Taylor Swift tries attracts children into reading
18 Oct 2011 09:47:12
Taylor Swift wants children in the Pennsylvania city of Reading (REHD'-ing) to hit the books — and she's made that easier by giving 6,000 volumes to the local library.
Librarians unveiled the donation from the Grammy-winning country singer Thursday. Swift grew up in nearby Wyomissing (wy-oh-MIHS'-ing) and wasn't able to attend the event.
Swift partnered with publisher Scholastic Inc. to donate the books for children and young adults. The titles were chosen by local librarians.
Reading is a stru... Read Full Story
The interview with Dyan Cannon
18 Oct 2011 09:45:12
Dyan Cannon is speaking out about her marriage to Cary Grant, including claims that the late actor used LSD as a way to cope with his childhood pain and relationship problems.
"I wanted it to be a helpful book, a hopeful book, an inspirational book. Something that would help people," Dyan, who was married to the Hollywood legend from 1965 to 1968, said on Monday's Access Hollywood Live .
PLAY IT NOW: Access Hollywood Live: Hilary Duff Dishes On Pregnancy Details!
"I don't rag on him. It's not a ... Read Full Story
Haruki Murakami
18 Oct 2011 09:43:31
Published on Tuesday 18 October, 1Q84 is the first long-form novel for Murakami's English fans since Kafka on the Shore was published in translation in 2005. The UK's largest book chain Waterstone's is celebrating its release with a midnight opening at its flagship Piccadilly branch, preceded by a "Murakami Mastermind" quiz – "very testing", according to the bookseller – with a £750 limited edition copy of the book as a prize. Independent chain Foyles is staying open late tonight with jazz and r... Read Full Story
Let's talk about new book All Hell Let Loose written by Max Hastings
17 Oct 2011 09:00:55
It's the significance of the individual witness that powers Max Hastings's new history of the second world war. He has written several books on the conflict, and his sometimes revisionist judgments on its conduct are well known. What is new and interesting here is the reliance on people who simply set out their own observations. The historical approach that fleshes out the larger narrative with worm's-eye viewpoints has grown in popularity recently. David Kynaston's excellent series about postwa... Read Full Story
New novel called Nightwoods from Charles Frazier
17 Oct 2011 08:57:39
There is an exchange at the heart of Nightwoods, Charles Frazier's first novel in five years, that conveys, in what is almost an aside, the central argument of the novel. A man named Stubblefield, whose life has lain fallow for some time, comes into a surprise inheritance and visits his grandfather's lawyer to discuss how best to profit from his new estate, now that the main house has burned down:– Uninsured, I'd bet, Stubblefield said.– Yep. Too bad. Hate to see the historic structures go down.... Read Full Story
History remember them - the winners of U.S. National Book Awards.
17 Oct 2011 08:44:45
Debut novelist Tea Obreht, poet Adrienne Rich and Malcolm X biographer Manning Marable, who died on the eve of his book's publication, are among this year's finalists for the U.S. National Book Awards.
Other nominees announced Wednesday include young adult author Lauren Myracle, poets Carl Phillips and Yusef Komunyakaa, and scholar Stephen Greenblatt, author of the Renaissance-era history "The Swerve."
Five nominees were chosen in each of four competitive categories. Honorary winners, previous... Read Full Story
Amy Winehouse prepare a memoir
14 Oct 2011 09:08:12
Amy Winehouse's father will write a memoir for his departed daughter, to be published next summer. Mitch Winehouse will continue the transformation from taxi driver to lounge singer to author, composing "a definitive account of Amy's life", with proceeds to benefit the Amy Winehouse Foundation.
"I feel that I need to write this book to tell the true story of Amy and to help with my personal recovery," Mitch said in a statement. The 60-year-old signed a contract with Harper Non-Fiction in the U... Read Full Story
"The Train of Small Mercies" from David Rowell
14 Oct 2011 09:04:14
The day is June 8, 1968, a Saturday when the body of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy is carried by train from New York City to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands — estimates ranged well past 1 million — lined the route to pay homage to the presidential candidate assassinated two days earlier.
David Rowell recreates the day through vivid portraits of a range of characters, black and white, young and old, whose mostly humdrum and ordinary lives turn on events ... Read Full Story
Tomas Transtromer took the Nobel Prize in literature
14 Oct 2011 09:02:50
Characterized by powerful imagery, Transtromer's poems are often built around his own experiences and infused with his love of music and nature. His later poems are darker, probing existential questions of life, death and disease.
Transtromer is considered a master of metaphor, weaving powerful images into his poems without much embellishment. The award citation noted that his collections "are characterized by economy."
"Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams. Free of the suffocating turbul... Read Full Story
The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
13 Oct 2011 08:44:11
Ever the deadpan comedian, Michel Houellebecq includes in the acknowledgments of the British edition of his new novel, a brief but perfectly straight thank-you to Wikipedia. Following the publication of The Map and the Territory in France last year, he was somewhat half-heartedly accused of plagiarising the information website, co-opting material on houseflies, a French town and a hunting activist. At the time – which was before the novel had won the Prix Goncourt – Houellebecq was rather persua... Read Full Story
What the plot of the book Less Than One by Joseph Brodsky
13 Oct 2011 08:42:18
These essays, collected and published in 1986, won the National Book Critics' award for criticism; and a year later he became the then youngest ever Nobel literary laureate. One hesitates to say that this collection actually won him that prize; but it certainly didn't hurt.
So, if there's an essential essay collection (actually, I think there are plenty), it's this one. Brodsky's prose zips along, even when you are reading about Mandelstam or Tsvetaeva or those other names which in this country... Read Full Story
Today we will talk about the Marriage Plot written by Jeffrey Eugenides
13 Oct 2011 08:41:31
The Marriage Plot largely (though not entirely) dispenses with the morbid element. Its cast consists mostly of bright, go-getting young Ivy Leaguers, and its storyline follows their love entanglements and spiritual crises during the early 1980s as they pursue and escape each other through a variety of colourful locations that stretch from Cape Cod to Monte Carlo to Calcutta. With one exception there is nothing seriously the matter with any of them.
It's customary to cheer when an author moves o... Read Full Story
