November 8, 2013
29-year-old Claire Vaye Watkins has won this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize for her debut story collection Battleborn. “Aimed at encouraging raw creative talent worldwide” the prize is restricted to writers under 30 and is worth 30,000 pounds (about $48,000).” Ms. Watkins also won two other major prizes on the same day: the $10,000 Rosenthal Family […]
November 7, 2013
We are pleased to introduce Evanston photographer Marc Perlish as the next artist in our ongoing exhibition series Local Art @ EPL. Throughout November, his striking new collection will be on display on the 2nd floor of EPL’s Main Library where it pays “poetic homage to Bookman’s Alley and the bookstore’s imaginative creator Roger Carlson.” […]
November 7, 2013
French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, born 100 years ago today in Algeria is probably best known for his novels The Stranger and The Plague. But as France marks his centennial, “it’s his politics, not his his philosophy, that still makes waves.” Winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957 and regarded as a giant […]
November 5, 2013
I heard the interview with Rich Cohen on NPR recently and, lo and behold, he’s touring our area to promote his new book, “Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football.” He was informative about football history and gave quite a bit of background surrounding the famed ’85 Bears. (This is from […]
November 5, 2013
Today’s Chicago Trib ran a front page story on the popularity and the global growth of the Little Free Library movement which has been reported about on this blog a number of times in the past. Free books housed in charming (weather-proof) little structures are placed on private property for passersby to use. They can […]
November 5, 2013
The 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature has been awarded to Mozambican author Antonio Emilio Leite Couto (Mia Couto). The first Mozambican author to be nominated for and to win this prize, Couto noted: “It is a sad moment for Mozambique because we are starting a war that we thought would never come back again. So […]
November 4, 2013
Chicago’s Lane Tech student body and the school’s 451 Degrees Banned Book Club received the Illinois Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award for their protest against the removal of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis. Chicago Public schools removed the novel from seventh grade classrooms because of its “powerful images of torture.” Lane Tech students waved signs […]
November 4, 2013
Interesting article in Sunday’s NYTimes Book Review section asked more than a dozen authors to talk about how new and changing technologies affect their storytelling. The writers commenting include Lee Child, Marisha Pessl, Frederick Forsyth, Douglas Coupland, Emily Giffin, and Ander Monson, among others. I love Margaret Atwood‘s response: “Do new technologies change what plot […]
November 2, 2013
An article about Israel’s attempt to preserve most of their websites for history caught my attention. Israel’s archive will be produced through the National Library. The stated purpose of this activity is to “preserve online publications published on Israeli websites for coming generations, just as books and other printed material are preserved.” Who else is pursuing this? The US […]
November 1, 2013
As many Jane Austen fans prepare to read Pride and Prejudice from the servants’ point of view in Longbourn, they may wonder how they would have fared in the social whirl of the Regency world. Would you have triumphed, like one of Austen’s heroines, or suffered ridicule and fallen into disrepute? Now, you can join […]
