Here's the only good thing -- books! -- about the Lynx losing the WNBA championship
The Minnesota Lynx may have lost to the Los Angeles Sparks by a single heartbreaking point in the WNBA championship last night, but the game was a win for readers.
The mayors of Minneapolis and Los Angeles engaged in a friendly bet over the matchup: The losing team has to send a shipment of books by local women authors to the winning city.
The idea came from Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges: The city has had bets like this in the past, but they've usually involved sending food. As a bookworm, Hodges thought highlighting local writers would be a new twist on the rivalry.
Jeff Shotts, the executive editor of Graywolf Press, which publishes many of the chosen books, said that while Graywolf is seriously disappointed in the Lynx's loss (and the controversy around it), they're "proud to make good on the wager and offer these Graywolf books to the mayor of Los Angeles."
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The press is proud to publish "great women writers," Shotts said in an e-mail.
The Minneapolis mayor's office said they plan to send the books next week to the Downtown Women's Center in Los Angeles. The books in the shipment include:
"Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living" by Krista Tippett
Tippett, creator of the On Being public radio show, shares what she's learned from 13 years of interviewing scientists, theologians, poets, activists and regular people.
"We use this phrase 'old and wise,' and actually, everybody doesn't grow wise — some people just grow old," Tippett said in an April interview with MPR News.
From the publisher:
The book is a master class in living, individually and collectively, curated by Tippett and accompanied by a delightfully ecumenical dream team of a teaching faculty. Wisdom emerges through the raw materials of the everyday.
On Being is based in Minneapolis' Loring Park neighborhood.
"Dear Committee Members" by Julie Schumacher
Schumacher's comic saga of a creative writing professor and his recommendation letters took home the Thurber Prize for American Humor last year. She was the first woman to ever have won the award.
Schumacher is a professor at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus. Her novel plays out the woes of a college writing professor in a declining department at a small Midwestern college. Hailed as a sharp satire of the academic world, Schumacher's book was called a "mordant minor masterpiece" by NPR.
"May Day" by Gretchen Marquette
Minneapolis poet Marquette wrote many of the poems in this book from the May Day Cafe in Minneapolis' Powderhorn Park neighborhood. It was published by Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press.
The poems of "May Day" explore stories of lost love and anxiety, centered around two specific themes: the end of a passionate love affair and the anxiety of having her younger brother serving in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jeff Shotts, Marquette's editor at Graywolf Press, calls the collection a book about "somebody who had been wrecked by grief and was desperately trying to find her way back into a world she loved."
"In Caddis Wood" by Mary Francois Rockcastle
Rockcastle helped develop and launch Hamline University's MFA in Creative Writing program more than 20 years ago. She was recognized at the 2015 Minnesota Book Awards for her contributions to the state's literary community.
"In Caddis Wood," a story woven through the alternating voices of a husband and a wife, "explores the competing rhythms of romantic love, family life, and professional ambition, refracted through the changing seasons of a long marriage. Beneath the surface, affecting their collective future, beats the resilient and endangered heart of nature," according to its publisher, local literary powerhouse Graywolf Press.
"Y" and "The Resurrection Trade" by Leslie Adrienne Miller
Miller is a Minnesota poet published by Minneapolis' Graywolf Press.
"Y" is Miller's 2012 book about motherhood. It explores, according to the publisher:
...the looming child, the son, the cipher, the letter for which a math problem seeks a solution. Collaging lyric investigation, personal reflection, and research into psychology and child development, Miller describes motherhood with a broad-ranging intelligence, a fierce humor, and an elegant, emotive poetic line.
And while "Y" focuses on the intimate and personal, "The Resurrection Trade" casts its lens on the intimate and scientific. The 2007 collection came from Miller's fascination with the scientific drawings of the 1700s.
At the time, the study of anatomy, and in particular the brain and the womb, were in vogue, she said. Trained artists took jobs as anatomical illustrators. Sometimes they even conducted the dissections themselves. Miller immersed herself in the sometimes sordid history of anatomical illustration — and body acquisition.
She found herself drawn to the stories around drawings of women, particularly pregnant women. Her book is based largely on the images and descriptive text that became the tools of science, some of which were more beautiful than accurate.