Blog Post
Fall Holy Days
by Beth Manuel
Read about Rosh Hashanah! Check out Apples & Pomegranates by Rahel Musleah. Today also marks the first day of Ramadan. For a touching youth story on the subject read Magid fasts for Ramadan by Mary Matthews. More on Jewish holidays during autumn can be found in Celebrating the Jewish Year by Paul Steinberg. And to read about fasting & religion check out Fasting: Spiritual Freedom beyond our Appetite by Lynne Baab.
Blog Post
New Youth Portuguese Collection at Downtown Branch
by Tara LS
New at the downtown library in the Youth foreign language collection on the 1st floor in the Youth department, there will soon be a selection of children's Portuguese books including picture books and titles for older children. Put a hold on the books through the library catalog and have them delivered to the branch of your choice or browse the shelves downtown. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments on Portuguese titles or any foreign language books, please e-mail stantont@aadl.org.
A selection of the new titles:
A girafa que comia estrelas
O meu livro
Doze reis e a moca no labirinto do vento
O castelo verde
O cavalo da noite
Blog Post
A2/Ypsilanti Reads 2008: The Bridegroom: Stories
by amy
This is one of three titles under consideration for this year's Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads, which will focus on China and America: Bridging Two Worlds.
From the remarkable Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award for his celebrated novel Waiting, The Bridegroom: Stories is a collection of comical and deeply moving tales of contemporary China that are as warm and human as they are surprising, disturbing, and delightful.
In the title story, the head of security at a factory is shocked, first when the handsomest worker on the floor proposes marriage to his homely adopted daughter, and again when his new son-in-law is arrested for the "crime" of homosexuality. In "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town," the workers at an American-style fast food franchise receive a hilarious crash course in marketing, deep frying, and that frustrating capitalist dictum, "the customer is always right."Ha Jin has triumphed again with his unforgettable storytelling in The Bridegroom: Stories.
Ha Jin was born in China in 1956.
Jin has published two collections of poetry, Between Silences and Facing Shadows, and two collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words, which received the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. In 2004, he published War Trash, which also won the PEN/Faulkner Award.
He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.
What did you think of this book? Tell us!
Blog Post
A2/Ypsilanti Reads 2008: The Eighth Promise
by amy
This is one of three titles under consideration for this year's Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads, which will focus on China and America: Bridging Two Worlds.
In the best tradition of The Color of Water comes a beautifully written evocative memoir of a relationship between a mother and son – and the Chinese immigrant experience.
In The Eighth Promise: An American Son's Tribute to His Toisanese Mother, author William Poy Lee gives us a rare view of the Chinese-American experience from a mother-son perspective. His moving and complex stories unfold simultaneously in his mother’s war torn childhood of China of the 1930s and ‘40s and then amidst the housing projects of San Francisco Chinatown and the counterculture of North Beach of the 1960s and ‘70s as told in two voices—the author’s own and that of his mother. The mother’s perspective provides a sense of tradition and culture as the author becomes completely American and then realizes that his simple Toisan farmer mother has been his greatest wisdom teacher.
It is a stunning tale of violent community turmoil including a murder implicating a close family member, injustice, fortitude, survival, and ultimately redemption. Already, this exquisitely wrought memoir is garnering rave notices.
William Poy Lee graduated with a Bachelors of Architecture, emphasis on urban design and planning from the University of California in Berkeley and completed his juris doctor degree from Hastings College of the Law, University of California. He has been a licensed California attorney since 1979 and has enjoyed a career as an international banking attorney with Bank of America and as an advertising co-principal serving Fortune 100 corporations. He now lives in Berkeley, California. The Eighth Promise is his first book.
What did you think of this book? Tell us!
Blog Post
Pull Up a bar stool
by RiponGood
Aliens have landed and they like to hang-out in a bar in Siberia, or so Larry Niven writes in The Draco Tavern. Set in the not too distant future, the book is a collection of short stories written by Niven over almost 30 years. Rick Schumann is the owner of the Draco Tavern, where a wide assortment of aliens stop as often as a Chirpsithra liner passes through the system. If you liked the cantina scene in Star Wars, you'll love this book. We also have an audio version.
Blog Post
A2/Ypsilanti Reads 2008: Red Azalea
by amy
This is one of three titles under consideration for this year's Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads, which will focus on China and America: Bridging Two Worlds.
Red Azalea is Anchee Min’s celebrated memoir of growing up in the last years of Mao’s China. As a child, she was asked to publicly humiliate a teacher; at seventeen, she was sent to work at a labor collective. Forbidden to speak, dress, read, write, or love as she pleased, she found a lifeline in a secret love affair with another woman.
Miraculously selected for the film version of one of Madame Mao’s political operas, Min’s life changed overnight. Then Chairman Mao suddenly died, taking with him an entire world. A revelatory and disturbing portrait of China, Anchee Min’s memoir is exceptional for its candor, its poignancy, its courage, and for its prose which Newsweek calls "as delicate and evocative as a traditional Chinese brush painting."
Born in Shanghai in 1957, Anchee Min came to America in 1984. While attending English as a Second Language classes, she worked as a waitress, a house cleaner, a fabric painter, and a model. In 1990 she received a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from the Art Institute of Chicago. Min wrote Red Azalea in English over an eight-year period. It won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in 1993 and was a New York Times Notable Book.
What did you think of this book? Tell us!
Blog Post
The City Beneath the City
by StoryLaura
If you have not discovered the wild Anybodies and the crazy Nobodies it is still not too late for the electric Somebodies! Somebody must save the endangered city beneath NYC. In this concoction of mystery, drama, fantasy and humor, author N.E. Bode takes our heroes Fern and Howard on another magical, fantastical romp!
Blog Post
Survivor of Rwandan Holocaust to Appear
by annevm
Immaculee Ilibagiza, author of Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, will be in Ann Arbor next month to speak at 7 p.m. Oct. 4 in St. Francis Catholic Church, 2250 E. Stadium. Ilibagiza and seven other women survived 91 days in their bathroom hideout in Rwanda in 1994, during a slaughter of nearly one million ethnic Tutsis in the country. The author's family members were murdered. Her book is being read and discussed by book groups at St. Francis and other churches in One Diocese, One Book. No tickets or reservations are needed for the appearance.
Blog Post
The Imagist Poet
by Maxine
September 10 is the birthday of Hilda Doolittle one of the first of the Imagist Poets. She was born in Bethleham, Pa. in 1886. Often referred to as H.D., Doolittle was known not only as a poet but a novelist, writer of non-fiction and actress. She was friends with the ex-patriate poet, Ezra Pound who introduced her to the literati of Europe at the time. She was an admirer of Ancient Greek culture which is evident in her work. The Imagist style demands "the perfect word" and musical, lush visual language. Following is one of Doolittle's poems, "Stars Wheel in Purple," which comes close to the Imagist ideal:
Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;
stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are
nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous;
yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.
Blog Post
Vergie Goes to School With Us Boys by Elizabeth Fitzgerald
by Tahira
Set in the Reconstruction era in Tennessee, Virgie Goes to School with Us Boys tells the story of a determined little girl and her desire to experience real freedom through education.