“It all started at an antique show,” says author Deborah Pollack over the phone with New Times. As she speaks, it’s easy to envision the day she’s describing: a breezy South Florida afternoon; her strolling through an open-air market, fingering the unique items on display. But that day, out…
Irvine Welsh, the author of the youth and drug culture touchstone “Trainspotting,” mentions Miami only in passing in his latest novel, “Dead Men’s Trousers.” But the Scottish writer is grateful to be back in his adopted hometown. “I’ve been in [the United Kingdom] the last couple of months. It’s so dreary and dark. We have no seasons in Scotland — it’s one long, dreary fall.”
Donald Trump towers over everyone else in the picture. The year is 1997, and he’s laughing it up with Gloria Estefan, Jennifer Lopez, and Shakira. It’s like the Mount Rushmore of Latinas. “The funny thing is, in that picture of everybody interacting, the only one looking in the camera is Shakira,” says Manny Hernandez, the longtime Miami-based photographer…
Whether you were born and raised in Florida or made it your home later in life, you’ve heard the smack talk: There’s no culture in the Sunshine State. And, hey, we’ll be the first ones to admit Florida is a weird place: Alligators eat men, and men eat faces, while…
You’d be hard pressed to find a writer more up to the challenge and giddy with the nerdery that comes with writing a fantasy/historical fiction/epic trilogy than Marlon James. Born and raised in Jamaica, the former advertising man and self-proclaimed “’90s South Beach club goer” is writing what he calls…
South Florida locals need no official letters from Hogwarts to experience some wizarding magic this weekend. Instead, Muggles who are 21 or older can gather in Brickell Saturday night for the second annual Potter Crawl. This bar-hopping event was inspired by Harry Potter books and films, and aspiring wizards can…
Anna Kasperski spent the first seconds of 2019 surrounded by people she loves. “I have three really close friends, and we went over to one of their houses. I slept over, and we rung in the new year that way,” she explains. “I never really spent New Year’s with my friends before. In years past, I just stayed at home. But this year, I thought, Why don’t we be together?…”
If you’ve been in Miami long enough, you know the Magic City runs on cafecito. Yemeni-American coffee entrepreneur Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the subject of Dave Eggers’ most recent book, “The Monk of Mokha,” will share his love of coffee and indulge in Miami’s own when he visits Books & Books…
Annie Leibovitz doesn’t name her cameras. And if you want to talk about digital cameras, don’t bother. “They’re just tools,” she explains. When the famed photographer attended the San Francisco Art Institute in her youth, she says, the most valuable lessons she learned had nothing to do with technical skills, but…
Want some context to today’s wild political swings? Look to presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Goodwin’s award-winning book Team of Rivals inspired the Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis award-winning film, Lincoln. Her history of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II, No Ordinary Time, earned her a Pulitzer…
The election is over, but for activists and organizers, that only marks a new chapter in the fight. In times of trouble, looking to strong leaders can help you lift your weary head — and numerous leaders are making their way to Miami this month. This year’s Miami…
Poetry is best read aloud. That’s a known fact of literary nature. But what becomes of it when it’s stamped into a concrete sidewalk? Miami-based artist Agustina Woodgate devised a scheme to see how that would play out after she won a Knight Arts Challenge grant about three years ago. This…
As a child, Kelly Link would excitedly await South Florida’s hurricane season. The sense of trepidation an oncoming storm would bring is what the 2018 MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow used for later writing inspiration. “That sense you have when you’re a kid, living in Florida — that feeling during the hurricane season, something big might be on the horizon.” Now an author, she says, “It’s great preparation for imaging worst-case scenarios and then imaging the extraordinary coming into a landscape and changing everything.”
In 1984, the crime-fighting duo of Crockett and Tubbs went face-to-face with dangerous drug lords and other unsavory characters, making Miami famous for cocaine, synths, and violence. While Miami Vice was lighting up every living room in America in pastel shades, Miami Dade College was launching the Miami Book Fair,…
Gary Shteyngart has achieved plenty of respectable goals: teaching at Columbia, speaking at Google, being featured in publications such as Rolling Stone and the New York Times. But mainly, he writes award-winning satirical fiction. Super Sad True Love Story, his 2010 novel following a budding relationship against a backdrop of dystopian consumerism, appeared on dozens of lists of that year’s best books.
If there’s anyone who could spearhead a Miami-based podcast dedicated to reading, writing, and the book world, it’s Mitchell Kaplan. As the owner of Books & Books, one of the few remaining independent bookstores in the city, and cofounder of the Miami Book Fair, he’s certainly got the chops and passion for all things related to words.
Our favorite buildings by the firm that defined Miami architecture.
The Miami Book Fair is a celebration of the literary arts that attracts some of the finest writers from all over the world. Everyone knows the Miami Book Fair is a hot ticket, offering a bit of warmth in the tropics before the long winter everywhere else. This year, the fair is set to take place November 11 through 18 at Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus, and it’s rolling out its roster of authors.
“There’s a weirdness from growing up in Miami that lends toward storytelling. Everyone there comes from somewhere else. It made me want to know people’s stories.”
Novelist Natalia Sylvester’s novel “Everyone Knows You Go Home” explores the trauma and joys of an immigrant family living in the United States. Sylvester is the artist in residence at the Betsy Hotel’s residency program the Writer’s Room.
The Alphabet of Enchantment Island is a bilingual children’s book about the magic of being Boricua and the African heritage of Puerto Rico, says its author Yajaira De La Espada. The Afro-Latinx creative of Puerto Rican and Panamanian decent spent the last four years writing the book, but after Hurricane…
Photographer Ian Witlen got a call from New Times’ art director just after 2:30 p.m. on Valentine’s Day. She had heard reports that there was an active shooter on the campus of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. Witlen had graduated from the school in 2001. “I immediately thought it was just another…
