April 14, 2014
…in 1648! University of Chicago Press editor Levi Stahl came across this Robert Herrick poem and wondered about the punctuation at the end of the second line. One wonders: was this an intentional play on the “smiling yet” line? Or a printing error? Heather N.
April 14, 2014
For the second year in a row, Dav Pilkey’s series Captain Underpants topped the American Library Association’s list of most-challenged books. Pilkey commented that he was surprised “that a series with no sex, no nudity, no drugs, no profanity and no more violence than a Superman cartoon has caused such an uproar.” Other “vilified” books […]
April 9, 2014
Author and naturalist Peter Matthiessen died Saturday at his home in Sagaponack, New York at age 86. According to this fascinating NYT article, Mr. Matthiessen ” was a man of many parts: litterateur, journalist, environmentalist, explorer, Zen Buddhist, professional fisherman and, in the early 1950s, undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency in Paris.” He […]
April 7, 2014
Billy Corgan, frontman of the Chicago-based Smashing Pumpkins rock band, performed a musical interpretation of the Herman Hesse novella in Highland Park (at Madame ZuZu’s tea house) last month. The performance lasted eight hours, and attendees were rotated in groups so that all had a chance to marvel at the Chicago rock legend. How can your […]
April 4, 2014
The 2014 PEN/Faulkner prize for Fiction was awarded to NYKaren Joy Fowler for her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. The $15,000 prize will be presented at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington on May 10. A panel of three judges, including Madison Smartt Bell, Manuel Munoz, and Achy Obejas, chose the work from […]
April 2, 2014
A new website dedicated to the work of playwright Lorraine Hansberry offers “all things Hansberry” including never-before released photographs, video clips of her television interviews, audio of her radio interviews and speeches. Although best known for her play A Raisin in the Sun, her estate created the site to focus on her work not only […]
April 1, 2014
Margaret Mitchell’s estate has authorized the publication of Ruth’s Journey – the story of the house slave Mammy in Gone With the Wind. Author Donald McCaig, who also wrote the 2007 Rhett Butler’s People, felt that “Mammy was such a fascinating and crucial character to the book he wanted to flesh out a story of […]
March 26, 2014
Sky-high rents are forcing many of Manhattan’s bookstores to close or move out of Manhattan according to today’s disheartening article in the New York Times. Independent stores Coliseum Books, Shakespeare and Company, Endicott Booksellers and Murder Ink have all closed and now the big chain stores like Barnes & Noble are closing as well. Biographer […]
March 19, 2014
NoViolet Bulawayo is the 2014 winner of the Hemingway Foundation’s PEN Award for her novel We Need New Names. The prize honoring best debut fiction was established in 1976 by Mary Hemingway in memory of her husband Ernest Hemingway. Along with the $10,000 award, the prize includes a one-week residence at the University of Idaho, […]
March 10, 2014
The first winner of the Folio prize, created in response to “shortcomings of the Man Booker prize”, was awarded today to the short story collection Tenth of December by George Saunders. Judges, including Lavinia Greenlaw, Michael Chabon, Sarah Hall, Nam Le and Pankaj Mishra, praised the stories as “darkly playful” saying: ” they take us […]
