bushell, is an anthology of poems, by 27 Maine poets...

Today’s poem is “Glukopikron” by Katherine Hagopian Berry. Her work has appeared in the Café Review, Deep Water, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, Balancing Act II: An Anthology of Poetry by Fifty Maine Women, Strange Fire: Jewish Voices on the Pandemic, and Enough! Poems of Resistance and Protest. Her first collection of poetry, Mast Year, was published by Littoral Books in 2020. Katherine lives in Bridgton, Maine. She writes, “‘Glukopikron’ was born wh...

OFF RADAR: ‘The Oracle Pool’ by Agnes Bushell Another thoughtful, warmly human book, characterized by exceptionally lucid prose, by one of Maine’s best fiction writers By Dana Wilde “The Oracle Pool” by Agnes Bushell; Littoral Books, Portland, Maine, 2020; 238 pages, trade paperback, $20 In Agnes Bushell’s new novel, “The Oracle Pool,” the main character is missing for most of the book. At the outset, Ruth is with a tour group investigating archaeological sites in Turkey. The...

OFF RADAR: ‘Why I Don’t Write and Other Stories’ and ‘Cow Palace’ New books by Susan Minot and Anne Britting Oleson By Dana Wilde “Why I Don’t Write and Other Stories”  “Why I Don’t Write and Other Stories” by Susan Minot; Knopf, New York, 2020; 176 pages, hardcover, $25. The spare, journalistic prose style in fiction was more or less invented by Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s and ’30s. Brief, straightforward sentences piled up to create a feeling of realistic, no-non...