Novel Niche

Unabashedly devoted to life steeped in books, tea, dark-eyed romances and other rare indulgences. Profile image © Razequl Zibon, via Flickr.  

[novelniche]

Five Titles for World Book Day 2021!

Five Titles for World Book Day 2021!

by Shivanee Ramlochan, Paper Based BloggerImages by Alicia Viarruel Here at Paper Based Bookshop, we celebrate books, reading and the lit-community every day, especially for all things Caribbean. It’s thrilling to take part in UNESCO’s World Book and Copyright Day, dedicated to improving global access to books in spaces that most need it. Here are five titles from our shelves to yours, each of…

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[novelniche]

and i am the man / laughing: "Connel, Morning"

and i am the man / laughing: “Connel, Morning”

Image: Port of Spain, Trinidad, posted at Flickr by Georgia Popplewell under a Creative Commons License. If you have spent any time at all in Port of Spain, you will know — like this poem knows — that it is worth writing about. “Connel, Morning” comes from the section of You Have You Father Hard Head that focuses on travel: international to inside your backyard, these poems call on their…

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[novelniche]

and i am the man / laughing: "I Have No Name for my Father"

and i am the man / laughing: “I Have No Name for my Father”

Image: Black Boy Booty, posted at Flickr by nathanmac87 under a Creative Commons License. We are who we are because of those who made us, or so we’ve been told. We model our lives in the shadows and the halos of our parents, and their parents before them: it’s part of what makes us get through the hard, hard grift of living, sometimes — this notion that we’re acting for our legacy, and in…

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[novelniche]

and i am the man / laughing: "The Plural of Me"

and i am the man / laughing: “The Plural of Me”

Image: Red Gift, posted at Flickr by Eric Martin under a Creative Commons License. If we are lucky within our sorrow, those who die before us tell us exactly how they wish to be mourned. You can take “The Plural of Me” in this spirit. For me, right now at least, it’s difficult to read this poem without wondering if this precisely is how Colin the human being would like to be remembered, would…

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[novelniche]

and i am the man / laughing -- "I Want to Bite"

and i am the man / laughing — “I Want to Bite”

Image: Sargassum, posted at Flickr by stuartanthony under a Creative Commons License. The poem is telling us about shapeshifting. One of the earliest poems in Colin Robinson’s You Have You Father Hard Head, “I Want to Bite” is a spare, enigmatic offering, showing the reader vignettes in eight movements. I am fortunate enough to be a nameless stagehand at these scenes, not remotely pivotal to…

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[novelniche]

Three Terrific Coming of Age Novels for Young Adults

Three Terrific Coming of Age Novels for Young Adults

by Shivanee Ramlochan, Paper Based Blogger Images by Alicia Viarruel

Ask (almost) any adult: growing up doesn’t always come together as easily as a pot of simmering pelau over a riverside cookstove. The ingredients for a successful coming of age story often feature spicy seasonings — how better to map a young adventurer, discoverer or teen rebel’s growth than with tempestuous authenticity? Just…

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[novelniche]

Dearly Departed: A Conversation with Anu Lakhan

Dearly Departed: A Conversation with Anu Lakhan

Novel Niche is thrilled to unveil this exclusive interview with Anu Lakhan, Trinidadian poet, fiction writer, editor and debut chapbookist. First published by Argotiers Press in 2018, Letters to K is hilarious and heartbreaking, audacious and abashed, like no other letter-set to a dead writer you’ve ever read before. 

Here, I sit with Lakhan over metaphysical tea, and let her tell me all about…

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[novelniche]

“The Whistler” – A Mary Oliver Primer

[novelniche]

"The Fish" - A Mary Oliver Primer

“The Fish” – A Mary Oliver Primer

Image: Lion Fish, posted at Flickr by Dave Scriven under a Creative Commons License.

I’ve seen fish being caught off the rocky outcropping of the North Coast at night. What transfixed me most was how violently, how viciously they struggled against death: it’s been years, and still, vividly, I can summon the muscular thrash of a fish torso, the rippling menace of tail sluicing seawater through the…

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[novelniche]

"Wild Geese" - A Mary Oliver Primer

“Wild Geese” – A Mary Oliver Primer

Image: Wild Geese, posted at Flickr by liz west under a Creative Commons License.

In Las Lomas where I grew up and still return every Sunday morning, wild parrots wake me up, the incantation of their united screech a resonant, strangely innervating chorus. I have always felt the press of the wild more closely in Las Lomas, and it is a complicated wilderness. I have had a calamitous, giddy…

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[novelniche]

Letters to K - Anu Lakhan

Letters to K – Anu Lakhan

by Shivanee Ramlochan, Paper Based Blogger

Argotiers Press, 2018.

 “The meaning of life is that it stops,” wrote Jewish novelist Franz Kafka. Taking this thought up beyond the grave, Anu Lakhan’s masterfully curious chapbook, Letters to K, asks the extraordinary question, “How do I send a letter to my dead best friend?” There is, of course, the small matter of our narrator living in an entirely…

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[bibliolectors]

Leyendo… metafóricamente? (ilustración de Sandra Conejeros)

[blackness-by-your-side]

The sign of high quality is the fact the book was banned by the government. Trash literature NEVER EVER had any troubles with the law.

[cuntybearjamboree]

FARENHEIT 451 IS ON THE BANNED BOOKS LIST??? IT’S LITERALLY ABOUT THE SOCIETAL DANGERS OF BANNING/OUTLAWING/BURNING BOOKS ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

[dancing-coyote]

That’s the reason it’s on the bloody list.

BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT HOW BANNING AND BURNING BOOKS IS WRONG.

[strawberryleaves]

Words.

[2dnd-deactivated20190101]

Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator Butcher Billy got the idea of turning famous love hits into book covers of horror master Stephen King. 

Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” The Smiths, “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears and many others were portrayed in a very unusual way.

“This series imagines an alternate universe where some of the most desperate and tragic romantic songs in the ‘70s and’ 80s are actually books written by Stephen King. The concept is to look at the dark side of love by the vision of pop culture, bringing aspects of its classic stories to play the true meaning of the songs - this can be completely subverted or stressed strangeness, while paying tribute to the vintage design of the original covers,” Butcher writes on his Behance.

[verylostpenguin]

Personally I love books that put the footnotes at the bottom of the page instead of at the end of the book so that I don’t have to keep flipping back and forth like an absolute barbarian

[macrolit]

Read Black authors