Surprisingly, it turns out that the operative word here is not so much “fixed” or “free” as “fun.” Repair Cafés are interactive social events, designed to heal divisions in communities as much as to fix beloved-but-broken possessions.
Printed in hardcover format, Ledge Lake Leaf Labyrinth includes 188 full-color photographs on 168 pages.
This choice of book is in many ways perfect for the time and circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Last weekend, the 115 Partition Street storefront in Saugerties that used to house Lucky Chocolates and its accompanying café – before founder Rae Stang sold the business and its new owners moved it around to the back of the building – became a pop-up gallery. The occasion was an art show titled “Images from The Daily Mouse: Tails from the Crisis,” and the painter whose works were on display was Stang herself.
Mention Carole and Steve Ford to Paltzonians of a certain vintage – those who attended the Campus School, the New Paltz Middle School and/or High School between the mid-1970s and early 1990s – and you’ll see eyes light up and hear fond memories recalled of the Arts Community Youth Theater. The Fords created a nurturing backstage family for many a creatively inclined youngster, introduced more than a few future thespians and theater professionals to the stage, and provided the community with years of high-quality live entertainment.
“Small Happenings,” a collection of aphorisms, thoughts, observations, witty thoughts, and short poems all presented as a guide of sorts to better living, will be the subject of a virtual book launch and reading with Woodstock’s Golden Notebook on Monday, October 5. Also being printed this year: “The Princeton Diary,” a novella about a Greek writer filling in for a famous writer who’s canceled his four-year stint at the noted Ivy League school, and “Trump Verse,” a collection of short poems that mix up the witty and the outraged and outrageous.
Sometimes, the most interesting parts of a town can be found in slightly out-of-the-way corners the locals know best. It’s easy to see how Parlor, a recently opened shop that’s “a place to meet, see, buy or sell books and other artifacts,” might quickly become such a prize in the Village of New Paltz.
It should perhaps not surprise us that some of the most profoundly moving literary meditations on nature are inspired not by pristine wilderness far from human habitation, but by places in the borderlands that lie just, in Lord Dunsany’s famous phrase, “beyond the Fields We Know.” In the foreword to her new book Reservoir Year: A Walker’s Book of Days, Nina Shengold drily observes that even Henry David Thoreau’s iconic Walden Pond lay “down the road from his parents’ house, where the apostle of solitude often ate lunch.”
The theme was inspired by memories of stories read aloud in childhood, with the participating artists translating that experience into visual media. “When someone read you a story, that information got transmitted and interpreted by whoever was going to read to you,” said Hicks. “There was a kind of comfort in that community aspect. Sharing and transmitting information in art can be literal or abstract. ‘Read to Me’ is also a demand – a cry for help, or a cry for information.”
The vivid world of Sigrid Heath’s Far Cry sets up shop in your head and doesn’t want to disperse when you are done. You are loathe to dismantle it by starting another book. Set in America immediately after the Civil War and during westward expansion, Far Cry is a strangely intimate and epic historical novel with many facets.