Category: Excerpt

High Country News: In Line at the Great Wall

Posted on by Rose Brandt

November 13, 2017

Author, poet, and Angeleno, Daniel A. Olivas is known for his provocative prose and cleverly crafted characters. Recently, High Country News featured an excerpt from his short story “In Line at the Great Wall,”  from his collection The King of Lighting Fixtures. In this story, Olivas imagines a future where anti-immigrant sentiment is enshrined in a border wall:

Rogelio stood in the long line that snaked from the detention center’s barracks to the lookout point at the other end of the compound. He shifted from foot to foot, the heat making him perspire and feel lightheaded. He was a smart boy — one of the best students in Ms. Becerra’s fifth-grade class — so he figured that even though the cool winter weather still made San Diego’s evenings chilly enough to need a sweater, the lack of circulation combined with the body heat of thousands of children conspired to make the detention center’s air heavy and almost suffocating.

Read “The Great Wall” in its entirety on High Country News.

Arizona Daily Star: Tom Miller Shows Us a Side of Cuba Tourists Rarely See

Posted on by Rose Brandt

November 12, 2017

Following the release event for Tom Miller’s Cuba, Hot and Cold, the Arizona Daily Star honored the Tucson travel writer by running an excerpt of his piece “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop:”

Tucsonan Tom Miller first visited Cuba 30 years ago. He has returned often, writing about a Cuba most don’t get to see. His books include “Trading with the Enemy” and “Revenge of the Saguaro.” This is an excerpt from his latest, “Cuba, Hot and Cold:”

José Martí, leader of Cuba’s nineteenth-century independence movement, is said to have had a voice that sounded like an oboe. Perhaps that’s why the country has so many oboe players. I took oboe lessons in Havana when I lived there in the early 1990s and wrote about them at the time. I was hoping to improve my mediocre oboe skills acquired during junior high school, and frankly, I wanted to show readers that contemporary music in Cuba was more than just salsa and reggaeton. I succeeded with the latter, but far less with improving my ability. I even had trouble with the ducks in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. And so I put my oboe on the top shelf in my Arizona office where it gathered desert dust. I’d glance up at it now and then with a sense of forlorn pride, reassuring myself that I owned a quality instrument that I once played with some gusto.

Read the full excerpt on the Arizona Daily Star.

September 30, 2017

Forthcoming this October, No Species Is an Island describes the surprising results of Theodore H. Fleming’s eleven-year study of pollination biology in Sonora, Mexico, in the most biologically diverse desert in the world. These discoveries serve as a primer on how to conduct ecological research, and offer important conservation lessons for us all. Fleming offers an insightful look at how field ecologists work, and the often big surprises that come from looking carefully at a natural world where no species stands alone.

In anticipation of the book’s release event at Tucson’s Tohono Chul Park, the Arizona Daily Star ran an excerpt of Ted Fleming’s No Species Is an Island:

The most biologically diverse desert in the world, the Sonoran Desert hosts four species of columnar cacti which, along with their pollinators, have been the subject of an 11-year study by Dr. Theodore Fleming. “No Species Is an Island” describes his surprising results, including the ability of organ pipe cactus to produce fruit with another species’ pollen and the highly specialized moth-cactus pollination system of the senita. With illustrations by Kim Kanoa Duffek, Fleming’s book offers an insightful look at how field ecologists work and at the often big surprises that come from looking carefully at a natural world where no species stands alone.

Read the full excerpt on the Arizona Daily Star.

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