The Stacks
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Bread and representation
Back on October 15, we had a book launch up at the local indie bookstore where our Head Alien hangs one of his many hats on the regular. He arrived to have a fellow bookseller exclaim “Hey! Did you know you’re in the book?”
No, no he did not…
A Faustian bargain… but the good kind
Reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in my teen years was a gateway drug to reading other classics and it made sense that Faust by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe quickly appeared on my radar. I mean, a book about selling your soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures – how can you resist?…
When Words Collide… 2023 and beyond
For those of who may not be familiar with it, When Words Collide is an annual festival for readers and writers and bookish folks of all kinds.
And for us here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, it has long been the never-to-be-missed event of the year…
Drawn Together, Judged Together
Today’s assignment? To investigate “a graphic novel or comic that has been challenged recently in western society.”
Our choice? Well, it’s the 2019 winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Best Picture Book, among other accolades…
You sold a book…
Embracing the Prairie Witch
Book mail is one of our highlights here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, but today’s package is especially exciting, an anthology edited by our very own Stacey Kondla, Prairie Witch published by Prairie Soul Press…
Finally, time for some summer reading…
Yeah, it’s been a hot minute, but between work and school and life we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library may have gotten a bit sidetracked from our (ir)regularly scheduled additions to our digital stacks.
But we have not forgotten you, beloved patrons!
![The Art of the [_____]: A Life in [_____]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fe7ef3acaf95b4fe9230724/d4828006-64f9-44fa-8939-27469cf3ef51/Art-of-the-1.jpeg)
The Art of the [_____]: A Life in [_____]
I just finished reading a great book, but I don’t want to tell you what it is.
Or rather, I don’t want to share the full title or the name of the author of it, just yet. I think the full title distracts from what the book is really about, which is the part of the title I am sharing as the title of this post: The Art of the [_____]: A Life in [_____].
Starting with our ABCs…
We wrote in a past post about the challenges of alphabetizing our collection of alphabet books, and have since continued to acquire more items. Rather than manually updating the list of books from that post, we decided to experiment with an online cataloguing tool, a project we alluded to in our recent post about The Organization of Information. And how best to start any project? You start with your ABCs…
Know Your Weird: The Organization of Information
As you may have noticed from our past posts, we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities aren’t just about reading books, but a much broader curiosity about all things bookish and even book adjacent…
In the spirit of that curiosity, I thought I’d share a quick photo or two of one of my current active reads, The Organization of Information…
Books as Wall Art: A Practical Guide
This year is the tenth anniversary of When Words Collide, an annual readers and writers conference based in Calgary, Alberta. Today I had the privilege of delivering an encore presentation of my session on Books as Object, Sculpture, and Performance.
This post is not about that presentation.
But it was sparked by it, and by this photo from my slide deck…
Book Lovers Day 2021
Now, really, every day is Book Lovers Day at the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rareties, but since the all-knowing interwebs say this is a with-capital-letters Day day… albeit with an origin story lost to the mists of time… we did feel we had to post a little something.
