I am drawn to writers who write effortlessly lyrical prose—a talent I’ve not been given. Detailing a lost time and a lost part of Colorado, Shelley Read elevates the mundanities of life—picking peaches, walking through a forest, fixing dinner—to poetry.
The story is a simple one—love, loss, and redemption…rinse and repeat. Like most of our lives. We share a similar love of Colorado, but Read paints the beauty of our state in delicate, sure, and unforgettable strokes. Having been born into a family farm on the Eastern Plains, there is no way I could elevate cockleburs, floods, and tornadoes, wandering cattle and drought-destroyed hay crops to poetry.
I've come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary like the deep and mysterious world beneath the sea.
On a cool autumn morning, Torie Nash heads into her village pulling a rickety wagon filled with late-season peaches. As she nears an intersection, a mysterious drifter with grimy thumbs and smudged cheeks and eyes as dark as a raven's wing stops to ask her the way.
She could turn left or cross over. But she does not. 'Go as a river,' he whispers.
So begins a mezmerising story that unfolds over a tumultuous lifetime as Torie begins to absorb…
We all remember our first love, and if we experience that first love as a teenager, the pain, the euphoria, the intensity is particularly unforgettable.
Reading Call Me by Your Name, a same-sex affair between a teen and an older grad student, plunged me back into that horrible, awful, wonderful time when I discovered love. We all want to hold onto it even after it’s gone, to recapture something that can never be recaptured.
Andre Aciman dissects each and every emotion in lush, haunting prose, and even though the ending is bittersweet, how can it be any other way? (And when Aciman wrote a sequel, he reminded me, at least, that a writer is blessed to capture lightning in a bottle once. Call Me by Your Name is legacy enough. Quit while you’re ahead!)
Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet, and Written by James Ivory
WINNER BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY ACADEMY AWARD Nominated for Four Oscars
A New York Times Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller A Vulture Book Club Pick
An Instant Classic and One of the Great Love Stories of Our Time
Andre Aciman's Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared…
Having been raised in a union family, I’ve always been fascinated by labor history.
Since some of the deadliest strikes took place here in Colorado—and some forty minutes from my home—I decided to write about the 1902-04 labor wars. But where to begin? Who mined the gold? What was daily life like for the miners? The mine owners? Were politicians as venal then as they are today?
All That Glitters is my go-to bible for all things turn-of-the-century Cripple Creek. In novel-like prose, the author vividly captures a time that, while only a century past, is quite different from our own. The heartbreaking end to the labor wars reminds us that, while the arc of the moral universe IS long, it doesn’t always bend toward justice.
At the turn of the century, Colorado's Cripple Creek District captured the national imagination with the extraordinary wealth of its gold mines and the unquestionable strength of the militant Western Federation of Miners.
Elizabeth Jameson tells the entertaining story of Cripple Creek, the scene in 1894 of one of radical labor's most stunning victories and, in 1903 and 1904, of one of its most crushing defeats. Jameson draws on working-class oral histories, the Victor and Cripple Creek Daily Press published by 34 of the local labor unions, and the 1900 manuscript census. She connects unions with lodges and fraternal associations,…
Maria Rendell is a founding member of my fictional family which spans the fourteenth century. And what a century it was—marked by the deposition and death of two kings; the Little Ice Age; the Black Death, the beginnings of the Hundred Years War, and a peasants’ revolt or two!
In The Lion and the Leopard, Maria is happily married to a backwater knight and far removed from political dealings. But her husband Phillip is liege to Edward II’s powerful illegitimate half-brother and after Phillip leaves—for selfish reasons, Maria decides—she turns to the king’s half-brother for solace. When England’s barons rise up against Edward II and his favorites, Maria finds herself caught up in events that alter the course of English history.
