Category: Literature
27 article(s) found that match this category.
Patrick Rothfuss ’02—World Builder
Spring 2013
Categories: Literature, Alumni, Fiction
Tags: Fantasy, Authors, Philanthropy
Taste, an Accounting in Three Scenes
Spring 2013
Categories: Music, Literature
Tags: Beethoven, Taste, Decorum
Maps, memory, and imagination
Winter 2012
The aspirations, dreams, and metaphors invested in maps are displayed in two recent books by WSU alumni, as well as several articles in this issue.
Categories: Alumni, Literature, Geography
Tags: Maps, Books
The learned observer
Summer 2012
“We should observe first, and think afterwards.”—The Lancet 19 Oct. 1823Part of the nature of a writer—but then again, perhaps I speak only for myself—is the constant reimagining of one’s self and context, the repeated immersion in my...
Categories: Literature, Journalism
Tags: Observation, Writing
Wendell Berry comes to Washington
Fall 2011
Poet and author Wendell Berry visited Skagit Valley in May at the invitation of Washington State University students and faculty. He spent the day touring the WSU research and extension center and exploring a farm. He also visited with area farmers...
Categories: Literature, Agriculture
Tags: Writers
The Storyteller—Patrick McManus ’56, ’59 MA
Summer 2011
Categories: Alumni, Literature
Tags: Humor, Authors, Outdoors, Fishing, Hunting
Nature twice: Poetry and natural history
Winter 2010
I lean on a glass case that displays stuffed egrets, herons, and sparrows. Across the room, Larry Hufford—director of the Conner Museum of Natural History and professor in the School of Biologica...
Categories: Literature, Library and museum studies, Biological sciences
Tags: Museums, Poetry, Nature, Collaboration
One version of pastoral
Fall 2010
Categories: Literature
Tags: Pastoral, Shakespeare, Montaigne
Booked: The Long Sentence of an Apprentice Reader
Summer 2010
What would it mean to refuse connectedness? Is it even possible?
Categories: Literature, English
Tags: Digital world, Reading, Technology, Books
Shall I Eat a Peach?
Summer 2010
At the risk of sounding either shopworn (which I hope I’m not) or like a Luddite (my identification with said philosophy depending on the day of the week), the thing I’m most looking forward to in “retirement,” besides being able to foc...
Categories: Communication, Literature
Tags: Internet, Technology, Digital world
Desperately Seeking Sherman
Spring 2010
Although his work is increasingly ubiquitous, the writer Sherman Alexie ’94 is a little harder to pin down. Our correspondent is undaunted.
Categories: Literature, Alumni
Tags: Native Americans, Authors, Writers
Yolandé McVey '07—Taking life back
Winter 2009
The heroine of Love’s Secrets puts on perfume, goes to a barbecue, and meets Rod: caramel skin, wavy hair, muscles, and commitment issues. The author of Love’s Secrets can never do two of those three things. Exposure to perfume or barbecue smo...
Categories: Alumni, Literature
Tags: Distance education, Novelists, Writers
Privacy and the Words of the Dead
Spring 2009
Do we violate the privacy of the dead when we read what they wrote for themselves? Maybe it depends on our purposes.
Categories: Literature
Tags: Privacy, Montaigne
Everybody reads
Winter 2008
When Mary Roach was researching her book on human cadavers, she attended a seminar where plastic surgeons practiced techniques on severed human heads. She also visited a body farm in Tennessee to see remains in various states of decay. And she sto...
Categories: Literature
Tags: Cadavers, Reading
Age of Identity
Summer 2008
Debbie Lee journeyed across an ocean and traveled back two centuries to find some of history's most infamous imposters. She came home with a new understanding of culture and identity.
Categories: History, Literature
Tags: England, Identity
Why Doubt? Skepticism as a basis for change and understanding
Spring 2007
Categories: Literature, Philosophy
Tags: Skepticism
Laurie Carlson: Doing the things she likes
Fall 2006
On the 90-minute commute from Cheney to Pullman to attend graduate school, Laurie Carlson's eyes often strayed from the road to the cows grazing the rolling hills of the Palouse.Carlson, who was completing her Ph.D. in history at Washington State ...
Categories: Literature, Alumni
Tags: Cattle, Authors
Medieval Missive: An ancient document rediscovered
Winter 2005
A sacred and significant artifact of European history-a genuine papal bull from the Middle Ages-was recently found tucked among the books and papers of Washington State University's Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections.The bull, or bulla...
Categories: Religion, Literature
Tags: The Pope
Washington State loves its literature
Summer 2005
In a report released last summer, the National Endowment for the Arts warned that literary reading has declined over the last 20 years. Scary stuff, huh? So we did our own informal survey of faculty, students, and alums. Their response? Read on!
Categories: Literature, Campus life
Tags: Books, Reading, Library
A Nobel laureate promotes a
Summer 2005
Wole Soyinka, a playwright, poet, novelist, and political activist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, spent a couple of days in February on the Pullman campus.His visit was in conjunction with the Theater Arts Program's presentation o...
