This is from The Writer’s Almanac, which is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media: It’s the birthday of (Nelle) Harper Lee, (books by this author) the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), born in Monroeville, Alabama (1926), the daughter of a local newspaper editor and lawyer. She was a […]
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50 States of Literature: Georgia On Our Minds | Columbia Spectator Tayari Jones’ debut, Leaving Atlanta, is set during the 1979 Atlanta Child Murders, at which time a total of 29 black children were killed. Three kids tell their stories: Tasha, struggling daily to stay in favor with her friends, Rodney, branded as too soft
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Four quite different memoirists help to prove the vitality of the literary form John Marshall, book critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, briefly discusses four memoirs that “demonstrate the genre’s vitality and variety.” The four cover very different subjects: childhood in Africa divorce alternative lifestyle–“living green” mental illness
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50 States of Literature: Exploring in Maryland | Columbia Spectator Columbia Spectator‘s 50 States of Literature series continues with Anne Tyler’s novel A Patchwork Planet, where the main character, Barnaby Gaitlin, lives just outside of Baltimore: The quiet neighborhood outside of Baltimore serves to nestle Barnaby with its “big, tall spruce trees” and “damp, chilly
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Offill, Jenny, and Elissa Schappell, eds. The Friend Who Got Away New York: Doubleday, 2005Hardcover, 294 pagesISBN 978-0-385-51186-5 Recommended We’re stuck with our families, but we get to choose our friends. And although it’s hard to pin down the formula for creating friendship, we all know the magic of friendship when we’re lucky enough to find
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Borders Bookzone Seeing and hearing an author speak can personalize a book. Borders new Bookzone offers videos of writes talking about their own books as well as about their favorite books. And it looks as if site visitors can also upload their own book reviews, although the only one I found there so far was
Amazon’s Kindle is stoking sales of e-books The debate over e-books and the future of publishing continues, here centered around Amazon’s new e-book device, the Kindle. One person involved in the publishing industry compares e-books to audiobooks. If that’s an apt comparison, then we can only expect e-books to become increasingly more prevalent relatively quickly.
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Hollywood’s James Ellroy enigma – Los Angeles Times “Which did you like better, the movie or the book?” Readers almost always choose the book. But because the book and film are different mediums, each with with its own traditions, requirements, and limitations, a direct comparison between the book and the movie is usually unfair or,
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Amazon Tightens Noose on Print-On-Demand Publishers; Insists They Use Company’s Own Service – washingtonpost.com Amazon is causing quite an uproar in the print-on-demand publishing world with its apparent attempt to create a monopoly for itself. Be sure to read the Writers Weekly article linked at the bottom of this piece.
50 States of Literature: Meandering Through West Virginia | Columbia Spectator From the hills of West Virginia comes Ann Pancake’s debut Strange as This Weather Has Been, based on real events and interviews from an Appalachian mining town. Lace See and Jimmy Make fall in love in the era of the Buffalo Creek Disaster. Twenty
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