Add a Comment
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Jeff Hobbs, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 9 of 9
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Awards, Authors, Josh Weil, Anthony Doerr, Bryan Stevenson, Jeff Hobbs, Add a tag
Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: University of Pennsylvania creative nonfiction 135, Cynthia Kaplan, Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, My Spectaculars, Add a tag
Here am I, sitting at this very desk this very morning, smiling still. My muse, She, standing tall back there in the light. The Easter orchids blooming. The books falling off their shelves. My boundary marker protecting my Qi. And a beautiful new swirl of bamboo, a gift, a remembrance, a dancer's pose.
Jeff Hobbs (The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace) visited with our Spectaculars yesterday, via Skype (with help, thank you, from Christopher Martin). So did two prospective Penn students, Jane and Josh (with help from the heart and soul of our operation, Jamie-Lee Josselyn, and my friend Cynthia Kaplan).
We sat in our old Victorian room, beguiled by and grateful for Jeff's authenticity, grace, talent, and emphasis on empathy. Can we ever really know another? No. Does it matter that we try? Yes. Are some conversations uncomfortable? Absolutely. Are we better people when we ask questions, remain humble, try for better every time? Am I growing rhetorical? Perhaps and indeed. It's my blog. I can.
We learn how to make great narrative nonfiction reading Jeff Hobbs. We learn the value of humility in speaking to him. Too many authors pose. Too many demand the central planks in the room. But greater is the impact, more true is the exchange, when someone who wrote something beautiful sits down with those who found the beauty, listens to the questions asked, asks questions, too. Simple as that. Profound as that. And lasting.
Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: children's book world, Sarah Laurence, BookPage, One Thing Stolen, Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Arcadia Summer 2015 Creative Writing Workshops, Moravian College Writers Conference, Add a tag
One Thing Stolen has had a two-step launch—last Tuesday, this Tuesday—and that seems to fit this old amateur dancer just fine.
Today I want to thank all of you who have been so kind to this book in its early days—who took the reading risk, who made room for Nadia and Maggie, and Katherine, Florence and West Philadelphia, neuroscience and a raging flood, who wrote words of encouragement. I don't write books that fit into established patterns, and there are, of course, consequences. But I can't imagine doing books or this life any other way, and I'm so grateful to be on this journey with you. I'm grateful, too, to the entire Chronicle Books team and to my editor Tamra Tuller.
In lieu of a launch party for One Thing Stolen, I'll be traveling to a few local venues to talk either about this book or about the writing life. The events are here, below. If you are out and about, I'd love to see you.
April 18, 2015
Little Flower High School Teen Writers & Readers Festival
Little Flower High
Philadelphia, PA
April 23, 2015
Let Us Be Honest
A New Directions in Writing Memoir Workshop
Residence Inn
Pentagon City, VA
details here
May 3, 2015, 1 PM
Schulykill River/FLOW presentation
Ryerss Museum
7370 Central Avenue
Philadelphia, PA
May 20, 2105, 7 PM
Body, Mind, Heart, Soul:
The Whole Self in Contemporary YA
IW Gregorio, Beth Kephart, Margo Rabb, Tiffany Schmidt
Children's Book World
Haverford, PA
June 5 - 7, various times
Moravian College Writers Conference
Keynote Address, Panel, Conversation with A.S. King
Foy Hall
Priscilla Payne Hurd Campus
More information here
June 27, 1 - 5 PM
Arcadia University
Creative Writing Summer Weekend
Master Class/Reading/Q&A
450 South Easton Road
Glenside, PA 19038
More information here
Additionally, I am grateful for the blog tour, which begins today and was organized by Lara Starr of Chronicle Books. A schedule can be found here.
Finally, I'm grateful for these recent reviews, fragments presented here. To read all official trade reviews as well as some early blog reviews, press releases, and the official teaching guide, please go here.