Categories: Literature, Cultural studies
Tags: Africa, Nobel laureate
Author Sherman Alexie receives Regents' Distinguished Alumnus Award
Spring 2004
Sherman Alexie likes to remind people that attending Washington State University presented him with a real challenge. As a Spokane Indian, a liberal, and a writer, he did not fit the prevalent mold of students attending WSU in the late 1980s and e...
Categories: Alumni, Literature
Tags: Awards, Native Americans
Poor farm kid makes good
Spring 2004
Sherman Alexie likes to remind people that attending Washington State University presented him with a real challenge. As a Spokane Indian, a liberal, and a writer, he did not fit the prevalent mold of students attending WSU in the late 1980s and e...
Categories: Literature
Tags: Books, Authors
Letters from Vladivostok
Spring 2003
"This is the best research project I've ever had. It's invaded my life in a very good way." So says Birgitta Ingemanson, associate professor of Russian at Washington State University, about her current project transcribing and editing more than 2,...
Categories: History, Literature
Tags: Russia
Thames Voices
Fall 2002
As a literary scholar wanders London's streets, he can hear the doubts and questions and skeptical musings of the 16th-century stage.
Categories: Literature
Tags: London
A common reader: Overcoming inertia
Fall 2002
I’d like you to meet someone. He’s a vulnerable fellow, rather too open to the joys and despairs of deep remembering. His life, therefore, is disordered but rich, evocative but dangerously reflective. He gets along, he thinks too well, he cuts...
Categories: Literature
Tags: Reading
A salon of their own
Spring 2002
Good conversation should bring about a transcendental melding of minds and dissolve class and ideological differences.The funniest things Washington State University historian Steve Kale ran across in researching his latest book were the a...
Categories: History, Literature
Tags: Salons, Women
The Peking Cowboy
Spring 2002
A short story by Alex Kuo; illustrations by David Wheeler. He wanted to tell the story in the third person, but it came out in the first; he wanted to tell it in the past, but it came out happening in the now; even if he wanted to, he could not change a word of it, its sequence and language clarifying its own shape and direction in his voice.
Categories: Literature
Tags: Fiction, Short stories
Spring 2013
Life’s a fantasy for best-selling author Patrick Rothfuss. He invites us into his worlds, one real and one of his own invention.
Categories: Literature, Alumni, Fiction
Tags: Fantasy, Authors, Philanthropy
Taste, an Accounting in Three Scenes
Spring 2013
I’d be lying if I claimed not to prefer the golf swings of Bobby Jones or Sam Snead to that of Tommy “Two Gloves” Gainey. So I guess I’m a snob.
Categories: Music, Literature
Tags: Beethoven, Taste, Decorum
Maps, memory, and imagination
Winter 2012
The aspirations, dreams, and metaphors invested in maps are displayed in two recent books by WSU alumni, as well as several articles in this issue.
Categories: Alumni, Literature, Geography
Tags: Maps, Books
The learned observer
Summer 2012
“We should observe first, and think afterwards.”—The Lancet 19 Oct. 1823Part of the nature of a writer—but then again, perhaps I speak only for myself—is the constant reimagining of one’s self and context, the repeated immersion in my...
Categories: Literature, Journalism
Tags: Observation, Writing
Wendell Berry comes to Washington
Fall 2011
Poet and author Wendell Berry visited Skagit Valley in May at the invitation of Washington State University students and faculty. He spent the day touring the WSU research and extension center and exploring a farm. He also visited with area farmers...
Categories: Literature, Agriculture
Tags: Writers
The Storyteller—Patrick McManus ’56, ’59 MA
Summer 2011
Patrick McManus’s comic formula depends on his creation of a world of oddly named characters with generous and adventurous souls. And a markedly different perspective. “As far back as I can remember,” he writes, “I have seen funny. What may horrify normal people may strike me as hilarious.”
Categories: Alumni, Literature
Tags: Humor, Authors, Outdoors, Fishing, Hunting
Nature twice: Poetry and natural history
Winter 2010
I lean on a glass case that displays stuffed egrets, herons, and sparrows. Across the room, Larry Hufford—director of the Conner Museum of Natural History and professor in the School of Biologica...
Categories: Literature, Library and museum studies, Biological sciences
Tags: Museums, Poetry, Nature, Collaboration
One version of pastoral
Fall 2010
Shakespeare offers little in terms of convincing natural description. His Forest of Arden is praised for what it isn’t rather than what it is.
Categories: Literature
Tags: Pastoral, Shakespeare, Montaigne
Booked: The Long Sentence of an Apprentice Reader
Summer 2010
What would it mean to refuse connectedness? Is it even possible?
Categories: Literature, English
Tags: Digital world, Reading, Technology, Books
Shall I Eat a Peach?
Summer 2010
At the risk of sounding either shopworn (which I hope I’m not) or like a Luddite (my identification with said philosophy depending on the day of the week), the thing I’m most looking forward to in “retirement,” besides being able to foc...
