Blog Post
Stories From the Sky
by emilyas
One of the latest additions to NPR's StoryCorps is the story from a flight attendant who took to the skies in the 1940s and loved every minute of her job. Read more about flight attendants in Georgia Panter Nielsen's From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant.
Blog Post
Storytime Scoop
by StoryLaura
Go wild at the last preschool storytime of the session at Downtown and Pittsfield with stories filled with jungle animals and jungle noises!
Blog Post
Babymouse!
by anned
Jennifer L. Holm has teamed up with her brother Matthew to create Babymouse, an adorable and imaginative comic starring a school-aged mouse and her best friend Wilson the Weasel (who both happen to love monster movies and cupcakes). Anyone who has been through grade school can relate to Babymouse and her problems with meatloaf lunches, lockers, and the incredibly mean Felicia Furrypaws. She gets through it all with the help of her friends and her favorite books. Drawn very simply in black and white with some pink thrown in for flair (and I could have sworn I saw some Ed Emberley animals roaming the school halls).
Blog Post
Kid Bits - Pirates Ahoy!
by ryanikoglu
AAaaargh !!! READ to ME! Melinda Long has made another picture book for land-lubber kids following How I Became a Pirate. Set your telescope for Pirates Don't Change Diapers and begin to make a new treasure map. You might explore pirate facts in books like Daring Pirate Women and Imagine You're a Pirate while you're at it.
Blog Post
Challenges of growing up
by K.C.
Sex and the City co-star Kim Cattrall offers insight into growing up through her advice-filled personal narrative of Being a Girl. Candid discussion is offered on topics such as developing self-esteem and a positive body image; discovering one's own sense of style; the importance of good nutrition, exercise and sleep; plus coping strategies such as understanding dynamics among family members and friends, dealing with "toxic cliques" and the "queen-bee mentality," and dating and sexuality.
Blog Post
2007 Orange Prize for Fiction - Shortlist
by muffy
Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, the UK’s only annual book award for fiction written by a woman, announces the 2007 shortlist
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk (A perosnal favorite)
The Booker Prize winner The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo.
The Observations by Jane Harris
Digging to America by Anne Tyler.
This year’s shortlist honors both new and well-established writers and reflects the international reach of the prize with authors from Nigeria, China, India and America represented. Your vote?
Blog Post
New Fiction on the New York Times Best Sellers List (4/15/07)
by Mazie
The allure and mystery of Shakespeare. The world's most famous playwright. THE genius of Western literature. And we know almost nothing about him. A few years ago Stephen Greenblatt wrote a speculative biography Will in the World, lively and informed by years of scholarship. Now Michael Gruber has written a fantastic thriller about a lost, unknown Shakespeare play. Critics have lobbed a few beanballs at The Book of Air and Shadows but many readers are loving it. It enters the List tied for #15 this week.
The four other new entries are all thrillers, too (Obssesion by Jonathan Kellerman, The Alibi Man by Tami Hoag, Absolute Fear by Lisa Jackson, and Hunter's Moon by Randy Wayne White)
Blog Post
2007 Pulitzer Prizes announced
by sernabad
The much-coveted Pulitzer Prizes for 2007 were announced Monday, April 16, 2007.
Among the winners in more than a dozen categories are:
Fiction
Cormac McCarthy for The Road, his dark post-apocalyptic vision of a world gone mad, as a man and his young son journey to the sea, with only their wits, two bullets, and a devolving immorality standing between them and destruction.
History
Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, co-authors of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation won for their riveting account of the best that American journalism used to be, when reporters dug out the truth and brought to light wrongs that needed to be righted.
Biography or Autobiography
Debby Applegate wrote The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother, Henry, was a powerful minister, abolitionist, and intellectual who gripped the public’s interest as much for his beliefs as for his weakness for women.
General Non-Fiction
Lawrence Wright, for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Stunning, carefully researched masterpiece that highlight’s one desperate FBI agent’s desperate race to stop 9/11 before it happened.
Blog Post
RARRARG!*
by anned
Patrick is a young boy who likes to do all the things that young boys do, only with his own flair—Patrick is a werewolf. He communicates by growling, but his parents and friends understand him just fine. Artist Art Baltazar and writer Franco Aurelian have created a cute and amusing character drawn in a style that pays tribute to 1950s Charles Schulz (Patrick’s shirt is even an invert of Charlie Brown’s).
If you would like to meet the artist, Art Baltazar will be making an appearance at the Motor City Comic Con May 18-20.
Blog Post
Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007
by sernabad
Kurt Vonnegut, the unofficial grandfather of the unofficial ‘disruptive group’ of 1970s literary mavericks, such as Richard Brautigan, Jerzy Kosinski, and Donald Barthelme, died April 11, 2007, from complications of a brain injury due to a fall.
Author of fourteen novels (Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine (1965), and Mother Night (1961), to name a few), Vonnegut used his experience as a WWII prisoner of war and his disdain for modern society's blind devotion to technology to craft novels that were a wholly unique blend of science fiction, fantasy, and sheer raw vision.
Vonnegut was 84.