Ages 18+.
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
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.
Blog Post
Vonnegut factoid
by sernabad
The complete official title for Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five, is:
Slaughterhouse Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cae Cod (and Smoking Too Much) Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire-Bombing of Dresden, Germany, the Florence of the Elbe, a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale: This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #59
by muffy
Set in a poor and crime infested housing estate in Nottingham, England, The Killing Jar* by first-time novelist Nicola Monaghan is a compelling read and recipient of several literary awards.
Young Kerrie-Ann Hill was abandoned (by a drugged-out prostitute mother), abused (by a teacher), coerced into running drugs at nine, and graduated to violent crimes as a sly and ruthless teenager.
Amidst the ugliness were moments of joy like an old neighbor who taught her about butterflies (and the killing jar), caring for her younger brother, and first loves.
Unapologetically realistic and bleak, the portrayal of the drug culture in urban England is spot on, while feisty Kerrie-Ann as the flawed heroine will earn your respect and sympathy.
Nicola Monaghan grew up at Broxtowe, the same council estate she set The Killing Jar. She is the first person in her family to go to university, and is currently at work on her second novel Starfishin, about a woman working hard to fit into the edgy London lifestyle.
* = Starred Reviews
Blog Post
Two Nobel Prize Laureates born April 15
by Maxine
Today is the birthday of two Irish literary stars, poet Seamus Heany and playwright, novelist, Samuel Beckett. Heaney was born in 1939 in Mossbaum, Northern Ireland, the oldest of nine siblings. His poetry is infused with images from his rural background. His father was a cattle dealer and Heaney grew up in a three room thatched farmhouse. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. A poem in tribute to the hard working hands of his father and granfather, "Digging," contains the lines:
"The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them."
Samuel Beckett insisted he was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906 although his birth records indicate it was a month later. He grew up in a wealthy suburb of Dublin but moved to Paris in his twenties. Known as the founder of absurdist drama, Beckett was also an accomplished novelist. But perhaps he is best known for two of his plays, Endgame and Waiting for Godot in which one of the characters says:"We are all born mad. Some remain so." Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969 and gave most of the money to charity.
Blog Post
New Fiction on the New York Times Best Sellers List (4/8/07)
by Mazie
Tracy Chevalier has carved out a unique and narrow fictional genre for herself. She may never duplicate the enormous critical (and monetary) success of Girl with a Pearl Earring but she continues to write popular books about other artists. Her latest, Burning Bright, features William Blake, the English poet and visionary, famous for:
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
Some readers may be disappointed, however, at the minor role he plays in the novel. For others the magic of eighteenth century London and the charming story about Blake's fictional neighbors has been enough to put it on the List at #12.
The only other entry is For a Few Demons More by Kim Harrison. This fantasy novelist also writes in a specific sub-genre labeled "sexy supernaturalism".
Blog Post
African Lit 101
by wheloc
Interested in African literature (that is, novels by people from Africa about people in Africa)? The following should get you started:
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
Xala by Ousmane Sembène (Senegal)
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya)
The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe/Rhodesia)
Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe)
A Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto (Mozambique)
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah (Ghana)
The Famished Road by Ben Okri (Nigeria)
Blog Post
Elizabeth Jolley, champion of oddball characters, has died
by sernabad
Novelist Elizabeth Jolley, born in England in 1923 and a resident of Australia since 1959, died February 13, 2007.
Ms. Jolley was first published late in life, when she was in her 1950s. Her dark novels, often described as Australian gothic, showcased society’s marginal characters. Loners, quiet murderers, and eccentric senior citizens were found within her pages. Her body of work included:
Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1984)
Mr. Scobie’s Riddle (1987)
Milk and Honey (1984)
Ms. Jolley was 83.
Blog Post
Geisha
by ryanikoglu
Do Geisha fascinate you? Did you read and enjoy Memoirs Of A Geisha by Arthur Golden? You may also enjoy Geisha by Liza Dalby, an American who had the unique experience of living and training with Japanese Geisha and wrote this book; or Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda. Then check out Secret Life Of Geisha, a documentary DVD on geisha that includes interviews with Golden and Dalby.