Kristen Hall-Geisler

Category: The Wingback

  • Silly + Serious = Superpowers

    Silly + Serious = Superpowers

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    Kristen
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    It takes some serious delulu to think you can build a reading app to rival Goodreads, one with more than 2 million users (that’s what Odunayo did). It also takes delulu to write books, to publish them, to send out newsletters, to contact bookstores. To paint. To write songs. To build furniture. To do any…

  • Review: The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry

    Review: The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry

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    Kristen
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    D’Erasmo has instead created the clearest example of the old writing saw “show, don’t tell” for a book about sustaining one’s creativity when the demands of family, the necessity of paid work, and the maintenance of friendships drain the energy you would otherwise put into art. She interviews a variety of artists—composers, dancers, actors, writers—who…

  • Review: Concerning the Future of Souls

    Review: Concerning the Future of Souls

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    Kristen
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    Concerning the Future of Souls is a follow-up of sorts to Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God. Both contain ninety-nine very short stories—in one case that I can think of, a single word—that might be called prose poems or (very) short stories or microfictions or, as Maggie Nelson called them in her Bluets, propositions. The…

  • Summer Reading Adventure Week 4

    Summer Reading Adventure Week 4

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    Kristen
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    Welcome to week three of our reading adventures, courtesy of the National Book Foundation’s reading challenge. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to read along and comment, and be entered to win volumes 1 and 2 of Memoirs of a French Courtesan at the end of the summer.

  • Best Dressed: How Cinderella Got into the Ball

    Best Dressed: How Cinderella Got into the Ball

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    Kristen
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    I’ve been thinking about balls a lot lately, thanks to my translation of Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 2: Spectacle. The author, Céleste Mogador, attends her first ball as young woman and eventually earns fame and her sobriquet, Mogador, while dancing with and for all the high-born young men in Paris.

  • Summer Reading Adventure Week 3

    Summer Reading Adventure Week 3

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    by

    Kristen
    in ,

    Welcome to week three of our reading adventures, courtesy of the National Book Foundation’s reading challenge. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to read along and comment, and be entered to win volumes 1 and 2 of Memoirs of a French Courtesan at the end of the summer.

  • Summer Reading Adventure Week 2

    Summer Reading Adventure Week 2

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    by

    Kristen
    in ,

    Welcome to week two of our reading adventures, courtesy of the National Book Foundation’s reading challenge. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to read along and comment, and be entered to win volumes 1 and 2 of Memoirs of a French Courtesan at the end of the summer.

  • Review: Godwin

    Review: Godwin

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    Kristen
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    Godwin Joseph O’Neill Pantheon, June 2024, $28 How did I get this book: NetGalley ARC There are two things to know about me before I begin this book review: I have been thinking about race, business, and sports since former NBA star and Portland Trailblazer Rasheed Wallace gave a blistering interview to The Oregonian in…

  • Summer Reading Adventure Week 1

    Summer Reading Adventure Week 1

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    Kristen
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  • This Was Supposed to Be a Book Review

    This Was Supposed to Be a Book Review

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    Kristen
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    I have notes, quotes, and a half-assed draft of a book review waiting in the Wingback wings. This was the weekend I was going to pull it all together and publish it on Monday. However. Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 2: Spectacle has been to the proofreader and the layout has been completed. I…