BookPage
One Thing Stolen explores themes of destruction and rejuvenation, emphasizing the possibilities and hope found in disaster. This is a unique and engrossing exploration of how characters deal with the pain and beauty of the real world. — Annie Metcalf
Sarah Laurence
One This Stolen offers no easy solutions but still leaves the reader with hope. I'd strongly recommend this literary novel to adults and to teenagers who are interested in psychology, art, history and Italy. Kephart does a marvelous job with a difficult topic.— Sarah Laurence
And now I am off to Penn, to teach my immaculate Spectaculars and to meet a few prospective Quakers who sound spectacular in their own specific ways. We're hosting the superlative Jeff Hobbs via Skype today. Jeff's The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is a seminal reflection on possibilities and choices (my thoughts on it here), and he's going to tell us how it came to be.
Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: The New Yorker, University of Pennsylvania, Daniel Menaker, Michael Sokolove, Jeff Hobbs, My Mistake, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Paul Strand, USA Today Top English Programs, Add a tag
Yesterday, on my way to teaching at Penn, I took a small detour to see a Paul Strand exhibit in the Fine Arts building. Then climbed the steps. Took out my phone. And snapped this shot through the window.
Damn, I thought. How lucky am I to be a spring semester adjunct here. This campus. This place. This Creative Writing arm of an English Department USA Today just ranked second in the nation.
Last year, Avery Rome and I joined forces and hosted Michael Sokolove (Drama High) as a special guest. Michael thrilled our students, taught us many things. This year, I'm enormously blessed to be hosting Daniel Menaker, who edited fiction for The New Yorker for 25 years and served as the Executive Editor in Chief of Random House, acquiring books by some of my favorite writers. In his various editorial capacities, Daniel has worked with Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, George Saunders, Charles McGrath, William Trevor, Norman Rush, Katha Pollitt, Colum McCann, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, Salman Rushdie—and many others. He has also written a memoir I loved, My Mistake. I wrote about that here—a blog post that initiated an unexpected conversation.
Daniel will be at the Kelly Writers House on February 24, beginning at noon, when he and I will be talking about the vagaries of the publishing industry. The larger community is welcome. At 1:30, my class will join with Lorene Carey's class to talk in private about My Mistake.
After Daniel was in touch regarding my words about his book, Jeff Hobbs, the wholly compassionate and deep-seeing author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, got in touch about this blog post, in which I spoke of how I was incorporating his book into my teaching plan. Jeff, who lives in California, offered to come visit my class as part of a larger east coast tour. When the dates weren't quite working out as we had hoped, a Skype visit was planned instead.
And so my students will have the opportunity to meet two authors whose books and lives inspire. My students—who are teaching me words like "jawn" and authors like Maira Kalman, teaching me narrative photography and the nuance of talk, the pronunciation of complex cloud forms and the Black Scholes equation. We are learning memoir new, and we are learning it together, and I am beyond delighted that the neon lyric of our conversation will be further radicalized by Daniel and Jeff.
Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Daniel Menaker, Gary Shteyngart, Jeff Hobbs, Little Failure, My Mistake, Charles M. Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, University of Pennsylvania memoir, Add a tag
During the last third of this upcoming semester at Penn my students will be reading The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, by Jeff Hobbs. It will be, for us, the fourth book in a "failure" series designed to provoke conversation and insight into the accidental, the premeditated, the inescapable, the unnecessary, the broken and the fixed—the things that shape all our lives. (The first three books are Little Failure, My Mistake, and Fire Shut Up in My Bones.)
I am keen to talk failure at a time when the world exasperates and disappoints, when the incomprehensible exists beside simple acts of compassion. I am keen to talk about socioeconomics and race, about the immigrant experience, about the irreversibly tragic, about the elusive promises of narrative and books. I am keen to teach the forms of memoir and narrative nonfiction, yes. But the quality of conversation will be of equal significance. Those of us who teach memoir have, I think, a responsibility to broaden the scope and enlarge the talk.
