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Author Birthdays: Crichton, Korman, Burroughs
by marshd
October 23rd marks the birthday of authors Michael Crichton, Gordon Korman, and Augusten Burroughs.
Michael Crichton was an American author and screenwriter, probably most famous for Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, both of which were novels turned into movies. Among his lesser known--but critically praised--works is A Case of Need, his debut and award-winning mystery novel.
Crichton's final work, published the year after his death, is Pirate Latitudes. As you might guess from the title, it's about a 17th-century Caribbean pirate trying to take a Spanish galleon.
Gordon Korman is a 47-year-old Canadian children's and young adult author. He won the Air Canada Award for promising authors in Canada when he was only 16. He also has many ALA recognitions for his young adult novels.
Korman has written many youth series, including the Everest, Island, and Dive series. He also wrote the second book in the 39 Clues series, One False Note.
Augusten Burroughs is an American writer, best known for his novel Running with Scissors. The story was intended by Burroughs to be a "memoir" of a family, which he later had to call a "book", since the family it was based on sued. The story was made into a film in 2006.
Burroughs' latest work was published last year. Called You Better Not Cry: Stories For Christmas, it's a set of short autobiographical stories relating to the holidays.
Blog Post
Author Birthdays: Wilde, O'Neill, Grass
by marshd
October 16th marks the birthday of authors Oscar Wilde, Eugene O'Neill, and Gunter Grass.
Oscar Wilde was an Irish novelist and playwright who was exiled to France after being convicted for being a gay man. You can read about this imprisonment in one of his poems, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Wilde's most famous works include the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and one of his plays, The Importance of Being Earnest, both of which have been made into films.
Eugene O'Neill was a Nobel-winning American playwright. Some of his plays won Pulitzer Prizes, including Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, and Strange Interlude. He also had a Swedish stage acting award named in his honor.
O'Neill's plays are often tragic and pessimistic. This can perhaps be seen the best in his play Long Day's Journey Into Night, which is a sort of biography of his family. The play was made into films in 1962 and 1987.
Günter Grass is a Nobel-winning German novelist. He is probably most well-known in the States for his first novel, The Tin Drum, which is the first in the Danzig Trilogy. The book was also made into a German language film.
The most recent of Grass's works to be translated into English, aside from his autobiography, is called Crabwalk. It describes the sinking of a German refugee ship in 1945 by a Soviet submarine. The ship, MV Wilhelm Gustloff, really existed, though Grass's characters are fictional.
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Author Birthdays: Williams, O'Connor, Stewart
by marshd
September 17th marks the birthday of authors William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Connor, and Mary Stewart.
William Carlos Williams was an American poet and pediatrician. He is typically regarded as a Modernist, though sometimes as an Imagist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1963 for his collection Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems.
Williams also wrote Paterson, a five-book poem, often considered his "epic". The 1992 edition contains clarifying notes on the poem. A Library Journal review noted that "By exploring the local, Williams sought to descry the universal and to find in city and landscape symbolic analogues for the essential issues of human life."
Frank O'Connor was an Irish short-story writer who served in the Irish War of Independence; he was published in The New Yorker. One of his autobiographies, An Only Child, was even quoted by JFK in a speech he gave while president.
In addition to his own, O'Connor also wrote a book on the subject of short stories in general, called The Lonely Voice. The book discusses other authors such as Chekhov, Joyce, and Hemingway.
Mary Stewart is an English writer, probably most well-known for her historical fantasy quintet, The Merlin Chronicles, which begins with the book The Crystal Cave.
Stewart has also written mystery novels, most of which have a touch of romance, such as The Stormy Petrel and My Brother Michael.
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Author Birthdays: Buchan, Isherwood
by marshd
August 26th marks the birthday of authors John Buchan and Christopher Isherwood.
John Buchan was a Scottish novelist and Governor General of Canada. He wrote mainly adventure fiction, five books of which contain the manly and MacGyver-like character Richard Hannay. Three other stories by Buchan feature the middle-aged reluctant hero Dickson McCunn, whose adventures start in the book Huntingtower.
Baron Buchan also wrote historical fiction, like the mystery Witch Wood, which features romance and religion in 17th century Scotland, and even a novel about a terminally ill man, his death and redemption, called Sick Heart River.
Christopher Isherwood was an English-born American author. One of his novels, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, was inspired by his life as an expatriate in Berlin in the 1930s. The main characters include the narrator, William Bradshaw, and the masochistic Arthur Norris.
Another of Isherwood's novels is A Single Man, which centers on a middle-aged gay Englishman and his recent partner's loss, which he must learn to cope with. It was recently made into a film by Tom Ford, and it stars Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.
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Author Birthdays: Ann M. Martin
by marshd
August 11th is the birthday of American author Ann M. Martin.
Best known for her 14-year-long series The Baby-sitters Club, Martin has written quite a few novels and other series for children as well.
Among the other series are The Doll People and Main Street.