Categories: Communication, Literature
Tags: Internet, Technology, Digital world
Desperately Seeking Sherman
Spring 2010
Although his work is increasingly ubiquitous, the writer Sherman Alexie ’94 is a little harder to pin down. Our correspondent is undaunted.
Categories: Literature, Alumni
Tags: Native Americans, Authors, Writers
Yolandé McVey '07—Taking life back
Winter 2009
The heroine of Love’s Secrets puts on perfume, goes to a barbecue, and meets Rod: caramel skin, wavy hair, muscles, and commitment issues. The author of Love’s Secrets can never do two of those three things. Exposure to perfume or barbecue smo...
Categories: Alumni, Literature
Tags: Distance education, Novelists, Writers
Privacy and the Words of the Dead
Spring 2009
Do we violate the privacy of the dead when we read what they wrote for themselves? Maybe it depends on our purposes.
Categories: Literature
Tags: Privacy, Montaigne
Everybody reads
Winter 2008
When Mary Roach was researching her book on human cadavers, she attended a seminar where plastic surgeons practiced techniques on severed human heads. She also visited a body farm in Tennessee to see remains in various states of decay. And she sto...
Categories: Literature
Tags: Cadavers, Reading
Age of Identity
Summer 2008
Debbie Lee journeyed across an ocean and traveled back two centuries to find some of history's most infamous imposters. She came home with a new understanding of culture and identity.
Categories: History, Literature
Tags: England, Identity
Why Doubt? Skepticism as a basis for change and understanding
Spring 2007
Skepticism can forestall a too-willing acquiescence to the-way-things-are; it can distance us from dogmatism and ward us away from zealotry; it can expose our mistakes.
Categories: Literature, Philosophy
Tags: Skepticism
Laurie Carlson: Doing the things she likes
Fall 2006
On the 90-minute commute from Cheney to Pullman to attend graduate school, Laurie Carlson's eyes often strayed from the road to the cows grazing the rolling hills of the Palouse.Carlson, who was completing her Ph.D. in history at Washington State ...
Categories: Literature, Alumni
Tags: Cattle, Authors
Medieval Missive: An ancient document rediscovered
Winter 2005
A sacred and significant artifact of European history-a genuine papal bull from the Middle Ages-was recently found tucked among the books and papers of Washington State University's Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections.The bull, or bulla...
Categories: Religion, Literature
Tags: The Pope
Washington State loves its literature
Summer 2005
In a report released last summer, the National Endowment for the Arts warned that literary reading has declined over the last 20 years. Scary stuff, huh? So we did our own informal survey of faculty, students, and alums. Their response? Read on!
Categories: Literature, Campus life
Tags: Books, Reading, Library
A Nobel laureate promotes a
Summer 2005
Wole Soyinka, a playwright, poet, novelist, and political activist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, spent a couple of days in February on the Pullman campus.His visit was in conjunction with the Theater Arts Program's presentation o...
Categories: Literature, Cultural studies
Tags: Africa, Nobel laureate
Author Sherman Alexie receives Regents' Distinguished Alumnus Award
Spring 2004
Sherman Alexie likes to remind people that attending Washington State University presented him with a real challenge. As a Spokane Indian, a liberal, and a writer, he did not fit the prevalent mold of students attending WSU in the late 1980s and e...
Categories: Alumni, Literature
Tags: Awards, Native Americans
Poor farm kid makes good
Spring 2004
Sherman Alexie likes to remind people that attending Washington State University presented him with a real challenge. As a Spokane Indian, a liberal, and a writer, he did not fit the prevalent mold of students attending WSU in the late 1980s and e...
Categories: Literature
Tags: Books, Authors
Letters from Vladivostok
Spring 2003
"This is the best research project I've ever had. It's invaded my life in a very good way." So says Birgitta Ingemanson, associate professor of Russian at Washington State University, about her current project transcribing and editing more than 2,...
Categories: History, Literature
Tags: Russia
Thames Voices
Fall 2002
As a literary scholar wanders London's streets, he can hear the doubts and questions and skeptical musings of the 16th-century stage.
Categories: Literature
Tags: London
A common reader: Overcoming inertia
Fall 2002
I’d like you to meet someone. He’s a vulnerable fellow, rather too open to the joys and despairs of deep remembering. His life, therefore, is disordered but rich, evocative but dangerously reflective. He gets along, he thinks too well, he cuts...
Categories: Literature
Tags: Reading
A salon of their own
Spring 2002
Good conversation should bring about a transcendental melding of minds and dissolve class and ideological differences.The funniest things Washington State University historian Steve Kale ran across in researching his latest book were the a...
Categories: History, Literature
Tags: Salons, Women
The Peking Cowboy
Spring 2002
A short story by Alex Kuo; illustrations by David Wheeler. He wanted to tell the story in the third person, but it came out in the first; he wanted to tell it in the past, but it came out happening in the now; even if he wanted to, he could not change a word of it, its sequence and language clarifying its own shape and direction in his voice.
Categories: Literature
Tags: Fiction, Short stories