May 16, 2014
A small blurb on NPR’s website mentions that author Jonathan Safran Foer has teamed with Chipotle to feature stories by Toni Morrison, Malcolm Gladwell, George Saunders, etc. on their bags and cups. He had the idea while eating a burrito at Chipotle one day with nothing to read. In his Vanity Fair interview, he said: […]
May 13, 2014
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Frank Bruni wrote in praise of the recent rise in numbers of young readers. For Bruni this rise in numbers came as a surprise because of his presumption that technology had outsourced the value of books to generations past. Bruni asserts that reading has much to do with the transformation […]
May 12, 2014
An interesting blurb on NPR today mentions that a bill has been approved in Calabria, Italy that would (if passed by the Italian Parliament) reduce prison sentences in exchange for reading books. The plan for reduced sentences is in response to the Government’s ban on prisoners receiving books. Mario Caligiuri, Calabria’s culture representative, said: “Reading […]
May 6, 2014
The 2014 Edgar awards were presented last week in New York to honor best mystery writing in fiction, nonfiction, and television. William Kent Krueger’s novel Ordinary Grace, “about a man’s look back at the summer of 1961 in Minnesota”, won the award for best fiction. Other winners include The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot […]
April 24, 2014
Heidi’s toasted cheese, Du Maurier’s dripping crumpets, the watery gruel that Oliver wanted more of, all foods we really can’t see. We rely on the author’s power of description to help us imagine the feast, or in poor Oliver’s case, the opposite, set before the characters in a book. Until now, that is. With Dinah […]
April 23, 2014
Author Elena Poniatowska has won this year’s Cervantes Prize. The 82-year old reporter and activist has written more than three dozen books, including novels, essays, children’s books and nonfiction. “The daughter of French-Polish immigrants to Mexico, Poniatowska began her career writing for the newspaper Excelsior. In an interview with the Madrid newspaper El Pais, she […]
April 23, 2014
This morning on NPR, Steve Shafer reported on the decision by the administration at the San Francisco library to have a full-time social worker on staff to work with the library’s homeless patrons. As program host Steve Inskeep said in his introduction, “whether they like it or not, libraries in some cities serve as homeless […]
April 23, 2014
Today is William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. In celebration, the Globe Theatre in London announced that it will begin a 2-year long tour of Hamlet, staging a production in every nation in the world. As the Bard’s most iconic play, it’s a story that nearly every culture can relate to, and as Globe Artistic Director Dominic […]
April 17, 2014
Nobel-Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez died today in Mexico City at age 87. The Colombian novelist “widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century,” was a master of the literary genre magic realism. In a 1984 interview with NPR, he said his writing was forever shaped by […]
April 16, 2014
This year’s Pulitzer Prize Winners were announced Monday at New York’s Columbia University. The prizes honoring excellence in journalism and the arts have been awarded since 1917. This year’s recipients include The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt in the Fiction category; The Flick by Annie Baker for Drama; The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, […]
