Robert McCloskey Sketches for “Make Way for Ducklings” Born in 1914 in Hamilton, Ohio, Robert McCloskey came to Boston to attend the now-defunct Vesper George Art School. He left to live in New York for a time and established a career as an author and illustrator in the late 1930s. Over the years, he became […]
There’s no denying that the state of the world is reflected in our favorite books of 2013. Among our top 10 are narratives that range from the war on terror to a middle Eastern country in the iron grip of a dictator to hard times much closer to home. In others, history — factual, or
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The manuscripts of Emily Dickinson have long been scattered across multiple archives, meaning scholars had to knock on numerous doors to see all the handwritten drafts of a poet whose work went almost entirely unpublished in her lifetime. The online Emily Dickinson Archive, to be inaugurated on Wednesday, promises to change all that by bringing
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Meet Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature The big literary news of last week was the announcement of Canadian writer Alice Munro as recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Munro is generally considered to be the current master of the short-fiction form. The announcement generated a lot of articles about Munro’s
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Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature – NYTimes.com Canadian writer Alice Munro, master of the short-fiction form, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Ms. Munro revolutionized the architecture of short stories, often beginning a story in an unexpected place, then moving backward or forward in time. She brought a modesty and subtle wit
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10 Impressive Uses of Borrowed Characters in Literature Kim Newman, whose latest book, Johnny Alucard, is out now, tells us: “In the Anno Dracula series, I’ve made use not only of characters and situations appropriated from Bram Stoker’s novel but a host of other preexisting fictional folk to populate the next-door-but-one world where Dracula defeated Van Helsing and
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize awards committee announced yesterday that Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon and The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson have been named the winners of the 2013 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction and fiction, respectively. via 2013 Dayton Peace Prize Winners Announced.
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The Randolph County school board in North Carolina has rescinded its ban on Ralph Ellison’s highly revered Invisible Man following a little over a week of intense criticism from free speech and literary advocates. The 5-2 decision, initially sparked by a parent’s complaint that the book was not appropriate for teenagers, was reversed in a
Censorship and Invisibility: A Boomer Perspective | Barbara Jones. Banned Books Week: September 22-28 In honor of Banned Books Week, Barbara Jones, director of the ALA (American Library Association) Office for Intellectual Freedom, offers a history lesson on book censorship over at Huffington Post. She recalls that, when she was an undergraduate at the University
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Why GR’s new review rules are censorship – Some thoughts Late Friday (US time) Goodreads announced a change in review and shelving policy, and immediately started deleting readers’ reviews and shelves. In doing this they became censors. Limiting readers’ ability to discuss the cultural context of a book is censorship designed to promote authors’ interests.
