July 1, 2014
The Academy Film Archive celebrated director Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing with a Silver Anniversary screening last Friday. Set in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood “the film about racial tension reaches a boiling point on a scorching summer day in Brooklyn.” President and Mrs. Obama joined the celebration via videotape where they talked […]
July 1, 2014
The Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction was awarded to Donna Tartt for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch. The award for nonfiction went to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for The Bully Pulpit. The medals were presented at the American Library Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas on Saturday. Each winner receives a $5,000 cash […]
June 25, 2014
It’s Pledge Week this week for Chicago-land WBEZ listeners, and I know some folks may cut back on listening a bit. If you are one of those who go on a public radio diet, you may have missed the segment last Monday with Nancy Pearl alerting listeners to great, under-the-radar choices for summer reading. As […]
June 20, 2014
The 2014 PEN Pinter prize is being awarded to Salman Rushdie. Named in memory of playwright Harold Pinter, the award is given annually to a British writer who has an “unflinching, unswerving” and “fierce intellectual determination…to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.” Head judge Maureen Freely said: This prize is English […]
June 16, 2014
The Library of Congress announced that 78-year-old Charles Wright will be named the next poet laureate this week. A retired professor at the University of Virginia, he has already won almost all prizes in the poetry world, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize and […]
June 12, 2014
Actress Ruby Dee died Wednesday at her home in New Rochell, NY at the age of 91. A passionate and versatile performer, she received accolades for her role in the 1970 Athol Fugard drama Boesman and Lena, and her role as Ruth Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark drama A Raisin in the Sun. She went […]
June 5, 2014
This prestigious prize honoring English-language works by women was awarded Wednesday in London to Irish author Eimear McBride for her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. Among 20 other nominated authors, including Donna Tartt for The Goldfinch and Eleanor Catton for The Luminaries, Ms. McBride wrote the book when she was 27 and […]
June 2, 2014
A new exhibit at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum features book jackets, first editions, galley proofs, and manuscripts from the Carter Burden Collection. Considered the book jackets’ golden age, the exhibition includes book covers from The Great Gatsby, Light in August, and Herzog as well as first edition copies of Henry James’s The Golden […]
May 28, 2014
86-year-old poet and activist Maya Angelou died Tuesday at her home in Winston Salem, N.C. Born Marguerite Johnson, she grew up in St. Louis, Mo. and Stamps, Ark. and was first called Maya by her brother. Leaving a troubled childhood and a segregated South, she began a career as both dancer and singer, touring Europe […]
May 20, 2014
Mary Stewart, British writer best known for her trilogy of Merlin books died May 9 at her home in Scotland. The Crystal Cave, first in the trilogy, was published in 1970. But Ms. Stewart had already written more than a dozen novels, including The Moon-Spinners, Nine Coaches Waiting, and The Gabriel Hounds. After reading History […]
