Books

Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America

From the jacket:

Adored by its fans, deplored by its critics, Oprah's Book Club has been at the center of arguments about cultural authority and literary taste since its inception in 1996. Featuring a wide survey of recent commentary as well as interview with many of the club's selected authors, READING WITH OPRAH is an engaging and in-depth look at the phenomenon that is Oprah's Book Club.

Currently available in hardcover, Reading With Oprah will be available as a revised and updated paperback in Spring 2008. The new edition will feature coverage of the James Frey controversy, as well as Winfrey's return to fiction with recent selections by Cormac McCarthy.

Something Really Wonderful

This limited edition chapbook was co-written with Elisa Gabbert and published in November 2007. It is available through dancing girl press.












That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness

Available from Otoliths Books in April 2008, That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness is a full-length collection of poetry collaborations co-written with Elisa Gabbert. All collaboration has taken place via email, first when Elisa was living in Boston and Kathleen was living in Provincetown, then when Kathleen was in Chicago, Tacoma and Chicago again. The collection contains experiments in various Oulipo forms such as beautiful outlaws, and more traditional forms such as ghazals, tritinas, addresses, and quatorzains, as well as new forms of their own devising, including count 'em ups, limited freedoms, and out of orders. Poems from this collection have appeared recently or are forthcoming in MiPOesias, Cake Train, elimae, Foursquare, Dusie, Sawbuck, Past Simple, Otoliths, and The Concher.

About Elisa Gabbert: Elisa Gabbert holds degrees from Rice University and Emerson College. She is a reader for Ploughshares and an editor of Absent. Recent work appears or will appear in journals including Pleiades, LIT, No Tell Motel, Kulture Vulture, RealPoetik, H_NGM_N, and Redivider, as well as the forthcoming anthologies The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor and Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. A chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine was recently published by Kitchen Press.


Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

Forthcoming from University of Arkansas in Spring 2009, Live Nude Girl will draw readers into an inside look at one of the most underexposed jobs of some of the most nakedly exposed people on the planet. A lively meditation on the profession of art modeling as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today, Live Nude Girl draws on Kathleen's own experiences working as an artists' model for over five years, as well as on the stories of famous, notorious, and utterly mysterious artists and models through the ages. Through a combination of personal perspective, historical anecdote, and a witty prose style, LIVE NUDE GIRL reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.


Brevity & Echo

Co-edited with Abigail Beckel and featuring a foreword by Ron Carlson and an afterword by Pamela Painter, this anthology of 77 previously published short shorts by 53 Emerson College authors is the inaugural book from Rose Metal Press.

Emerson College was one of the first and remains one of the only writing programs in the country to offer specific classes in and extensive support for the short short story. Brevity & Echo is a celebration of this continuing legacy and of short shorts as a rich and expanding genre. These microfictions-the longest weighing in at 1400 words and the shortest at just 55-appeared originally in the pages of such books and journals as McSweeney's, StoryQuarterly, Quick Fiction, What If?, Night Train, failbetter, and Best American Non-Required Reading.