PicoBlog

If you are new or have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art for the very first time, you are in for a treat. Our contributor, Sanja Vladovic, a chocolate taster and activist will take you on a journey through the story of chocolate and “her” most famous women. If a friend forwarded you this article welcome; if you like it, share it or why not subscribe?I am not sure of how is it referred to in other languages, but in Croatian, “chocolate” is a feminine noun, so when I talk about chocolate, I’m talking about her and when I read about chocolate history, I’m reading herstory.

“If you love baseball, sign up for Molly Knight's The Long Game right now. The author of 'The Best Team Money Can Buy' has great insight into MLB and hosts live discussions during the playoffs that offer some of the best, most fun, chat on what's going on during the game that I've found anywhere. I was a huge fan of the game growing up and lost my enthusiasm for it during the steroid scandal, but Knight has helped me rediscover it.

There are a million ways to slight a rival’s manhood, but to suggest that he enjoys Zima is one of the worst. Zima was the original “malternative”—a family of alcoholic beverages that eventually came to include such abominations as Smirnoff Ice and Bacardi Silver—and it has long been considered the very opposite of macho: a drink that fragile coeds swill while giving each other pedicures. That stereotype has persisted despite the fact that Zima’s brief heyday came nearly 15 years ago.

This 40-episode drama by Tencent Video is the latest xianxia hit on Netflix. Led by Xiao Zhan and Ren Min, The Longest Promise is at heart a drama about a romance made impossible due to a master/student relationship.  Although there are no “gods” in this drama, its universe exists between the human and celestial realms. There’s the Kongsang kingdom, supported by spiritually powerful forces led by the priests and preceptors (what the hell is a preceptor?

As you’ve likely heard, Cormac McCarthy has passed away at the age of 89. Like many American writers, reading McCarthy was a profound experience for me. Few novels have haunted me or rewritten my ideas of what sentences can do like Blood Meridian or Child of God. McCarthy is in a rare pantheon of American writers—Toni Morrison and William Faulkner would be two others—whose words seemed to be transported here from some other, lusher world.

The entire idea was formulated on a single road trip, just a pair wrestlers shooting the shit on a four hour drive down I-95 between two of the South’s premiere tourist destinations. Don Kernodle and Sergeant Slaughter left Myrtle Beach with an empty page. Kernodle was at the wheel with Slaughter jotting down thoughts in a convenience store notebook. As they pulled into their next pit stop in the never-ending grind that is pro wrestling, they’d devised a scheme that would totally capture the hearts and minds of Carolinians.

LONDON — The first NBA season that I really, really remember well, way back in 1977-78, was seared into my consciousness by three major happenings that mesmerized Little Kid Me. 🏀 My Buffalo Braves went 27-55 after Tiny Archibald tore his Achilles in the Braves' final preseason game — meaning Tiny never actually suited up for them alongside fellow speedster Randy Smith — and then crushingly moved to San Diego at season's end.

I have a new short story out today in a wonderful collection called IN THESE HALLOWED HALLS: A Dark Academic Anthology, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane. I have to admit the dark academia trope is one of my all time favorites. I thought I’d share an essay I wrote for CrimeReads for the release of another dark academia title of mine, Good Girls Lie, to celebrate this awesome new collection!

Many Americans don’t realize it, but the United States is home to some 1 million Gypsies, spread throughout the nation. It is believed that Columbus arrived in the States with Romani slaves in 1498, and that Oliver Cromwell shipped Romanichals (often known as English Gypsies, or English Travelers) to the US to be slaves on Southern plantations in the 17th century.  The Romanichal also immigrated to America from the UK in the middle of the 1800’s, coinciding with the weakening of the Ottoman Empire.