Peace is not a memoir. It is the deeply reported story, as the subtitle tells us, of a brilliant young man who leaves Newark for the Ivy League only to return to one of the nation's most dangerous cities—and stay, teaching some times, dealing drugs, too; a role model and a criminal. Robert Peace became Jeff Hobbs' roommate during freshman year at Yale. He was at his best and seemingly most true when helping others—his single mother living in poverty, his incarcerated father, his family and his friends. He was at his most self-protected and (also) vulnerable when he trafficked in drugs, when he revealed the depths of his anger, when he could find no answer, increasingly, to the question: What are you, Yalie, doing with the rest of your life?
Hobbs did not take the easy way out in telling this story. He might have written memoir only, recreating his impressions of the guy with whom he lived for four Yale years, talking, exclusively, about how it all seemed to him. Instead Hobbs goes all the way back to the beginning, relying on hundreds of hours of interviews to find out who Rob was, to learn the complexities that riddled his heart.
I have written in the margins of almost every page of this book. I have thought about what I hope my students will find as they read. This book should be required reading for everyone. But for now, to entice you, here is Rob, as he was introduced at his high school graduation, in the pages of Hobbs' book:
The headmaster spoke of a boy who woke up at four-thirty six days a week to lifeguard at the pool, who taught himself to swim as a freshman and who was now among the top ten butterflyers in the state, who led quietly and by example, who spent hours each week officially and unofficially working as a math tutor, who would have been valedictorian if a C in freshman art class hadn't knocked his grade point average down to a 3.97—third in the class—and who had grown up with nothing and now had college acceptances to Hopkins, Penn, and Yale
And then here is Rob, now that his days at Yale are over. He has graduated brilliantly (despite a thriving pot business on campus). But he has returned to Newark with no real plans, only a desire to take care of those he loves, and the willingness (or the arrogance) to court danger:
Rob's role as a dealer was already more complicated than the next guy's, because he was now a Yale graduate tagged with all the many stigmata that simple word carried in this neighborhood's underworld. Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League.
Blog: PowellsBooks.BLOG (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Alastair Bonnett, Jeff Hobbs, Eula Biss, Roxane Gay, Brian Turner, Anita Reynolds, Biography, Sociology, Politics, Best Books of the Year, Geography, Crime, World History, Russia, African American Studies, Gender Studies, Rebecca Solnit, Masha Gessen, American Studies, Health and Medicine, Feminist Studies, Walter Kirn, Leslie Jamison, Add a tag
A lot is made of the romance of bookstores. The smell of paper! The joy of discovery! The ancient, cracking leather bindings of books with dated inscriptions! And it's true that bookstores are magical places to browse and linger — just maybe not in the two days before Christmas. Because in the swirling mad hum [...]
Blog: Galley Cat (Mediabistro) (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Amazon, Stephen King, Cristina Henríquez, Emily St. John Mandel, Anthony Doerr, Hampton Sides, Liane Moriarty, Phil Klay, Jeff Hobbs, Celeste Ng, Carl Hoffman, Awards, Add a tag
Amazon has revealed their picks for Best Books of 2014, a list led by Celeste Ng, Stephen King, and Liane Moriarty. Follow this link to see the full list of 100 titles.
According to the press release, the editorial team chose the top 10 from a pool of 480 books. We’ve reprinted the top 10 books below.
(more…)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Add a CommentBlog: PowellsBooks.BLOG (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: International Studies, Beyond the Headlines, Jeff Hobbs, Alice Goffman, Gary Haugen A, Laurence Ralph, Nell Bernstein, Law, Sociology, Crime, African American Studies, Add a tag
Like many Americans I walk an uneasy line between being appalled by the living conditions of the inner-city and being afraid of them. The educational and socio-economic disadvantages common in inner-city neighborhoods, along with the high rates of drug- and gang-related violent crime, are already hard problems to grasp and tackle. The fact that these [...]
Blog: PowellsBooks.BLOG (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Shelf Talkers, Staff Pick, Jeff Hobbs, Add a tag
On one level, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is about unfulfilled potential and heartbreaking loss, but more importantly it deals with the pressure we all feel to succeed and be happy in an increasingly competitive society. It is a beautiful eulogy to a friend and an accurate portrayal of what it means [...]