Among the novels are Belle Teal, which features a young girl who encounters racism, death, and abuse as she grows up, A Dog's Life: The Autobiography Of A Stray, which is told by a stray dog and gives a great perspective on the many perils homeless animals face, and the 2003 Newbery honor book A Corner of the Universe, which tells the story of a girl named Hattie, set in the 1960s.
Blog Post
Made in Michigan Writers Series
by breaking_glass
Have you heard of the Made in Michigan Writers Series? Published by Wayne State University Press, the series features Michigan authors in the fiction, non-fiction, short story and poetry genres.
The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, by Michael Zadoorian
Short fiction stories about characters living in and around Detroit, surviving the odds.
Eden Springs, by Laura Kasischke
Using historical sources, a novella about the House of David religious colony that was based in Benton Harbor, Michigan in the early 20th century.
As If We Were Prey: Stories, by Michael Delp
Darkly humorous yet touching collection of short stories about men in a small northern Michigan town.
Birth of a Notion; Or, The Half Ain't Never Been Told: A Narrative Account with Entertaining Passages of the State of Minstrelsy & of America & the True Relation Thereof (From the Ha Ha Dark Side)
by Bill Harris
Using prose and poetry, Harris studies preconceived notions of “blackness” in nineteenth century American culture to the early twentieth century, investigating sources of lasting stereotypes and racist imagery.
An American Map: Essays, by Anne-Marie Oomen
Northern Michigan native Anne-Marie Oomen’s contemplative and inspirational essays from her travels across America.
Blog Post
If you love British period dramas
by ballybeg
Catherine Cookson, born poor to a young, single mother in 1906, didn’t set pen to paper until she was 44 years old. When she did, a steady stream of stories flowed from her, all set in her native county Durham, in the far north of England, and all featuring the struggles and hopes of young working class women trying to survive in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, through to the uncertain time of WWI. (one is set during WWII)
She was especially class conscious: at a time in England when each class was in its own track and changing lanes was barely possible, it was hard not to be. Still, her stories were prescient about the winds of change which would blow through England after WWI and rearrange the possibilities for classes to rise, mingle and even inter-marry. Many of her stories seem patterned after her own life, for she did rise from a washerwomen to be the famed and beloved authoress of over 100 books.
Tyne Tees Studios took 18 of those stories and adapted them to a television series which aired in England in the 1990s. We own 17, and my favorite is whichever one I am watching at the time.
Here is a list by production date, but it doesn’t matter the order you watch them – each stands alone. They are all a delight: the wild beauty of the north country settings; the lovely, lilting north country accents; the marvelous acting by many familiar British actors and actresses; and the rousing life stories of north country heroines. For quintessential Cookson try The Wingless Bird or The Tide of Life.
Blog Post
Blasts from the past
by annevm
Remember the Cold War, maybe "duck-and-cover" at school or a bomb shelter at home? Deborah Wiles captures all that and a lot more -- Breck Girls! -- in her new youth novel Countdown, starring 11-year-old Franny and a cast of colorful family and friends. Wiles, an award-winning author, says on her web page that all her books are "personal narrative turned into fiction."
Blog Post
A mother's devotion
by Maxine
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam is a novel based on one woman's experience in the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence. Rehana Haque is a widow whose children, Sohail, 20, and Maya, 17, are both deeply involved in the resistance to the Pakistani takeover. When Sohail asks her to use the building she owns behind her house as a guerilla refuge and a place where a wounded Bengali major is recovering, she reluctantly agrees. But soon, Rehana is caught up in the turmoil and realizes that although she fears for her children's lives, she must support them as the invasion ensues. A heart-wrenching story that may be the first volume of a proposed trilogy.
Blog Post
Your Tudor Tutor
by anonymous
Today would be the 501st anniversary for King Henry VIII and his first wife, Catharine of Aragon. I'm not sure what the correct present is for that specific anniversary, but I don't know that I'd be accepting whatever it would be from Henry.
King Henry VIII has fascinated many people, though, regrettably, mostly because of his six marriages (two of which ended in divorce, and two more in beheading). However, it may interest you that these are not his only...accomplishments.
Some notable books on the Tudor king which do not focus on his matrimonial issues include The Last Divine Office: Henry VIII And The Dissolution Of The Monasteries and Henry VIII: The King And His Court.
However, if you'd like to go the more traditional route, you'll have plenty of choices: The Wives of Henry VIII, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, and Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII among them.
Of course, there are also historical fiction books that contain the infamous king. While they are not necessarily as accurate as the non-fiction, they are just as entertaining, if not more so. The oldest of these would be Shakespeare's play, given the regal name Henry VIII. Among the more recent, there is the "autobiography" by Margaret George, as well as the well-known The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. Though, my personal favorite is not a book at all, but the Showtime television series The Tudors.
You may even want to take a look at his children. Each one showed off one bit of his overbearing personality. And I can guarantee one of them is probably just as interesting as he was.