Babe In The Woods or The Art Of Getting Lost - a graphic novel by Julie Heffernan

 

Babe in the Woods, or the Art of Getting Lost, is Julie Heffernan’s first graphic novel, published by Algonquin Books.  In the book, a young artist named Julie, on a hike with her infant son, takes a wrong turn and finds herself on an extraordinary journey through her tangled past. It looks fabulous.

“One summer day, a young artist with a newborn—sleep-deprived, desperate to escape her hot, cramped apartment and her oblivious husband—sets off on a hike in the country with her baby boy, Sam, strapped to her front and her senses fully attuned to the colors, the sounds, and the flora and fauna in the woods around her. During her journey, Julie reflects on her childhood, her parents, her marriage, and her path to becoming a painter. Her memories soon merge with the imaginative pictorial worlds she invents in her work, creating a glorious and perturbing narrative.”

California

(Biblioklept)

Longlist for the 2026 Women’s Prize For Fiction Released

The Women’s Prize Trust announced the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which highlights sixteen novels—including seven debuts, seven American writers, and nine offerings from indie publishers—published in the last year.

• Lucy Apps, Gloria Don’t Speak
• Hannah Lillith Assadi, Paradiso 17
• Elaine Castillo, Moderation
• Susan Choi, Flashlight
• Addie E. Citchens, Dominion
• Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors
• Virginia Evans, The Correspondent
• Marcia Hutchinson, The Mercy Step
• Sheena Kalayil, The Others
• Rozie Kelly, Kingfisher
• Lily King, Heart the Lover
• Katie Kitamura, Audition
• Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief
• Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
• Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything
• Alice Evelyn Yang, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing

I have only read one of them (Katie Kitamura’s Audition) so I have a lot of catching up to do.

More: Literary Hub

T.S. Eliot Fun Page

Wrong Hands

Paper Engineering

Sampler paper pop-up mechanism booklet:

More here Via Kraftfuttermischwerk

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Battling Insomnia (and a Single Mosquito) - An excerpt

When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia. I see now that that was because I had never had much; it appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

Now if insomnia is going to be one of your naturals, it begins to appear in the late thirties. Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval. This is the time of which it is written in the Psalms: Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris.

With a man I knew the trouble commenced with a mouse; in my case I like to trace it to a single mosquito.

My friend was in course of opening up his country house unassisted, and after a fatiguing day discovered that the only practical bed was a child’s affair— long enough but scarcely wider than a crib. Into this he flopped and was presently deeply engrossed in rest but with one arm irrepressibly extending over the side of the crib. Hours later he was awakened by what seemed to be a pin-prick in his finger. He shifted his arm sleepily and dozed off again— to be again awakened by the same feeling.

This time he flipped on the bed-light— and there attached to the bleeding end of his finger was a small and avid mouse. My friend, to use his own words, “uttered an exclamation,” but probably he gave a wild scream.

Read More: Literary Hub 

A Day in the Life of an American Paperboy, c. 1974

I’m not sure why I agreed to take a job without the promise of being paid. But when you’re thirteen, you don’t have much bargaining power.

A modest income was promised to young boys (occasionally girls) by the publishers of The Conshohocken Recorder and The Weekly Advertiser, two minuscule newspapers published in the Philadelphia suburbs, probably not that different from many other local papers at the time. The way the income was earned by those who delivered it, however, was unusual.

It’s hard to imagine a time when anyone would want to read these weekly ten-page tabloids. As its name suggests, The Advertiser was crammed with ads for local businesses, next to brief articles about local doings. The Recorder, I guess, recorded local news, but like its competitor, supported itself by advertising the same pizzerias, barbershops, and insurance agencies that placed identical ads in our local church bulletin.

Decades before the internet, there were far fewer places to get news, and decades before cable and streaming, there was far less to watch on TV. In the Philadelphia area we had the Holy Trinity of Channels 3, 6, and 10 (NBC, ABC, and CBS) plus whatever you could find on UHF: Channels 17, 29, and 48, whose fare ran heavily to Gilligan’s Island and The Flying Nun reruns, 1960s Japanese anime cartoons like Astro Boy and Marine Boy, and black-and-white movies from the 1950s and earlier. In that entertainment wasteland, why not peruse the papers to see what The Advertiser was advertising and The Recorder was recording?

Delivering papers at a young age would be good for me, said my dad. When you were a kid, things that sounded frankly awful were always good for you.

Read more: Literary Hub 

Excerpted from Work in Progress: Confessions of a busboy, dishwasher, caddy, usher, factory worker, bank teller, corporate tool, and priest by James Martin.

Letter From Minnesota: A Brief History of ICE in Poems

Đenise Hạnh Huỳnh: “rainbows of women are beaten & shot in our streets”

More: Literary Hub 

Barricades of Welcome

(Biblioklept)

Hobart :: Songs in Case of Sudden Death

On a Wednesday I wonder if Bob Dylan will accompany my mangled form into the afterlife; the following Friday I imagine John Lennon. A week later, surrounded by shattered glass, a rusted guardrail impaling the awful tableau, I’m sure I’ll hear Nina Simone as I draw my final, ragged breath. There are now over one hundred songs on my “untimely death/car crash” playlist, all carefully selected in case I should perish in a macabre tangle of metal and gasoline on southbound M-39.

M-39 is a grey chute of concrete bisecting metro Detroit, a regular part of my commute. It chainsaws through urban decay and development alike, miles of new and crumbling brick, the shoulder a graveyard of discarded Big Gulps and broken 40s and containers for other beverages that never really quench your thirst. Five billboards featuring shark-eyed personal injury attorneys loom across the freeway, and I’m often fearful that their outsized, two-dimensional faces will be the last I see in this life. I can’t do much about what I see here, but the audio element is definitely within my grasp.

“This is beyond morbid,” my husband, G, tells me when I inform him of my playlist. I shrug and add a few Miles Davis tracks, deciding some instrumentals might be nice. Lyrics sometimes devolve into underwhelming choruses: strings of baby or hey or oooh, less than ideal listening for the last moments of life.

“God forbid a stupid remark on some podcast be the last thing I hear before I leave this world!” I say.

This is the crux of it, really. It’s not just the thought of dying in a wreck in suburban grayscale that depresses me, it’s the notion that the soundtrack to my death would be so inane: a movie plug or fake laughter or an ad line punctuating my demise. Imagine a death scene in a movie, but the music isn’t Hans Zimmer or John Williams—it’s the jingle for Auto Zone. 

Read More Hobart :: Songs in Case of Sudden Death by Casey Jo Graham Welmers