EISNER WINNER: NLR native Nate Powell's 'Swallow Me Whole.'

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Nate Powell, new poetry, Southern vampires and more.

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Last month, North Little Rock native Nate Powell won an Eisner Award for New Graphic Album (translated, Best Graphic Novel of the year) for his book “Swallow Me Whole” (Top Shelf Productions, $19.95, hardcover). There’s no higher award in comics.

 

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Local poet Michael Inscoe has self-released a new chapbook called “I am trying to please you because i care about you.” It’s available for sale at the House restaurant in Hillcrest.

Inscoe has likened his aesthetic to mumblecore, the no-frills film movement focused on telling stories about young people struggling to communicate. Both can be maddening in their navel gazing and self-hate (Inscoe regularly derails his poems with some combination of “I don’t know” or “I feel stupid”), but where mumblecore films rarely acknowledge the humor in all the pained emotion and aimlessness, Inscoe’s often really funny wallowing in it. He over-shares, but he usually leavens all his sad-sackery with self-deprecation.

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Here’s a particularly nice moment from an untitled poem: “I was trying to kiss you / you knew what I was doing / and I knew you knew and so on and so forth and/ you weren’t opposed to it / not fully, I mean, but you / were opposed to it.”

Stay tuned, Inscoe might be onto something.

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Magnolia’s Charlaine Harris has signed a contract to write three more Sookie Stackhouse novels. The tenth book in the series (and the basis for HBO’s “True Blood”) will be out in May 2010.

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Coming in September: The latest from Arkansas treasure Donald Harington. In “Enduring” (Toby Press, $24.95, hardcover), the Fayetteville novelist continues his exploration of Stay More, the fictional Ozarks town he created some 40 years ago that’s been the setting of most of his novels. Latha Bourne, the first character the author created (in 1970’s “Lightning Bug”), who’s reappeared in a number of his books, receives the full treatment in “Enduring.”

 

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